Illinois tells you how long this takes before you commit to a route

The Bottom Line for Illinois LLCs

Buy it online from the business entity search and print it from the receipt page or the email that follows. The expedited option belongs to the paper route, and it earns its money only when you are stuck on paper.

The usual trouble with this document is not knowing whether a request placed today comes back this afternoon or next month. Illinois publishes both figures for its form-based route, routine and expedited, and then goes further: its own LLC guide footnotes the certificate line to say the online purchase happens in real time and needs no expedited fee. Put those together and the decision makes itself. If the portal will serve you, paying for speed buys nothing you were not already getting.

What Illinois Actually Calls It

Illinois calls it a Certificate of Good Standing, issued by Illinois Secretary of State, Department of Business Services.

The Secretary of State says a Certificate of Good Standing confirms compliance with the state of Illinois Business Services Department, and that it may be purchased and printed for a Corporation or LLC after satisfying all requirements of the relevant Illinois statutes.

Why You Need One

Registering the company in another state is the single biggest source of requests. The receiving office wants Illinois to confirm the company exists and is current, and it usually wants that confirmation recent. Banks and lenders come next, most often at account opening for a company whose managers are not walking into a branch, or while a loan file is being assembled. After that comes a real but occasional tail: a large customer's vendor onboarding, a landlord signing a commercial lease, a lender refinancing, and the diligence file when the business changes hands. One caution before you order. Illinois serves limited partnerships and limited liability partnerships with a different document from the same office, so if you are buying for one of those rather than for an LLC, check that the request you are about to send is the right one.

What It Costs in Illinois

Illinois charges $25 for the Certificate of Good Standing.

Expedited service is available: Expedited Certificate of Good Standing at $45 in total rather than the ordinary price (24 hours).

Where this fee comes from: "Purchase the Certificate online: Corporation/LLC ($25); Not-for-Profit ($5)." Form LLC-50.25 prints "Routine Certificate of Good Standing . . . $25" and "Expedited Certificate of Good Standing . . . $45". 805 ILCS 180/50-10(b)(22) sets the statutory basis: "For furnishing a copy or certified copy of any document, instrument, or paper relating to a limited liability company or foreign limited liability company, or for a certificate, $25."

How to Order It

You can order the Certificate of Good Standing online, by mail, by phone and by fax.

Immediate print online, or 10 business days by request (24 hours expedited).

Order it on the Illinois site

Form LLC-50.25: "In addition to the above fees, an additional payment processor fee will be charged when paying by credit card (minimum $1)."

Start in the business entity search, open the company's file detail report, and buy from the link on that report. Print the certificate from the link on the receipt page or from the link in the email that follows, and save the PDF while you have it, because neither link is a permanent home for the document. Card payments carry a processor charge on top of the certificate price, levied by the state's payment vendor rather than by the Secretary of State, so the amount leaving your account is a little higher than the figure shown above. The paper route still exists for cases the portal cannot serve, and it is more flexible than its age suggests: the request form accepts fax and email as well as post, and it lets you choose how the certificate comes back to you, including by fax or by email. Flexibility, rather than speed, is the reason to reach for it.

1. 1

   Open your company's file detail report in the business entity search

   Search by name and open the report. This page is public and it is where the purchase link lives, so you can look before you decide to buy.

2. 2

   Read the status and annual report lines before buying

   The report tells you whether the company is current. Checking first is quicker than working out afterwards why a purchase produced nothing.

3. 3

   Buy the certificate from the link on the report

   Choose the LLC product rather than the not-for-profit one. The card payment adds the state vendor's processor charge at checkout.

4. 4

   Print or save from the receipt page, then from the email

   You get a link on the receipt page and a second link by email. Save the PDF from whichever you reach first and keep your own copy.

5. 5

   Use the paper request form only when the portal cannot serve you

   The form goes in by post, fax or email and lets you specify how the certificate comes back. This is also the only route where paying for expedited handling changes anything.

6. 6

   Send a separate apostille application if the certificate is going abroad

   The Index Department handles authentication on its own form. Order the certificate first, then submit it for the apostille.

What Puts You Out of Standing in Illinois

Before Illinois will issue the Certificate of Good Standing, your filings with the state's business filing office have to be current. We found no separate tax clearance requirement from a revenue agency, though Illinois does not publish a statement either way, so treat that as no requirement found rather than an assurance.

The Secretary of State's wording is conditional. You may purchase and immediately print the certificate once the company has satisfied what the Illinois statutes require of it. The mechanism sitting behind that phrase is the annual report: miss the due date and the company is placed in delinquent status, and a company in delinquent status has not satisfied those requirements. Illinois has not published a certificate-specific refusal rule in so many words, so what you will actually experience is a purchase step that fails to produce a certificate rather than a message explaining itself. If that happens, open the file detail report and read the company's status and its annual report line before you telephone anybody. Filing the outstanding report is what clears it, and the certificate becomes available again once the record updates.

How Long It Stays Good in Illinois

Illinois publishes nothing about how long the Certificate of Good Standing stays current. Whoever asked you for it does: banks, lenders and other states' filing offices each set their own recency rule, and that window is theirs, not Illinois's. Ask what it is, and order the certificate once you know.

Real-time issuance changes how you should sequence this. In a state where an order takes weeks, you buy early and hope the recipient's window is generous. In Illinois you can wait until the bank or the other state's filing office has told you exactly what it wants, buy the certificate the same hour, and send it out carrying today's date. Do that. The certificate most likely to be rejected is the one bought two months ago in anticipation of a request that had not yet arrived. The exception is the paper route, where a recipient wants something the portal cannot produce. That is the one situation where the expedited option is worth its money, because there you are genuinely waiting on the office.

Using It Outside the United States

For use abroad, Illinois Secretary of State, Index Department will authenticate the certificate with an apostille for $2 per document.

Who to Ask in Illinois

The Department of Business Services at the Illinois Secretary of State issues this certificate and is the office to ask about a company's status, a delinquent annual report or a request form that came back. The request form itself carries a fax number and an email address alongside the Springfield post address, and those are usually the quickest way to reach a person about an order that has stalled. Apostilles belong to a different department entirely: the Index Department authenticates Illinois documents for use abroad, on its own application form, so a certificate destined for a foreign registry means two requests to two desks in the same building.

Sources

• ilsos.gov/departments/business-services/business-searches.html
• ilsos.gov/departments/business-services/howdoi.html
• ilsos.gov/content/dam/publications/pdf_publications/llc5025.pdf
• ilsos.gov/content/dam/publications/pdf_publications/c334.pdf
• ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/fulltext.asp?DocName=080501800K50-10
• ilsos.gov/departments/index/apostilles.html
• ilsos.gov/publications/pdf_publications/i213.pdf

Every figure on this page was read from an Illinois government source, not from a formation service. Confidence in this record: high. See our editorial policy for how these are verified and corrected.