foreign-qualification

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

Per-jurisdiction record of what it costs and what it takes to register an existing LLC from another state: the registration fee, the official form, the agency that takes the filing, and the ongoing obligations that follow. 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

Foreign qualification is the same filing event as formation but with its own fee, its own form and its own follow-on obligations, and it is the one place an existing LLC's owner meets a new state's bureaucracy without forming a new entity. The root dataset answers "what does this state charge to form"; this namespace answers "what does this state charge to let an LLC from elsewhere do business here".

Scope boundaries

The registration filing only. The fee and form to register a foreign LLC. Amendments, withdrawals and dissolutions are out of scope.
No "doing business" advice. Whether a particular activity requires registration is a legal question for the filer; the record carries the state's published fee and form, not an opinion on when they are triggered.
Registered-agent eligibility rules stay where they are. agent-rules is authoritative for who may be an agent. This namespace records only the standing requirement to have one, inside ongoingObligationsNote, as prose.
County-level costs are out of scope. Where a foreign registration also triggers local costs, they belong to the county layer, not here.
This namespace is authoritative for the foreign registration fee and the official form. Any other mention of a foreign qualification fee 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 publisher is the Secretary of State or the agency that takes the filing; the fee usually sits on that agency's own fee schedule. 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). registrationFeeUsd holds the real out-of-pocket cost on the common filing path, and feeBasis explains the gap when it differs from the statutory figure. 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`

`foreignQualification`

Field	Type	Notes
`registrationFeeUsd`	number \| null	Real out-of-pocket cost on the common filing path (online or paper); `feeBasis` names the path
`feeBasis`	string	What the figure covers and why it differs from a statutory fee, if it does
`formName`	string	The official form's name or number, verbatim
`formUrl`	string \| null	The official form page or fee schedule the form was read from
`filedWith`	string \| null	The agency that takes the filing, verbatim
`ongoingObligationsNote`	string \| null	One short sentence: what the LLC must do after registering (annual report, agent maintenance, recurring fees)
`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 (online-only application), New York (paper, higher fee), Texas, Delaware 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. Fees move with legislative sessions; read lastVerified before trusting any of them.