The Geography of Corporate America: Observing the Landscape of Registered Business Addresses
Look up a company’s “registered address” and you might expect a headquarters or office. In reality, a tiny slice of locations do outsized work as the supposed homes of American corporations. Inside Enigma graph-model-1, just 128,124 addresses (0.21% of all unique addresses) are linked to about 106.6 million registrations — and those high-throughput addresses account for about 26.6% of the 400.4 million registrations we observe. That footprint belongs to the registered-agent (RA) infrastructure: the legal mailboxes corporate America relies on.
The concentration of registered addresses
Two Delaware locations host by far the most registrations. But if you drive by these offices, you won’t see millions of employees. Instead, these are industrial-scale RA operations handling service of process and official notices for companies incorporated nationwide. But this is not just a Delaware story — the RA pattern repeats across states. Let’s look at the locations hosting the largest number of corporate registrations in America.
Top 10 most concentrated addresses (all states, by linked registrations):
251 Little Falls Dr, Wilmington, DE — 2,106,681 registrations
1209 N Orange St, Wilmington, DE — 2,079,340 registrations
28 Liberty St, New York, NY — 936,362 registrations
1025 Capital Center Dr, Frankfort, KY — 860,412 registrations
2710 Gateway Oaks Dr, Sacramento, CA — 845,562 registrations
1200 S Pine Island Rd, Fort Lauderdale, FL — 836,218 registrations
2 N Jackson St, Montgomery, AL — 730,143 registrations
600 W Main St, Jefferson City, MO — 660,060 registrations
Half of the top ten addresses sit in state capitals — Sacramento, Tallahassee, Montgomery, Jefferson City, and Frankfort — reflecting a mix of RA offices co-located near agencies and state service-of-process infrastructure. That pattern is consistent with legal logistics — the advantages of being near agencies and courts, and in some cases interacting with state service-of-process channels. It’s a reminder: registration is about legal routing, not customer foot traffic.
Where RA markets are most consolidated
We estimate consolidation by registrations per high-throughput address (states with ≥100k total registrations in our lens):
Delaware — 91,987 per address (81 addresses, ~7.5M registrations)
Wisconsin — 7,415 per address (104 addresses, ~771k)
Michigan — 6,478 per address (267 addresses, ~1.7M)
South Carolina — 2,739 per address (540 addresses, ~1.5M)
California — 1,539 per address (3,705 addresses, ~5.7M)
Delaware’s density is an order of magnitude higher than any other large state—unsurprising given its long-standing corporate law ecosystem and the network effects around it.
Why this matters (and what it doesn’t tell you)
Registered address ≠ operating location.
A San Francisco startup, an Ohio restaurant group, and a New York hedge fund can all share a Wilmington mailbox. Registration addresses are poor proxies for economic activity, which is why Enigma pairs them with operating-location signals (payments, payroll, permits, geospatial footprints) when we need to map real-world presence.
The RA industry has scale economics.
A handful of large providers (e.g., CSC, CT, Registered Agents Inc., others) handle massive volumes with standardized processes. That scale shows up in the data as extreme concentration at a relatively small set of addresses.
The RA industry has broader implications.
Economic development — The registry map is a story about legal gravity, not where commerce happens. Delaware and several capitals show concentrations because they collect paperwork, not payroll. In Enigma’s data, that contrast is visible the moment you look beyond the mailbox: the legal layer concentrates into a few super-nodes, while operating signals disperse across retail corridors, logistics belts, and office parks. Read together, the two layers explain why a tiny building in Wilmington can “house” millions of companies even as the day-to-day economy shows up somewhere else.
BI & risk — Registered-agent hubs behave like high-degree nodes in a business identity graph. They’re useful landmarks — thousands of entities touch them — but they can also distort a naïve map of customers or counterparties. Enigma’s unified profiles separate the legal routing address from the places where a business actually appears in the world, so the cluster becomes context rather than confusion. That shift makes patterns legible: roll-ups that share an agent, SPVs that live entirely on paper, and operating brands that share a legal backbone but diverge in footprint.
KYB/AML — A crowded RA address is ordinary — the interesting signal is the pattern around it. In Enigma’s KYB lens, the narrative changes when an entity at a super-node also lacks foreign registrations where activity should exist, shows no operating traces, or rotates agents quickly while ownership overlaps proliferate. The inverse is just as telling: long-lived holdings with stable filings and corroborating activity look exactly like the legitimate infrastructure the RA universe was built to serve. The phenomenon isn’t the mailbox — it’s what the rest of the data says once the mailbox is accounted for.
Methodology
Source: Data gathered from Secretary of State filings for all U.S. states (and applicable territories), normalized by Enigma. StreetView images by Google.
Lens: We focus the RA view on addresses linked to ≥45 registrations—a threshold that captures professional RA sites and filters out single-tenant locations. This “high-throughput” slice contains ~106.6M registrations tied to ~128,124 addresses. The full registry covers ~400.4M registrations across ~61M addresses.
Address standardization: We deduplicate on a normalized full-address string (street1, city, state, ZIP). Minor formatting differences and suite variations can under/over-roll up a physical site.
Timeframe: Active and historical registrations through 2024; historical entries for dissolved entities remain, so current RA concentration may be lower.
Caveats: Registration address is not an operating location.
We cannot always attribute a given address to a specific RA firm without separate attribution logic.
Several top addresses sit in multi-tenant or government buildings that aggregate filings.
