Filing a New York Biennial Statement is a small task that people put off because they are not sure what it involves. It is one form, four pieces of information at most, and a $9 fee paid by card. Done online, it takes about ten minutes once you have the right details in front of you. This page walks the whole process — what to gather, what each field means, where people get stuck, and what to do when the system will not cooperate.
Last updated: 10 August 2026
What the Biennial Statement is
Every business corporation and LLC registered in New York files a Biennial Statement with the Department of State. As the name says, it is due every two years — not annually. It is a short confirmation of current contact information, not a financial report. There is no revenue figure, no balance sheet, and no tax calculation on it.
The fee is $9. That is the same amount for an LLC and for a business corporation. If you have seen a higher number quoted somewhere, you were looking at a service fee, a different filing, or an out-of-date page. More detail in our breakdown of what a Biennial Statement costs.
Not-for-profit corporations do not file Biennial Statements. If you run a New York not-for-profit, this filing is not yours.
Before you start: what to gather
The online system is unforgiving about one thing in particular. It will not find your business unless you give it exactly what it expects. Spend five minutes collecting these four things and the filing itself becomes routine.
1. Your exact registered name
Not your trade name. Not the name on your website or your bank account. The name on the certificate you filed with the State, punctuation and all — including whether it ends in LLC or L.L.C., Inc. or Incorporated, and whether there is a comma before the suffix. A single missing period is enough to produce a failed lookup. You can confirm the exact string in the State's Corporation and Business Entity Database, or start with our New York business name search guide.
2. Your DOS ID number
This is the identification number the Department of State assigned your entity when it was formed or authorized. It is not your EIN, and it is not your New York State tax ID. It appears on your filing receipt and on your entity's record in the State database. If you have never needed it before, our DOS ID lookup walkthrough shows where to find it in under a minute.
3. Your due month
Your filing period is the calendar month in which your original Certificate of Incorporation, Articles of Organization, or Application for Authority was filed with the Department of State — repeating every two years. If your LLC was formed on March 14, your Biennial Statement is due in March, every other March. The day of the month does not matter. You have the whole month.
That original filing date is on your entity's record in the State database, listed as the initial DOS filing date. Note that this is the date the State accepted the filing, which is not always the date you signed the paperwork or the date your formation service told you it was done. Use the State's date. We cover the edge cases — foreign entities, reinstated companies, entities that changed type — in how to find your due date.
4. The information the State will ask for
What you report depends entirely on your entity type. Corporations answer four questions. LLCs answer one.
| Reported item | Business corporation | LLC |
|---|---|---|
| Name and business address of the chief executive officer | Required | Not required |
| Street address of the principal executive office | Required | Not required |
| Address for forwarding service of process | Required | Required |
| Number of directors on the board, and how many are women | Required | Not required |
| Filing fee | $9 | $9 |
How to file the Biennial Statement online
New York takes these filings through the Department of State's e-Statement Filing Service, the online system also referred to as the Division of Corporations Biennial Statement e-Filing System. It lives at filing.dos.ny.gov/eBiennialWeb/, and it is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Department staff who can help by phone keep shorter hours — Monday through Friday, 6:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Eastern.
- Open the e-Statement Filing Service. Go to the Department of State system directly rather than through a search result. There is no account to create and no password to remember — the system identifies your business from the details you enter, not from a login.
- Enter your exact entity name and DOS ID number. These two together are how the system finds your record. If the lookup fails, the problem is almost always the name string rather than the number.
- Confirm the record the State shows you. Check that the entity displayed is genuinely yours — name, entity type, and county. New York has plenty of similarly named companies.
- Complete the reporting fields for your entity type. An LLC supplies one address. A corporation supplies the CEO details, the principal executive office, the service-of-process address, and the director counts. Each is covered field by field below.
- Review everything before you pay. Addresses are the field people mistype, and an error here has consequences that an error in most forms does not.
- Pay the $9 fee by card. The system accepts credit and debit cards — MasterCard, Visa, and American Express.
- Save the confirmation. Do not close the browser until you have captured proof of the submission.
