LLC structure and taxes by state: three states out of sixteen keep your name off the record

Anonymity is the most heavily marketed feature in the LLC industry, and among the sixteen states verified here, three deliver it. Delaware, Wyoming, and New Mexico keep member and manager names off the formation record. The other thirteen put somebody on a public document, most of them every single year, and no filing choice inside those states changes it.

Three states out of sixteen keep your name off the record. In the other thirteen, the anonymity being sold to you does not exist.

Even the three come with edges. New Mexico hides your name and then requires the articles to state whether the company may operate as a single-member LLC, which publishes the one structural fact a creditor’s lawyer actually wants. Wyoming’s annual report carries the name of whoever files it, so if the beneficial owner files, the beneficial owner is on a public document. Delaware’s certificate names only the company and its registered agent, and Delaware itself frames the result as privacy from a casual search rather than from legal process.

This page compares what each state’s entity structure costs and discloses. Every figure comes from that state’s own statute or schedule, verified state by state, and each row links to the full page where the sources are named. Sixteen states are verified; the rest of the country appears when its law has been read. Where a figure was not verified, the cell says so, which is why the transfer tax table below has more blanks than numbers.

Privacy: who ends up on the public record

State	Formation record	Recurring disclosure
Delaware	Company and registered agent only	None. No annual report at all
Wyoming	No member or manager names	The annual report names whoever files it
New Mexico	No names, but single-member status is public	None. No recurring report
Ohio	Not verified here	None, by absence of any annual report
South Dakota	Ordinary disclosure; the secrecy is a trust feature	Annual report
Nevada	Managers public under NRS 86.263	Annual list of managers, every year
Alaska	Owners disclosed	Biennial report lists managers or members, including 5% owners
Florida	Owners disclosed	Annual report names members or managers
Texas	Owners disclosed	Public Information Report, every May
California	Owners disclosed	Statement of Information names managers or members
Montana	Owners disclosed	Annual report names members or managers
Georgia	Owners disclosed	Annual registration names officers or managers
North Carolina	A member, manager, or organizer is named	Annual report
Illinois	No entity privacy; the land trust is the tool	Annual report
New Jersey	Owners disclosed	Annual report
New York	Publication, not disclosure, is the burden	Biennial statement

Two states deserve their own line. South Dakota is famous for secrecy and the fame is earned, but it attaches to trusts, with permanent sealing and quiet trusts, not to LLCs; the South Dakota LLC is an ordinary entity with ordinary disclosure. Illinois offers real privacy through the land trust, an Illinois invention that puts a trustee’s name on the deed and keeps the beneficial owner off the record, with an LLC sitting behind it as beneficiary. Neither is entity anonymity, and both get sold as though they were.

South Dakota’s secrecy is a trust feature. Illinois privacy is a land trust feature. Neither one is a property of the LLC.

Two limits apply everywhere and erase most of what remains. First, foreign registration: the privacy is a feature of your formation state’s filing requirements, and the first form you file in a disclosure state asks what your formation state never did. A Delaware LLC operating in a disclosure state has no anonymity where it operates. Second, federal beneficial ownership, which under a March 2025 interim rule currently exempts domestic entities, a rule that has been in flux long enough that several state pages carry standing warnings about it. New York went further and built its own regime, and the result is the opposite of what nearly every 2025 law firm alert predicted: after a December 2025 veto, the New York LLC Transparency Act currently reaches only LLCs formed outside the United States. The full picture is on the anonymous LLC page.

Series LLCs: who offers them, who refuses, who taxes them

State	Series	The detail that matters
Delaware	Invented them	Three kinds, and one of them shields nothing
Texas	Since 2009	Registered and protected series added in 2021
Nevada	NRS 86.296	Created in the operating agreement, no filing, no per-series fee
Wyoming	W.S. 17-29-211	$10 per series
Illinois	Public certificate model	$400 to form, $50 per series per year, each series on the public record
South Dakota	SDCL 47-34A-701	Certificate of designation required, a public filing per series
Ohio	ORC 1706.76, since 2022	Ohio was the fifteenth state to allow them
Montana	Allowed	$50 per series member named in the Articles
Florida	New July 1, 2026	Protected series under Fla. Stat. 605.2101, weeks old
Georgia	Recognizes, will not form	Registers a foreign series, creates none
California	Will not form, will tax	Every foreign series doing business there owes its own $800
Alaska, New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina	None	No series statute

The price spread is the largest of any structural feature on this page. Nevada creates a series in the operating agreement for nothing. Wyoming charges $10. Illinois charges $400 up front and $50 per series per year, so a ten-series Illinois LLC pays $575 annually. California charges $800 per series per year to series it refuses to create, so five series operating there owe $4,000 before earning a dollar. And New Mexico, with no series statute at all, answers the same problem with separate LLCs at $50 each, once, forever.

California will not let you form a series and will bill each one $800 a year for doing business there. Refusing to create a thing is not the same as refusing to tax it.

One open question runs under the entire table, and nearly every series state’s page carries it: no court has decided whether a charging order against one member reaches a single series or the whole structure, and the federal tax treatment of series still rests on proposed regulations from 2010 that were never finalized. Ohio’s statute is well drafted and untested, which is a different thing from safe. Florida’s is three weeks old. Georgia’s position is the strangest of all, since a foreign series registered there is asking Georgia courts to honor walls the Georgia legislature never created. The doctrine is on the series LLC page.

