LLC filing fees by state: the formation fee is the wrong number

California charges $70 to form an LLC. Wyoming charges $100. Every ranking of cheap states to form an LLC has Wyoming near the top and California near the bottom, and on the number those rankings actually compare, California wins.

Hold both companies five years and California costs $4,130 against Wyoming’s $400.

The formation fee is the most quoted and least useful number in the LLC industry. It is a one-time cost being used to rank a recurring one.

That gap is the whole point of this page. Formation fees cluster between $50 and $300 and get compared endlessly. Recurring costs range from nothing at all to $800 a year and get mentioned in passing, if at all. The number that decides what an entity actually costs is the second one, multiplied by how long you keep it, and almost nobody publishes it.

Every figure below comes from the state’s own fee schedule or its statutes, verified state by state, and each row links to that state’s full filing page where the sources are named and the mechanics explained. Sixteen states are verified. Where a figure has not been read from an official source, the cell says so rather than guessing, which is why two states in the table below have no formation fee printed at all.

Five years, end to end

Formation plus five years of recurring state costs. Registered agent fees are excluded because they are private, not state, charges, and they run roughly $35 to $300 a year everywhere.

State	Form	Recurring	5-year total
New Mexico	$50	None	$50
Montana	$35	$0 through 2027, then a reported $20	~$95
Texas	$300	$0 for most, but a May 15 filing is mandatory	$300
New York	$200	$9 every two years, plus publication	~$227 plus publication
Wyoming	$100	$60 a year minimum	$400
South Dakota	$150	$55 a year	$425
New Jersey	$125	$75 a year	$500
Illinois	$150	$75 a year	$525
Alaska	$250	~$100 a year (biennial report plus business license)	~$750
Florida	$125	$138.75 a year	$818.75
North Carolina	$125	$200 a year, starting the year after formation	~$925
Delaware	$110	$300 a year	$1,610
Nevada	$425	$350 a year	$2,175
California	$70	$800 a year, plus $20 every two years	$4,130
Ohio	Not verified	None	Formation only
Georgia	Not verified	Annual registration, amount not verified	Not computable

Two states are deliberately incomplete. Ohio and Georgia both publish their fees on schedules this site has not read directly, and it does not print figures it has not read. Ohio’s recurring cost is verified, and it is nothing at all: no annual report, no annual fee. Georgia’s registration is verified as an annual obligation filed in a January-to-April window, at an amount its own state page declines to guess.

Two rows on this table are missing numbers on purpose. A verified gap is worth more than a confident guess, and the guess is what every aggregator offers.

What the totals actually say

Four states cost essentially nothing to hold. New Mexico and Ohio have no recurring state filing whatsoever, Montana has waived its fee through 2027, and Texas charges nothing for the report most LLCs file. The catch in three of those four is that free is not the same as nothing to do: Texas requires a franchise tax report by May 15 every year, and missing it triggers forfeiture that exposes members and managers to company debts personally, which makes it the most expensive $0 filing in the country. Montana’s waiver applies only to on-time filings, and filing late costs $35, more than the fee the waiver removed. Ohio alone has genuinely nothing to miss at the Secretary of State.

The expensive states are expensive in different ways. California’s $800 minimum franchise tax is owed whether the company earns a dollar or not, starting in year one now that the first-year exemption has expired for LLCs formed from 2024. Nevada’s $350 a year is a bundle, the annual list plus a state business license, and the same bundle applies to foreign LLCs, so registering an out-of-state company in Nevada costs about what forming one does. Delaware’s $300 is a flat tax with no report attached. North Carolina’s $200 is the priciest ordinary annual report in the verified set, and it passes the formation fee before the company is two years old.

Nevada’s real formation cost is $425, not the $75 its articles fee suggests, because the initial list and the business license are due in the same envelope.

Nevada is the clearest example of a bundling problem that shows up in several states. The number most sites publish for Nevada is $75, the Articles of Organization fee. The actual cost of forming is $425, because the initial list and the business license are mandatory and simultaneous. Florida bundles too, at $125 rather than $100, because the registered agent designation carries its own $25. Delaware’s $110 splits $70 to the state and $40 to the courthouse municipalities. Alaska adds a separate $50 annual business license on top of its biennial report. A fee schedule read one row at a time produces the wrong number in all four states.

Deadlines and what missing them costs

Penalty structures vary more than fees do, and the pattern is counterintuitive: the states with the friendliest penalties are not always the safest places to be late.

