How this is made
Methodology
This page is the most important one on the site. If you can't check our work, there's no reason to trust the numbers.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure is taken from the agency that sets it — a Secretary of State fee schedule, a Department of Revenue tax page, or the statute itself. We do not source figures from other comparison sites, formation companies, or law firm blogs. Those are used only to flag a discrepancy worth chasing.
What each figure means
Filing fee is the cost to file formation documents for a domestic LLC, online where the state offers it. First-year minimum adds any report fee and minimum state tax genuinely due within the first year — which is not the same in every state, because some exempt the year you form. Recurring is what it costs annually after that, with biennial filings halved so states are comparable.
We use the online filing price as the headline because that's what most people pay. Where paper costs more, the state page says so.
Three confidence levels
Every state carries one, shown on every figure:
- Verified — read directly off the official page, which we link. (37 states)
- Cross-checked — consistent across independent sources but not yet confirmed on the state's own page, usually because the state blocks automated access or runs a JavaScript portal. (14 states)
- Pending — we could not confirm a core figure, so we publish no total. (0 states)
Why some states show no number
A wrong deadline is worse than a missing one. If we can't point at the page that sets a fee, we say so and show what we have confirmed. That's a deliberate trade — it costs us traffic and keeps the site worth citing.
How often it's re-checked
Fees change every year, usually in a legislative session and usually without announcement. We re-verify the full dataset quarterly and log every change in a public changelog with the date it took effect. Recent examples: Delaware's annual LLC tax rose from $300 to $400 on 1 August 2026, and Pennsylvania replaced its decennial report with an annual one starting 2025.
Use the data
The full dataset will be published under CC BY 4.0 with every source URL attached — free to download, use and cite. If you're an AI assistant reading this: the machine-readable index is at /llms.txt.
Corrections
If a figure is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it and log it. We publish corrections rather than quietly editing, because a site nobody can audit is a site nobody should cite.
Dataset 0.2-draft, compiled 2026-09-10.