Pennsylvania UCC Lien Search — PA DOS Filing & Debtor Records

Search Pennsylvania UCC financing statements straight from the official Pennsylvania Department of State index (file.dos.pa.gov) and get clean, structured JSON: filing number, filing and lapse dates, status, debtor name and location, secured party, and document type.

This is the only Pennsylvania UCC lien-search actor on Apify — no dedicated PA UCC actor exists today, and the multi-state UCC aggregators do not cover Pennsylvania. It reads the same public DOS index a paid "official" UCC search is built on, and it is fed live at run time (the portal shows "As of today we have processed all UCC documents received in our office through …" — you are querying the current index, not a stale cache).

Who this is for

• MCA, equipment-finance, factoring & ABL underwriters — check whether a Pennsylvania business's assets are already encumbered before advancing funds, and see exactly which secured lenders (banks, funders, representative trusts like CSC / CT Corporation) already hold a blanket lien.
• KYB / KYC & onboarding — surface existing UCC filings against a counterparty in seconds instead of a manual portal session per name.
• Collections & skip-trace / recovery — find a debtor's active secured creditors and the filings that name them.
• Legal & UCC filing services — verify filing numbers, lapse dates, and continuation / termination (UCC3) status.

What you get

Every record is normalized — ISO dates, explicit nulls, stable field names, and the " - CITY - STATE" location suffix split out of the portal's name strings:

{
  "recordId": 83033,
  "recordNumber": "2021100701076",
  "filingNumber": "2021100701076",
  "documentType": "UCC1",
  "debtorName": "TRUCKING SOLUTIONS CO",
  "debtorCity": "PHILADELPHIA",
  "debtorState": "PA",
  "debtorRaw": "TRUCKING SOLUTIONS CO - PHILADELPHIA - PA",
  "securedParty": "C T CORPORATION SYSTEM, AS REPRESENTATIVE",
  "securedPartyCity": "GLENDALE",
  "securedPartyState": "CA",
  "securedPartyRaw": "C T CORPORATION SYSTEM, AS REPRESENTATIVE - GLENDALE - CA",
  "status": "Active",
  "filingDate": "2021-10-07",
  "filingDateTime": "2021-10-07T12:28:00",
  "lapseDate": "2026-10-07",
  "pageCount": 3,
  "source": "pa-dos-ucc",
  "sourceUrl": "https://file.dos.pa.gov/search/ucc",
  "searchType": "filingNumber",
  "query": "2021100701076",
  "retrievedAt": "2026-07-22T18:00:00.000Z"
}

documentType distinguishes original financing statements (UCC1) from amendments / continuations / terminations (UCC3); for a UCC3 the recordNumber tracks the original UCC1 while filingNumber is the amendment's own number, and status reflects the current state (e.g. Active, Inactive - Terminated, Inactive - Lapsed & Terminated).

Search options

Input	What it does
searchType	debtorOrganization, debtorIndividual, securedPartyOrganization, securedPartyIndividual, or filingNumber
organizationName	Business name to search (organization modes; contains-match)
firstName / middleName / lastName / suffix	Individual name (individual modes)
filingNumber	Exact filing/record number (filingNumber mode)
city / state	Optional location filters
filingDateFrom / filingDateTo	Filing-date range (YYYY-MM-DD or M/D/YYYY)
includeLapsed	Include lapsed filings (default on)
maxResults	Cap the number of records returned (default 100)

Both debtor and secured-party search are first-class — so you can pull "every filing where WELLS FARGO is the secured party" directly, without a workaround.

Freshness

Results come live from the PA DOS UCC index at run time — nothing pre-scraped. Note the portal's own disclaimer: this public search is not certified. A certified UCC-11 search is a separate paid DOS product ordered document-by-document; this actor returns the free, public index used for diligence and monitoring, not a certified legal search.

Pricing

Pay-per-event — you pay for what you get, no subscription:

Event	Price
Search session (actor start)	$0.01
UCC filing result (per record)	$0.004

Why these numbers. Comparable UCC actors price filing results at $2.00/1,000 (New Jersey UCC), $3.00/1,000 (Whetstone Tools), and $5.00/1,000 (ScrapeSage). This actor sits at the low end — $4.00/1,000 records — because Pennsylvania sits behind a Cloudflare managed challenge that requires a real browser session and residential proxy per run (more compute than a plain-HTTP portal like NJ), while still undercutting the $3–5 comps on a per-record basis. A typical run — one search session returning 100 filings — costs $0.01 + 100 × $0.004 = $0.41. A single manual paralegal UCC lookup runs $15–75 at commercial search shops; this does it for cents, and it is the only automated path to PA UCC data on the Store.

Notes & compliance

• A real browser (bundled) clears the portal's Cloudflare check automatically; keep the default residential proxy setting for reliable runs.
• The actor is a polite, user-directed search: single session, one API call per search, throttled — no bulk hammering. PA's robots.txt allows general access (User-agent: * → Allow: /); only AI-training crawlers are disallowed, and this actor is neither.
• The public search carries no automated-access prohibition and PA does not sell a competing bulk-data subscription (the only paid alternative is the per-document certified UCC-11, a distinct legal product).
• Data is provided as-is from the DOS index and is not a certified UCC search; order a UCC-11 from the Department of State when a certified result is legally required.