State	Deadline	Penalty for missing it
Florida	May 1	$400, automatic and non-waivable, the day after
Texas	May 15	$50, plus forfeiture and personal liability exposure
Nevada	Last day of anniversary month	$75 on the list, $100 on the business license
Delaware	June 1	$200 plus 1.5% monthly interest, and loss of good standing
Montana	April 15	$35, and the fee waiver is lost
North Carolina	April 15	No late fee at all
Wyoming	First day of anniversary month	No flat penalty; recovery is by reinstatement at $100 to $350
Illinois	Anniversary-based	A penalty applies; the amount is not verified here
New Mexico, Ohio	No recurring deadline	Nothing to miss

Florida’s $400 is the harshest single penalty in the set and it is worth understanding precisely: it is automatic, non-waivable, and larger than the report itself, turning a $138.75 obligation into $538.75 for being one day late. Texas charges only $50, and Texas is the far more dangerous deadline, because forfeiture of the right to transact business under the franchise tax rules exposes the people behind the company to its debts. A clerical lapse becomes a liability event. North Carolina charges nothing for lateness, which sounds forgiving until you need to reinstate: that costs $300 minimum, plus $200 for every additional delinquent year.

Judge a deadline by what forfeiture does to you, not by the size of the late fee. Texas charges $50 and can cost you the liability shield.

The cheap-to-form, expensive-to-keep inversion

Sort the table by formation fee and you get one ranking. Sort it by five-year cost and the order barely survives.

California is the extreme case: the second-cheapest state to form in this entire set, and by a wide margin the most expensive to keep. Montana and New Mexico are cheap on both measures, which is genuinely unusual. Texas and Alaska are the mirror image of California, charging real money at the door and little or nothing afterward, which rewards long holds and punishes churn. Nevada is expensive on both.

The practical consequence depends on how many entities you plan to hold and for how long. A one-property holding company kept for a decade should be evaluated almost entirely on recurring cost, where the spread between New Mexico and California over ten years is roughly $8,000 per entity. A structure with ten entities multiplies the recurring number by ten, which is why North Carolina’s $200 becomes $2,000 a year for a ten-entity portfolio while Ohio’s nothing stays nothing. Illinois deserves its own note here: its series structure is openly priced at $400 to form and $75 plus $50 per series annually, so a ten-series Illinois LLC pays $575 a year, which is honest pricing and still the cheapest way to run ten separated pools of assets in a state that recognizes them.

None of this should decide where you form. Where your LLC actually lives is a legal question with tax and litigation consequences that dwarf these numbers, and forming in a cheap state while operating in an expensive one usually means paying both. The doctrine is on the nexus and foreign qualification page, which is also where the question of which state your LLC legally lives in gets answered. These figures tell you what the paperwork costs. They do not tell you where to file it.

Why these numbers and not the ones you found elsewhere

Every figure here was read from a state’s own schedule or statute, and the verification date is published on each state’s page, currently July 2026 across the set. That discipline exists because fee tables are unusually prone to a specific failure: a wrong figure gets copied until several sources agree, and agreement gets mistaken for verification. Delaware’s formation fee circulates as $90, $110, and $220 in different places, and the wrong ones are adjacent rows of the same official table. Wyoming’s expedited filing is widely described as unavailable and appears on the official schedule. A number several websites agree on can be several copies of one mistake.

The corollary is the part most sites skip: fee schedules change, and a page that publishes figures without dates is unfalsifiable. Every number above can be checked against a named source, and every one of them will eventually be wrong. The dates are there so you can tell when.

What is not here yet

Foreign registration fees are verified in only five states, because most of the state pages sent readers to the current schedule rather than publish an unread figure. Reinstatement costs are verified in five. Expedited service tiers are verified in four. Those three tables are coming as the research passes complete. Thirty-five states are absent from every table above for the same honest reason as on the protection hub: their schedules have not been read here yet.

The bottom line

Formation fees run $35 to $425 in the verified set and tell you almost nothing. Five-year costs run $50 to $4,130 and tell you nearly everything. California is cheaper than Wyoming to form and more than ten times more expensive to hold for five years. Nevada’s real formation cost is $425 rather than the $75 usually published, because three mandatory filings arrive together. Florida charges the harshest late penalty at $400 automatic; Texas charges $50 and is the more dangerous deadline, because forfeiture reaches the owners personally. Ohio and New Mexico have no recurring state filing at all. And two states in the table have no figures printed, because this page publishes what it has read and says so when it has not.

Last verified July 2026.