One timing rule catches people out. A Biennial Statement should not be filed before the calendar month in which it is due. If you file early, the State still requires a Biennial Statement in the actual due month — so filing ahead buys you nothing, and you may end up paying the fee twice. Wait for your month.
The corporation path, field by field
Corporations have the longer form. None of the fields are difficult, but two of them are routinely misunderstood.
Chief executive officer name and business address
Report the person who actually functions as chief executive, and a business address for that person. In a small corporation with one shareholder who is also the president, that person is the CEO. You do not need a board resolution formally appointing someone chief executive officer before you can answer. The address here is a business address, not a home address, unless the business genuinely runs from the home.
Street address of the principal executive office
This is where the corporation is actually run — the office you would point to if someone asked where the company operates. It must be a street address. A post office box on its own does not satisfy this field. If your corporation is a one-person operation with no separate office, the address where you do the work is the principal executive office.
Address for forwarding service of process
This is the most consequential field on the form, and it gets its own section below.
Number of directors, and how many are women
New York asks every business corporation to report the number of directors constituting the board and how many of those directors are women. This is a statistical disclosure requirement, not a quota. No penalty attaches to any particular answer.
Solo owners stall here, because the question sounds like it assumes a real board. It does not. If you are the only director of your corporation — entirely permissible in New York — the number of directors constituting the board is 1. You then report how many of that board are women: 1 if you are a woman, 0 if you are not. Answer for the board as it stands today, not as your bylaws allow it to be. A corporation whose bylaws permit up to five directors but which currently has two directors reports two.
Do not leave the field blank and do not enter a placeholder. If your board composition changed since the last filing, the Biennial Statement is where that change gets recorded. Our page on the corporation Biennial Statement goes deeper on board reporting for multi-director companies.
The LLC path
New York asks LLCs for one thing: the address to which the Secretary of State should mail a copy of any process accepted on the LLC's behalf. No members, no managers, no capital, no revenue. If you were bracing for something heavier, that is the whole filing.
The brevity is real, but it is not a reason to be casual. That single address is the one thing standing between your LLC and a lawsuit it never learns about. Confirm it is current, then file. See the LLC Biennial Statement in detail if your situation is unusual — a foreign LLC, a single-member LLC with no office, a PLLC.
Choosing a service-of-process address, and why it matters
In New York, the Secretary of State is the agent for service of process for every corporation and LLC. When someone sues your business, they can serve the Secretary of State. The State accepts the papers on your behalf and forwards them to the address on file. Whether you ever see them depends entirely on whether that address is one you still check.
That is the failure mode. A company moves, forgets the address on file, and a complaint gets forwarded to an office the company left three years ago. Nobody answers it. The plaintiff takes a default judgment. The first the owner hears about it is when a bank account is frozen. This is not a theoretical risk. It is the most common way a stale Biennial Statement turns into real money.
A good service-of-process address has three properties:
- Someone reliably opens the mail. Not a location you visit occasionally. Not a shared mailbox in a building you sublease from.
- It survives a move. If you have relocated twice in five years, a home address or your accountant's office is often more stable than the current lease.
- It is a real deliverable address. Mail sent there reaches a person, not a returned envelope.
One technical note worth knowing. The address for service of process cannot be changed through a Biennial Statement Amendment. Amending that address outside the regular biennial reporting is done by filing a Certificate of Change or a Certificate of Amendment, which is a separate filing with its own fee. Getting the address right when you file the Biennial Statement saves you that step.
Paying, and what happens at the end
The $9 is paid by credit or debit card at the point of submission. MasterCard, Visa, and American Express are accepted. There is no check option in the online system and no invoice-later arrangement. Expedited handling is not available for Biennial Statements, so there is no faster tier to buy.
Before you close the window, capture proof. Save or print the confirmation the system gives you at the end of the transaction, and keep it with your entity records alongside your formation documents. If an acknowledgment arrives at the email address associated with the filing, keep that too. Two years from now, when you are trying to remember whether the last one went through, that record is the fastest answer — faster than ordering a Certificate of Status.
