North Carolina

Free, and searchable by entity name, registered agent or company official. The officer search is the one worth learning — see above.

Filings are viewable, and annual reports give you a dated address and officer list for each year the entity stayed in good standing. An entity that stopped filing has a last-known-good date attached to it, which is useful on its own.

Free public search of secured filings. A UCC-1 names the debtor, the secured party and the collateral, and the secured party is very often a bank — which makes this one of the few free routes to where a business banks.

North Carolina offers both a standard and a non-standard search. The standard one is the strict legal match; the non-standard search lets you use starts-with, any-words and all-words logic, and that’s the one to run when you’re hunting rather than certifying.

The $38 fee is only for a certified UCC-11 search by written request. If you just need to know, the online search costs nothing.

North Carolina has no single professional license lookup. Each board runs its own — the Medical Board, the Board of Nursing, the Licensing Board for General Contractors and several dozen more.

Search the board name plus “license verification” rather than hunting for a central portal that doesn’t exist. Board records are usually free and usually give you a legal name, a status, an issue date and a city.

No statewide property search. Each of the 100 counties runs its own, split between two offices: the register of deeds holds the recorded deeds and mortgages, and the county tax office holds ownership, parcel and assessed value.

Tax office first to find out what someone owns, register of deeds for the document itself. Most North Carolina counties put both online free and both are name-searchable, which is better than the national average.

All 100 counties, one search, free, no account. Criminal, civil, family and estate cases. Search by party name, attorney, case number or citation, and filed documents are viewable where they’re public.

Search names loosely. The Portal matches on what the clerk typed, so a middle initial, a suffix or a maiden name will lose the case. Try the surname with a first initial before you conclude there’s nothing there.

See the section above — the $25 search is a single county. The eCourts Portal is the practical route for a name check now, because criminal cases are in it statewide.

What the Portal won’t tell you is disposition detail on older cases, or anything sealed or expunged. North Carolina expunges more than it used to, and an expunged case is gone from the public index entirely.

Birth, death, marriage and divorce records from the state office, with county registers of deeds also holding local copies of births, deaths and marriages.

The county register of deeds is often faster than the state office and can issue for events in that county. If you know the county, start there.

Free name search of property the state is holding. Worth running on any locate for reasons that have nothing to do with the money.

A reported item names the holder — the bank, insurer or employer that had the funds. That’s an institution the person had a relationship with, and it’s frequently the answer to a bank locate you were about to spend hours on.

North Carolina runs one of the better free voter lookups in the country. Search a name and you get the registration address, county, status, party and the voter’s election-by-election history.

The full statewide file is also published for free download if you need bulk data. For a single subject the lookup answers it in seconds.

Registration is updated by the registrant, so the address is what the person themselves last told the state. That’s a different and often better class of information than a scraped address.