LEI registration for US businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

No — lei registration is operational work inside your books, not something submitted to IRS. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside registrations & licences more broadly, that stays with your CPA or enrolled agent, never with us.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for lei registration — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

LEI registration sits inside registrations & licences, alongside EIN registration, State payroll registrations, Seller’s permit registration. Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

It's a 20-character code, unique to one legal entity, that shows up in GLEIF's Global LEI Index. US businesses typically need one when a specific transaction requires it — opening certain institutional trading or custody accounts, being named on a swap or derivatives confirmation, or appearing as a counterparty in a transaction a bank has to report under a regime like Dodd-Frank. It's not a general business requirement; something transactional triggers it.

No. GLEIF sets the global standard and accredits a network of Local Operating Units — LOUs — but only an LOU actually issues, maintains or renews a code. GLEIF doesn't sell LEIs to end entities or charge them a separate fee; the fee paid is the LOU's own price.

Bloomberg and RapidLEI are both GLEIF-accredited and serve US entities; there are others globally. The choice is the client's — we place the application with whichever accredited LOU they choose and prep the entity data to match.

The entity's legal name, registered address and business registry reference — the state Secretary of State filing number — at minimum, sometimes with parent/ownership structure depending on the LOU's form. Every field has to match the official state record exactly, since that's what the LOU verifies before issuing the code.

Typically same-day to a few business days once the LOU has verified the submitted entity data against official state records. A mismatch between what's submitted and what the state has on file is the most common thing that slows it down.

The code itself stays in GLEIF's database, but it has to be renewed with the issuing LOU annually. Miss the renewal and the public status in the Global LEI Index changes to 'issued but not renewed' — a status some counterparties reject on sight, which is functionally the same as not having a live code for that transaction.

We keep a standing renewal calendar entry tied to the specific LOU's annual cycle and flag it ahead of the due date, so the renewal gets handled before the code lapses.

Yes — the LEI code itself is portable between LOUs, and a switch can be initiated at renewal time. It has to be started before the current registration lapses, though, not after.

There's no government fee at all — GLEIF doesn't charge end entities, and there's no regulator setting a price. The LOU sets its own fee for issuance and renewal. We place the order directly with the accredited LOU so what's paid is that LOU's own published rate, not an intermediary markup on a process that has no free government-run alternative.

No. The EIN is an IRS tax identifier and the state registration number is the Secretary of State's own filing number — the LEI is a separate, GLEIF-standard identifier that specific financial counterparties and reporting regimes require. The LOU verifies the LEI application against the state registration number, but the two numbers serve different purposes and neither substitutes for the other.

Depending on the transaction, the counterparty may simply decline to proceed — banks reporting under CFTC or SEC swap-data regimes generally can't complete or report the transaction without a valid, current LEI on file for every party to it. Getting the code issued before the deadline, rather than after the transaction stalls, is the difference that matters.