For company registration in China, you must have a registered address which will be indicated in your business license. The registered address will be decided which district your company belongs to.

For example: If your company registered in Pudong new district, then your business license would be launched by Pudong Market Supervision Administration Bureau. That means all your company matters will be supervised by Pudong relevant departments, and your tax will be declared and paid to Pudong tax bureau.

Therefore, it’s very important to choose a registered address when company formation.

Currently, there are two types of registered address in Shanghai,

Physical Office VS Virtual Office.

Registering your company by using physical office,

You need to rental an office firstly then this address will be showed on all your company licenses.

That’s the perfect situation if you have physical office for registration.

All the information matched, your registered address on licenses and actual work location are same.

Residential house cannot be used for office registration, so please do double check with landlord or pre-check their office property ownership certificate to make sure it could meet your requirement.

Disadvantages:

If you change your office later, you need to change all your company licenses, including tax and bank change. It will cause additional cost and time to you.

Registering your company by using virtual office,

Please do choose the legal virtual office and be careful of who is the owner of the virtual office, because you need to consider the long-term stability for your company.

NOT all the virtual address are legal address.

Virtual office is not your real workplace, but it’s legal for your company registration purpose.

The advantages by using virtual office :

Once you registered by using virtual address, you can keep using it for many years (we cannot promise Forever but maybe YES);
Then it could be flexible for you to rent physical office when you need it or change it at any time depends on your company demand;

If you have good tax contribution in the future, the local government (virtual office provider) may return some taxes back to you as encouragement.

If you use physical office for registration, you can’t enjoy this tax preferential policy.

NOT all the companies can be registered by using virtual office.

It depends on your business scope.

Below companies must be registered by physical office;

Trading company who has food, liquors, dangerous chemicals or Class II medical equipment qualifications.

Consulting company who needs to apply for special service certificate must have physical office. For example, immigration company, Human Resources Company.

Food and Beverage Companymust have physical shop or physical office.
Both physical and virtual office have their own advantages, you may decide based on the actual usage and budget.