How much does an LLC cost?

What is the average cost to form an LLC?

The average formation fee is $128 and the median is $100. The two differ because a handful of states sit far above the pack, including Massachusetts at $500, Nevada at $425, and Tennessee and Texas at $300 each, while sixteen jurisdictions charge under $100. The median is the more useful number for guessing your own state's cost, since the mean is skewed upward by those four outliers.

Which states charge nothing to keep an LLC open?

Eleven states charge no recurring fee to the Secretary of State, but only six of those eleven ask nothing of you at all; the other five either still require a report, come with a tax hook behind the zero, or both.

Check your own state against this table before assuming a "$0" headline means nothing is owed.

Which states charge a minimum tax on top of the report fee?

Twelve states bill a mandatory minimum through their revenue department, separately from the Secretary of State, which is why it never appears on a filing-fee schedule. Whether it reaches you depends on how your LLC is taxed, so the last column matters as much as the dollar figure.

Split that list by who actually pays and it gets more useful. Six of these states reach a plain one-person LLC with no elections filed: California, Rhode Island, Delaware, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alaska. The other six only bite if you take on partners or elect corporate treatment, which means a solo freelancer in Vermont or New Mexico can ignore them entirely.⁴

Kentucky is the clearest illustration of why this column exists. Its Limited Liability Entity Tax is levied, in the state's own words, on every business protected from liability by the laws of the state, and it explicitly does not reach sole proprietorships or general partnerships. Register an LLC in Kentucky and you have created a $175 annual tax bill that did not exist the day before.

Rhode Island works the same way and is just as blunt about it. Single-member LLCs file Form RI-1065 and owe an annual charge equal to the corporate minimum tax, currently $400, while general partnerships are expressly excepted. Illinois belongs in this family too, though it is a rate rather than a flat minimum: LLCs owe a 1.5% personal property replacement tax on net income on top of the $75 report.

Check your state's revenue department, not just the Secretary of State. Two agencies bill you, and only one of them shows up in a fee table.

What happens if you file the annual report late?

A late report triggers a penalty first and administrative dissolution eventually, and dissolution ends the liability protection you formed the LLC to get. Florida is the cautionary example. Miss the May 1 deadline and the state adds a flat $400 that it will not waive, turning a $138.75 obligation into $538.75.

Getting a dissolved LLC back is not catastrophic, but it is not cheap either. Expect back fees plus a reinstatement charge somewhere between $100 and $500, and a gap in your good standing that a bank or a client may ask about.

Which states make you publish a notice in a newspaper?

Three states still require newspaper publication after you form: New York, Arizona, and Nebraska. New York is the expensive one by a wide margin.

Under LLC Law § 206, a New York LLC has to run a notice in two newspapers chosen by the county clerk, once a week for six consecutive weeks, then file a $50 Certificate of Publication.⁵ The state fee is the small part, and what the newspapers charge is genuinely unknowable in advance. New York does not set or cap legal publication rates. Judiciary Law § 91 only requires a paper to file a statement of its charges with the court to qualify for designation, so each paper prices its own notices and no state agency publishes a schedule.

That is why the $500 to $1,200 Manhattan range quoted on every other page about this is an estimate rather than an official figure, and why it varies so widely by county. Call the county clerk for your designated papers and ask them directly before you budget.

Arizona requires three consecutive publications under A.R.S. § 29-3201, with an automatic exemption if your statutory agent's address is in Maricopa or Pima county. In those two counties the Corporation Commission posts the notice on its own site for free, which covers most of the state's population. Nebraska requires three successive weeks under Neb. Rev. Stat. § 21-193, plus a $25 filing to prove you did it.

Is it cheaper to form an LLC yourself or use a service?

Filing directly with your state is always cheaper in cash terms, because a service charges you for paperwork the state already lets you submit online. The forms are short and the states have gotten reasonably good at walking you through them.

What a service genuinely buys you is the registered agent, usually bundled for the first year. If you work from home, that is the difference between your street address sitting in a searchable public database and not, and it is the one line item here worth paying for. A comparison of the specific providers belongs on its own page.