A good habit: a few days after filing, look your entity up in the State's Corporation and Business Entity Database and confirm the record no longer shows the statement as past due. It takes thirty seconds and it closes the loop.
When the system cannot find your entity
This is the most common point of failure, and it is nearly always fixable without calling anyone.
- Check the name character by character. Copy it from the State database rather than typing it. Watch for LLC versus L.L.C., a comma before the suffix, ampersands versus the word and, numerals versus spelled-out numbers.
- Confirm you are using the DOS ID. The EIN, the state tax ID, and the DOS ID are three different numbers.
- Check whether the name changed. If the entity filed a Certificate of Amendment, the current name is the one the system expects — not the original.
- Check the entity type. Not-for-profit corporations, limited partnerships, and sole proprietorships do not file Biennial Statements.
- Check your status. A dissolved or revoked entity may not be able to file until the underlying status is resolved.
If the details are right and it still fails, the Division of Corporations can be reached at (518) 473-2492.
Filing on paper instead
Paper filing is available, but not by downloading a form. New York does not publish a blank Biennial Statement PDF, because the form is produced against your entity's current record. You request one from the Department's Statement Unit.
Your request has to identify the entity precisely: the exact name of the corporation or LLC and either its date of formation or authorization or its DOS ID number. Requests go to the Statement Unit, New York Department of State, One Commerce Plaza, 99 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12231-0002, or by email to the address published on the Biennial Statement page at dos.ny.gov. The Statement Unit sends the form to you. You complete it and return it with payment.
Paper makes sense in a narrow set of cases — the online system genuinely cannot locate your entity, you have no card to pay with, or something about your record needs to be handled by a person. For everyone else it adds weeks to a filing that otherwise clears quickly.
If you are already past due
Take the pressure down first. New York does not charge a late fee on a Biennial Statement, and it does not dissolve your entity for missing one. The fee is still $9 no matter how late you are.
What does happen is that the Department of State's records show the entity as past due in the filing of its Biennial Statement. Any Certificate of Status or status letter you obtain reflects that, and in the State's own words, this may prevent the corporation or LLC from completing certain business transactions. In practice that surfaces at the worst moments — a lender running diligence, a landlord asking for good standing, a buyer's counsel reviewing your file, a licensing body requiring a clean status letter.
The fix is the same filing. A past-due Biennial Statement can still be filed online through the e-Statement Filing Service. There is no special form and no reinstatement process. File it, and the past-due notation clears. Our past-due guideIf you never file covers what to do if several cycles were missed and how to verify the record afterward.
Making sure you do not miss the next one
New York does not reliably remind you. Any notice goes to the address on file, which is exactly the address that goes stale when a business moves — so the reminder fails precisely when you need it most. Build your own backstop:
- Put a recurring calendar entry on the first business day of your due month, repeating every two years, with your DOS ID in the body of the event.
- Add a second reminder two weeks later as a catch.
- Store your exact registered name, DOS ID, and formation date wherever you keep your EIN letter.
- When you move, update the service-of-process address deliberately rather than waiting for the next cycle.
One more thing worth clearing up, because it drives a lot of confusion. New York has no separate annual report for corporations and LLCs. The Biennial Statement is the filing. If you have been searching for a New York annual report and coming up empty, that is why.
When it makes sense to hand it off
If you have your DOS ID, your exact name, and ten free minutes in your due month, file it yourself. Everything you need is above, and the State charges $9. We would rather you got it done than paid us for something straightforward.
Handing it off makes sense under different conditions — you manage several entities with different due months, you have already missed a cycle and want it closed out today, you are mid-transaction and a lender needs a clean status, or the filing keeps sliding down the list because it is nobody's actual job. In those cases the cost of forgetting is a great deal larger than the cost of delegating.
Our service is $49 to file as-is, or $79 full service, with the State's $9 fee included. We confirm your entity details against the State record, file within 24 hours, and email you the confirmation. No subscription, no upsell, no renewal that quietly bills you in two years. If you would rather it were handled, that is what you get.