agent-rules

Status: draft / proposal. Not published, not part of the dataset yet.

Per-jurisdiction record of who may serve as an LLC's registered agent: whether the LLC itself may be its own agent, whether a commercial mail receiving agency (CMRA) address is acceptable, and what address rule applies. One JSON file per jurisdiction in states/<slug>.json.

This namespace is additive: it adds no key to states.json, entitysearch-state-data, name-rules, dba-rules, processing-time or tax-rules, and nothing already published changes because of it. A consumer that ignores this directory sees exactly the dataset it saw before.

Why this namespace exists separately

Registered-agent rules are statute-level facts that formation sites copy loosely and contradict each other on: the same state is described as "you can be your own agent" by one service and "an entity cannot serve as its own agent" by another. The distinction that matters to a filer is narrow — the LLC itself, a member, another entity, a CMRA — and it is exactly the distinction this namespace records, one small set of fields per state.

Scope boundaries

Eligibility rules only. Who or what may be the agent, and what address the agent's office must have. Commercial registered-agent pricing and services are out of scope.
No filing mechanics. Acceptance of service, service on the Secretary of State as fallback, and court process rules are out of scope.
Contact data stays where it is. entitysearch-state-data remains authoritative for the agencies' own contact details, addresses and hours.
This namespace is authoritative for registered-agent eligibility. Any other mention of who may be an agent anywhere else in the dataset is prose, not a value to be read.

Sourcing

Held to the standard in the root README.md §Methodology. The source is the registered-agent provision of the state's LLC act or the agency's own registration guidance; the statute is preferred. No blogs, no formation-service pages, no commercial aggregators, including as corroboration.

Every admissible value is bound to a verbatim passage quoted from the cited page (evidence). false is a researched finding and requires a passage from the provision that would have said so. null means not yet researched and is always preferred to a plausible guess.

Field dictionary

Identity

Field	Type	Notes
`stateName`, `stateAbbr`, `stateSlug`	string	Same conventions as the other namespaces; DC uses `district-of-columbia`

`registeredAgent`

Field	Type	Notes
`llcCanBeOwnAgent`	boolean \| null	Whether the LLC itself may serve as its own registered agent. `false` needs evidence from the provision that would have said so
`cmraAllowed`	boolean \| null	Whether a commercial mail receiving agency (CMRA) may serve as the registered office or address
`addressRule`	string \| null	The address requirement in the state's own words: physical street address, P.O. box policy, business-office requirement
`evidence`	evidence[]	One verbatim passage per value

Record plumbing

notes, needsReview, sources[] (citation, title, url, type, lastAccessed) and lastVerified carry their usual meaning from the other draft namespaces.

The pilot

The namespace opens with five jurisdictions chosen to stress the schema, not to cover ground. Hypothesis candidates: Texas (reported explicit prohibition on the entity serving as its own agent), Delaware (reported entity-permissive provision), California, New York and Georgia. Every expectation here is a hypothesis until the record's own sources confirm it; the schema is expected to change during the pilot.

This is not legal advice, and nothing here is a filing instruction. Statutes move with legislative sessions; read lastVerified before trusting any of them.