county-dba

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

Per-jurisdiction record of the county dimension of DBA costs: a verified fee range and up to three example counties per jurisdiction, plus a note on publication cost where publication is required. 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.

Scope: county-dimension jurisdictions only

This namespace does not collect 51 jurisdictions. It covers the jurisdictions where DBA costs have a county dimension — where the filing level is county or split, or where publication is required — as already recorded in dba-rules (filingLevel and publicationRequired). Measured from the current data that is 16 jurisdictions; the remaining 35 are out of scope by design and need no record. The README's coverage statement will name the set, not a 51/51 claim.

Why this namespace exists separately

dba-rules already records the state-level facts, including the important sentence "each county sets its own fee". What a filer actually needs next is numbers: a range and verified examples from official county pages. This namespace adds that layer without touching the state-level contract, and it deliberately caps the work — three examples per jurisdiction, no county-by-county census.

Scope boundaries

Costs only. The county filing fee and, where required, the publication cost. The publication requirement stays authoritative in dba-rules (publicationRequired / publicationRule); this namespace never restates it as a value.
Verified examples, capped at three. examples never lists more than three counties per jurisdiction, and every example is read from that county's own official page.
A range is sourced, never derived. feeRangeUsd is the range the official pages actually show, or the range spanned by the verified examples — never an average, never a guess.
This namespace is authoritative for county DBA fee figures and publication costs. The county examples in dba-rules feeBasis are narrative; where they disagree with a record here, this namespace wins.
No "unknown" estimation. A county whose fee is not published is simply absent from examples; three-state null discipline applies.

Sourcing

Held to the standard in the root README.md §Methodology. The publisher is the county filing office — a Clerk of Superior Court, a county clerk, a Register of Deeds — or the official legal organ that sets the publication rate. 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). 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`

`countyDba`

Field	Type	Notes
`applies`	boolean \| null	Whether this jurisdiction has a county dimension. `false` is only used inside the scoped set, for a jurisdiction whose county costs turned out not to vary
`feeRangeUsd`	object \| null	`{min, max}` — the range the official pages show or the verified examples span
`publicationCostNote`	string \| null	One short sentence on publication cost where publication is required
`examples`	array, max 3	`{county, feeUsd, publicationFeeUsd, note}` — verified county examples
`note`	string \| null	Anything the fields cannot carry
`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: California (county-set fees under a statutory cap), Georgia (county clerk fees plus a publication fee), New York (per-county fees), Nebraska (state filing with publication) and Minnesota (state filing with publication). 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. County fees move frequently; read lastVerified before trusting any of them.