In 2014 individuals filed more Florida fictitious names than companies did, 53,187 against 48,028. Through August 21 of this year the count is 58,605 filed by companies and 24,437 filed by people. Company-owned registrations have gone from 47.5% of the total to 70.6% in twelve years, and the shift happened without a single reversal after 2021.
Florida fictitious name filings are running 13.9% ahead of last year through July. The growth is entirely on the company side: filings by individuals peaked in 2020 at 57,118 and have fallen to roughly 24,000 so far this year, while company filings have risen every year since 2021.
Key findings
- The crossover happened in 2017. That was the first year companies filed more Florida trade names than individuals did, 51,120 against 48,729.
- Individual filings peaked in the pandemic and have not recovered. 57,118 in 2020, then 41,690, 36,698 and 34,092 in the three years that followed.
- This is not a handful of large filers. 51,169 different companies appear as the owner on 2026 filings. Only 237 of them filed five or more.
- The July slowdown shows up here too. Fictitious name filings ran 12% to 23% ahead of 2025 every month from January to June, then landed within eight filings of last July.
What does the company and person split actually measure?
Florida's fictitious name file carries an owner name format code on each registration, and the state's own file specification defines it in one line: (P) for Person, (C) for Corporation. It is set at filing, it applies to each of up to ten owners, and it is the cleanest way to tell whether a trade name was registered by a human being or by a legal entity.
The distinction matters because a fictitious name means something different in each case. When a person registers one, the name is usually the whole business: no company behind it, no liability shield, just a name to put on a sign and a bank account. When a company registers one, the name is a brand sitting on top of an entity that already exists, and the entity is what carries the obligations.
| Year | Filed by companies | Filed by people | Total | Company share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 48,028 | 53,187 | 101,215 | 47.5% |
| 2015 | 48,489 | 53,975 | 102,464 | 47.3% |
| 2016 | 48,697 | 51,016 | 99,715 | 48.8% |
| 2017 | 51,120 | 48,729 | 99,849 | 51.2% |
| 2018 | 52,963 | 45,434 | 98,397 | 53.8% |
| 2019 | 52,712 | 43,102 | 95,814 | 55.0% |
| 2020 | 58,238 | 57,118 | 115,356 | 50.5% |
| 2021 | 62,265 | 53,240 | 115,505 | 53.9% |
| 2022 | 65,283 | 41,690 | 106,984 | 61.0% |
| 2023 | 68,715 | 36,698 | 105,419 | 65.2% |
| 2024 | 69,988 | 34,092 | 104,087 | 67.2% |
| 2025 | 76,513 | 35,024 | 111,545 | 68.6% |
| 2026 to Aug 21 | 58,605 | 24,437 | 83,052 | 70.6% |
Why does 2020 break the line?
Because the pandemic pulled individuals back in for two years and then let them go.
Filings by people had been falling steadily since 2015, from 53,975 down to 43,102 by 2019. Then 2020 produced 57,118, the highest figure in the whole series, and 2021 added another 53,240. Two years later the number was 36,698, below where it had been before the pandemic started, and it has stayed there.
Company filings did not do that. They rose through 2020 and 2021 like everything else, and then simply kept rising: 65,283, 68,715, 69,988, 76,513. No dip, no correction. The side of the ledger that spiked is the side that gave it all back.
Is a small number of companies driving this?
No. That was the obvious explanation to check, and the numbers rule it out.
51,169 distinct companies appear as the first owner on a 2026 fictitious name filing. Of those, 4,755 filed two or more registrations, and only 237 filed five or more. The overwhelming majority of company filers registered exactly one trade name, which is what a small operating business does when it wants to trade under something other than its legal name.
The heaviest filers are the ones you would expect: health systems that run clinics under local names, and retailers that register a name per site.
| Owner | Filings |
|---|---|
| Florida Hospital Medical Group, Inc. | 63 |
| Wal-Mart Stores East, LP | 52 |
| Public Health Trust of Miami-Dade County | 42 |
| Dollar Tree Stores, Inc. | 40 |
| First Coast Energy, LLP | 38 |
| AdventHealth Bond Clinic, Inc. | 34 |
| Adventist Health System/Sunbelt, Inc. | 34 |
| Scrubora Florida, LLC | 34 |
| AdventHealth Primary Care Network, Inc. | 28 |
| Somerset Academy, Inc. | 27 |
Together those ten account for 392 filings out of roughly 58,600 company registrations this year. The shift is broad, not concentrated.
How many trade names is Florida registering this year?
83,052 between January 1 and August 21, against 73,258 in the same window last year. Through the seven complete months the figure is 75,669 against 66,456, a rise of 13.9%.
| Month | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 8,733 | 10,701 | +22.5% |
| February | 9,089 | 10,230 | +12.6% |
| March | 10,138 | 11,829 | +16.7% |
| April | 10,333 | 12,318 | +19.2% |
| May | 9,519 | 10,830 | +13.8% |
| June | 9,018 | 10,143 | +12.5% |
| July | 9,626 | 9,618 | −0.1% |
| January to July | 66,456 | 75,669 | +13.9% |
July is the line worth pausing on. Six months of double-digit growth, then a month that finished eight filings below last July. New business formations did the same thing at the same time, falling from 16.5% year-over-year growth in March to 2.0% in July, which we covered in Florida business formations grew 2% in July 2026.
Two registries with different filing processes, different fees and different reasons to file, turning flat in the same month, is a more interesting signal than either one alone. It is also only one month in each, and fictitious names carry no publication lag, so the July figure here is final rather than settling.
Why this matters if you are checking out a business
A trade name tells you what is painted on the door. The owner record attached to it tells you who you are actually dealing with, and seven times in ten that is now a company rather than a person.
That is a practical difference. If the owner is an entity, you can pull its filing history, its officers, its registered agent, and its status, and judge the business on those. If the owner is an individual, the fictitious name registration may be close to the entire public paper trail. Knowing which one you are looking at before you sign anything is the point of reading the field at all.
Worth pairing with this: the 2021 cohort of registrations, all 115,507 of which expire on December 31 this year.
About these numbers
Figures come from Florida Division of Corporations fictitious name filings as republished in the sneyk dataset, current to August 21, 2026, with counts taken on August 22, 2026. Owner type uses the state's own owner name format field, defined in the fictitious name file specification as (P) for Person and (C) for Corporation. Year totals include a small number of registrations carrying neither code, which is why the two owner columns do not always sum exactly to the total.
Fictitious name filings publish daily and without the lag that affects corporate formations, so figures for a month that has closed are final. August is shown only inside the year-to-date comparison, cut at August 21 in both years, because the month is incomplete.
Filer counts group by the first owner name exactly as filed, so an owner that appears under two spellings is counted twice. That makes the concentration figures a floor rather than a ceiling, and it does not change the conclusion, since the gap between 51,169 filers and 237 heavy filers is far larger than any plausible spelling variation.
