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This office doesn't provide legal advice or interpretation of the law. Please consult your attorney for advice on how to make your filing legally effective.
Choose a topic below:
An online search shows all filings on record as of the date and time of your search. The report also gives the date through which we can certify that all records received by mail have been processed so they show on the search report. The certified-through date is about 2 days before the report date.
Washington uses the same processing guidelines as the majority of states. To view Washington State's rules, please see Laws and rules.
Yes, you may file initial financing statements and amendments online. You'll receive an immediate acknowledgment that your record was accepted and posted to the database.
You also may search online for free and get immediate, certified results. To determine whether we have a record for a particular debtor, you can look for as many different name variations as you need in the Browse Names search. If you want copies of records showing collateral, you may request them for a fee and we'll mail them to you.
No, we don't provide this service.
Use our online service! If you mail your documents, we're usually able to return your acknowledgment of filing or search results within 2 business days. However, you can save mail time by delivering your requests to our office. You may also contact a data service company for assistance; they're listed in the yellow pages under Attorneys' Service Bureaus.
Make sure you are using the address where your bill is sent. If you continue to have difficulty, please contact your card provider. A private vendor authorizes use of the credit card and provides the error messages. Typically an authorization (which blocks money in your account) will remain blocked for a few days waiting for a billing from the Department of Licensing. We won't bill on a transaction that wasn't finalized on the Internet due to mismatched credit card information.
We don't provide printed forms. If you can open a form on your computer, you'll be able to fill it out, print it, and mail it to us. The national UCC forms also may be available in stationary or office supply stores where legal forms are sold. Just remember, we don't accept handwriting, so you must type the information.
No, submit addendum pages only as needed to complete the information from the front page of the related form. Please don't attach a UCC-1 Addendum to a UCC-3 Amendment form and vice versa. If you make this mistake, the names won't get added to the index.
Yes, we'll accept attachments both online and through the mail. However, all information on the attachment pages will be kept as an image only and won't be added to the index. Therefore, you must use the national Addendum form or Additional Party form for every additional party you want indexed. If you name them in an attachment they won't be found on a search of that name.
There's no charge for the first addendum, but all subsequent addenda and attachment pages cost an additional $1 per single-sided page.
It is important to submit only 1 copy - The Filing Officer Copy. Your acknowledgment will be machine-generated, so we don't need or want a second copy for acknowledgment purposes. Extra copies will be treated as additional filings and your request may be refused for insufficient payment.
If you want to create your own form, please see the International Association of Commercial Administrators (IACA) Forms and Approval Process (iaca.org). The format (field locations) must match our forms exactly for the information to be machine-readable in Washington. Forms that aren't machine-readable will be refused.
No, as of July 1, 2013, this information is no longer required.
There are several possibilities. You may be submitting:
No, it will remain on file with the Department of Licensing and the county won't be informed. Please be certain that this is the correct office for filing.
The form you submitted is the official record and is retained as an image in our office until 1 year past the lapse date. The computer-generated acknowledgment is a notice that we filed your record, but we display only the data we added to the index. Even though the acknowledgment doesn't show the collateral statement, the image of the form is provided to anyone who requests a copy search of the record.
The most important tip for successful filing is to fully complete debtor and secured party information every time; including name, address, and debtor organizational information. For instance, you must complete all of Box 7 for amendments to either the debtor or secured party information.
It depends. There's no fee for search results displayed online, but you must pay a fee if you want copies or order your search using the UCC-11 Information Request form (iaca.org). To find out how much your search will cost, see Fees and payment options.
It depends on the option you requested. The following is a brief description of each type:
No, you can search any name variation you think a record may be filed under. However, we conduct exact name searches only, so a partial name search won't return any matches. The one exception is that certain "noise words" at the end of organization names are ignored in the search process. You can view the list of noise words, but it won't make any difference if you choose to include them in the name to be searched.
Hint: Try our free Browse Names search to help determine the likely name to search.
Yes, we're able to provide online searches of secured party names, but we can't provide copies of the individual records. If the search result is very big, you may need to limit your search to a specific date range.