How do I search for UCC liens on a Florida business?

You can search for UCC liens filed against a Florida business or individual through the Florida Secretary of State's FSTR (FloridaUCC.com) portal, or use SunbizStatus to run a combined entity status and UCC lien check in one place.

What is FloridaUCC.com and who uses it?

FloridaUCC.com (officially FSTR Online Filing) is the Florida Secretary of State's UCC lien search portal. It is used by lenders, banks, attorneys, CPAs, title companies, factoring companies, and M&A professionals to check whether a borrower or business has existing liens before extending credit or completing a transaction.

Can lenders check UCC liens on Florida businesses before funding?

Yes. Lenders and banks routinely search the Florida FSTR (UCC) database before extending credit to verify that collateral is not already pledged to another creditor. SunbizStatus provides a direct link to run this check alongside the entity's Sunbiz status.

Florida's Dissolution Deadline Is This Friday: What to Check on Every Client Before 5 PM, September 25

If a client's Florida LLC or corporation still hasn't filed its 2026 annual report, this is the week it stops being a paperwork problem and becomes a legal-status problem. The state's administrative dissolution deadline — the point where an unfiled entity legally ceases to be authorized to do business — lands this Friday, September 25, 2026, at 5:00 PM ET for anything paid by credit card. If a client was planning to mail a check, that window already closed on September 18; only online, credit-card filings can still beat the clock.

For a firm tracking one entity, that's a five-minute check. For a firm tracking a client roster, it's the exact kind of thing a multi-client dashboard exists for — one place to see, right now, which of your clients are still Active and which are about to age out, instead of pulling each name up on Sunbiz.org one at a time this week.

Why this specific Friday matters

Florida's annual report window runs January 1 through May 1 each year. Miss May 1 and a $400 late fee applies the next day to profit corporations, LLCs, LPs, and LLLPs (nonprofits are exempt from the fee, but still must file). Keep missing it, and the entity faces administrative dissolution or revocation — under Fla. Stat. § 607.1421 for corporations and § 605.0714 for LLCs — effective the close of business on the fourth Friday of September. For 2026, that's September 25.

This isn't a warning letter or a grace period. Once it takes effect, the entity legally exists only to wind up and liquidate — it's no longer authorized to conduct ordinary business, and (per the personal-liability exposure discussed in prior posts on this blog) anyone signing contracts on its behalf afterward is arguably signing as an individual, not as a protected entity.

The check to run on every client, today

Pull current status for each entity you manage. Active, or one of the at-risk states (report not yet filed, or already Inactive from a prior cycle)?
For anything not yet filed, file today if at all possible. Online filing with a credit card is the only path still fast enough to beat Friday's 5 PM cutoff — mail is no longer an option for this cycle.
Flag anything you can't reach the client about in time. If a client is unreachable or the filing genuinely can't happen by Friday, shift straight to planning the reinstatement conversation below rather than losing the week to a deadline that's already passed by the time you follow up.

If Friday passes and an entity dissolves anyway: the reinstatement path

Dissolution isn't permanent, but it isn't free or instant either. Reinstatement requires filing a Reinstatement Application with Sunbiz along with catching up every missed annual report, and the combined cost adds up fast:

LLCs: a $100 reinstatement fee plus the current annual report fee — a minimum of roughly $238.75 if filed before December 31, rising to about $377.50 after January 1 (each additional missed year adds another annual report fee on top).
Corporations: a $600 reinstatement fee plus the annual report fee — a minimum of roughly $750 before December 31, closer to $900 after January 1.
Processing runs 24–48 hours for card or Sunbiz-account payments, or 10–14 days if paying by check.

For an entity that's been dissolved for a while, attorneys who handle these filings regularly note the all-in cost — reinstatement fee, back annual reports, and accumulated late fees together — often lands somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000 by the time everything is current. That's a meaningful number to be able to tell a client before Friday, not after.

There are consequences beyond the fee, too. While dissolved, the entity's liability shield doesn't hold the way it should — a plaintiff in a contract dispute or injury claim can argue the business didn't legally exist when the underlying event happened. Contracts signed during the dissolved period are open to the same challenge. And the business name itself becomes available for someone else to register; reinstatement doesn't guarantee you get it back if that happens.

The multi-client angle

None of this is hard to check for one entity. It gets hard when a CPA or attorney is carrying twenty, fifty, or two hundred client entities and Friday's deadline applies to all of them at once, with no single view of who's already filed and who hasn't. That's the exact problem a multi-client dashboard solves — every client entity in one place, status checked continuously rather than only when someone remembers to look, with an alert the moment anything changes. If this week's scramble to check client-by-client on Sunbiz.org felt familiar, that's the signal it's worth setting up before the next deadline, not during it.

Sources: Florida Division of Corporations — File Annual Report; Sunbiz — Reinstatement Filing Instructions; Fla. Stat. § 607.1421; Fla. Stat. § 605.0714; reinstatement cost range and dissolution consequences per Trust Counsel P.L. (2026).