What the state charges the entity for existing

State	Entity-level cost	Note
Wyoming	None	No income, corporate, or franchise tax
South Dakota	None	Bank franchise tax reaches chartered banks only
Alaska	None	No income tax and no statewide sales tax
Florida	None on pass-throughs	C-corp election pays 5.5% on Florida income
Texas	$0 under $2.65M	Franchise margin tax; filing required regardless
Nevada	$0 under $4M	Commerce Tax on gross receipts above that
North Carolina	None on pass-throughs	Flat personal income tax, declining on schedule
Ohio	Commercial Activity Tax	Gross receipts, with an exclusion threshold
New Mexico	Gross receipts tax	Reaches services, including intercompany fees
Delaware	$300 franchise tax	Plus gross receipts tax on in-state revenue
New Jersey	Per member	Reported at $150 per member per year
California	$800 minimum	Plus $900 to $11,790 on gross receipts above $250,000

California is the outlier by a distance, and the reason is the stacking: a business with no profit at all can owe $12,590. Three states tax gross receipts rather than income, which catches thin-margin operations that an income tax would spare, and New Mexico’s version reaches services and intercompany management fees in ways sales-tax thinking will miss entirely. New Jersey’s per-member charge is the only one on the list that scales with how many owners you have, which makes admitting a member a tax event in a small way most operating agreements never mention.

Three states tax revenue rather than profit. A company can lose money all year in Ohio, New Mexico, or California and still owe.

Moving property in: the tax nobody prices first

This is the most consequential unpriced decision on the site. Deeding real property into an LLC is the standard asset protection move, and what it costs ranges from nothing to several percent of the property’s value depending entirely on where the property sits.

State	Transfer tax on moving property in
Wyoming	None
Texas	None. Recording fees only
Alaska	None
Illinois	$0.50 per $500 state, and an assumed mortgage is excluded
South Dakota	About $0.50 per $500
Nevada	$1.95 to $2.55 per $500, exempt for same-ownership with an affidavit
Florida	$0.70 per $100, and it reaches the mortgage
Delaware	Up to 4%, highest in the country, but contribution to your own entity is exempt
California, New York, New Jersey, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Montana, New Mexico	Not verified here. Price it with the county before recording

Two states demonstrate why this cannot be reasoned about from general principles. Move a $1,000,000 building with a $600,000 mortgage into your own Florida LLC and the documentary stamp tax reaches the mortgage balance, roughly $4,200, even though you owned the property before and own it after. Do the identical thing in Illinois and the assumed mortgage is excluded from the base by statute. Same transaction, same ownership, and the tax turns entirely on which state’s recorder stamps the deed.

Florida taxes the mortgage you bring into your own LLC. Illinois excludes it by statute. The transaction is identical; the bill is not.

Delaware is the instructive third case. It has the highest state transfer tax in the country at up to 4 percent, and contributing property into a wholly owned LLC is exempt, so the headline rate never touches the move most owners make. The catch is on the other side: that exemption is carved out of the tax on changing who owns the LLC, so the structure is cheap to build and expensive to rearrange. California’s danger is different again and is not a transfer tax at all: moving property into an entity can trigger a change-in-ownership reassessment that resets the assessed value Proposition 13 has been holding down for decades, a cost that dwarfs any stamp tax and arrives every year thereafter.

Eight of sixteen states above have no verified figure here. That is deliberate and it is the honest state of the research: transfer tax mechanics are county-administered in most states, and this site does not publish rates it has not read from the source. Each of those eight state pages says the same thing in its own words and sends you to the county recorder and to counsel before the deed records. A focused verification pass is queued, and its results will land here and on a dedicated comparison page.

The distinctive features worth knowing about

A few states offer structures the rest do not. Wyoming was first in the country to let a decentralized autonomous organization register as an LLC, and also offers a close LLC variant with tighter transfer restrictions. Delaware forms statutory trusts for $500 and permits professional LLCs. Montana’s absence of any state sales tax created the most-searched structure in the country, the Montana LLC that owns and registers vehicles, which is legitimate for a Montana resident with a Montana vehicle and is use-tax evasion when the vehicle lives in another state, a distinction home states pursue with back taxes, penalties, and in some cases criminal charges. New York’s publication requirement stands alone as a pure cost with no informational purpose: six weeks in two newspapers, $230 to more than $1,950 depending on county, applying to LLCs while corporations are exempt. And most states now permit conversion and domestication, so a company can enter or leave as the same legal entity rather than dissolving and re-forming, which the restructuring guide covers.

The bottom line

Three of sixteen verified states keep owners off the formation record, and all three have edges: New Mexico publishes single-member status, Wyoming’s annual report names the filer, and Delaware calls its own product privacy from casual search rather than from process. Eleven states offer series LLCs at prices from nothing to $800 per series per year, and no court anywhere has tested how a charging order interacts with one. California can charge a profitless company $12,590, and three states tax revenue rather than income. Moving property into your own LLC costs nothing in Wyoming, Texas, and Alaska, reaches the mortgage in Florida, is exempt from a 4 percent rate in Delaware, and can reset a Proposition 13 basis in California. And half the transfer tax picture is still blank here, because the alternative to a verified number is not an estimate, it is a blank.

Last verified July 2026.