State LLC Naming Rules: six questions asked of 49 US state LLC acts and the District of Columbia

Six questions about limited liability company names, asked of fifty US state LLC acts and the District of Columbia, each answered from that jurisdiction's own statute, administrative code or published guidance. The six: whether the entity designator distinguishes a name, whether a registered trade name occupies the same namespace, what a consent route requires, whether a court can override a conflict, what happens to the name of a dissolved company, and how long a name reservation runs. Every row carries the statutory sections that were read. Nothing is copied from another comparison site. That is the whole of the method, and it is why the file exists: these same six facts are widely published, widely copied between commercial sites, and frequently wrong. Two things follow from the method and matter before you use the data. Verified silence is recorded as an answer rather than a blank. Where a statute was read and contains no such provision, the cell says so — "No consent route at all", "Not addressed in the naming section". A blank cell means nobody has read it, and the JSON marks the difference with a read boolean on every cell so a parser never has to infer it. Every jurisdiction is now answered at least in part, and one row is not statute-derived. Tennessee publishes its code through a vendor that serves no readable text to an automated reader, and its Secretary of State's own domain returns 403 to any request, with or without a US network exit. It was an empty row in earlier versions. Two of its cells now come from the Secretary of State's own FORMS — SS-9411 for consent and SS-9425 for reservation — and its source column says so. A form is a primary source and a different kind of one; a consumer treating every cell as statute-derived would be wrong about this row and only this row. Its other four cells stay empty because those forms do not answer them. Fifty-one of fifty-one jurisdictions are answered in part: 302 cells of 306. Changes since version 2026-08-27, seven cells across two states. Tennessee gains consent and reservation as described above. Florida's reservation rank is REMOVED rather than corrected: the statute authorises a 120-day reservation and the Division of Corporations does not offer one, so a rank implying an ordering would have been wrong. The reservation text now says so. What the files do not contain: a reading date per answer. They carry the statutory section and a dataset version. Most of the per-state guides on the source site give the date their statute was read, but that is not in these files and about half of the guides do not state one. Do not infer currency from the version alone — statutes are renumbered, and Utah's naming provisions renumber on 1 October 2026. This is a record of what statutes say, compiled by a publisher rather than a lawyer, and it is not legal advice. Check the cited section before relying on it. The browsable comparison and the per-state guides carrying the section numbers are at https://www.theformationhub.com/data