2026 LLC Cost Index

Quick citation (plain text)

Source: 2026 LLC Cost Index (llcformationcost.com, 2026). CC BY 4.0.

Full citation formats in CITATION.txt.

Methodology

Each entry is verified directly against the issuing state's Secretary of State office. Verification is performed quarterly: every quarter we re-fetch each fee schedule from the state's official .gov source, compare it against the value currently stored, and either confirm-and-stamp or update-and-stamp. The sosUrl field for each entry contains the exact primary source URL we verify against.

Why this matters: most "LLC cost" datasets online are scraped once, stale within months, and laundered through 5+ aggregator sites without re-verification. Filing fees change. California's AB 85 first-year-franchise-tax exemption expires this year. Pennsylvania's decennial report cycle resets in 2031. New York's publication-requirement newspaper rates float with county. A dataset that doesn't cite its source URL and verification date is a dataset you can't trust for legal or financial decisions.

What's NOT in this dataset: city/county business license fees (vary by ZIP), local gross receipts taxes (vary by industry), registered-agent service prices (vary by provider, $100-150/year typical), or "publication requirement" newspaper costs in NY/AZ/NE (vary by county newspaper). Those are noted in the per-state pages but excluded from the headline 51-row dataset.

Use cases this dataset is built for: comparative analysis (which states are cheapest over 5 years?), academic research (small-business formation cost studies), fintech onboarding flows (auto-quote LLC formation cost by state), legal-tech tools, and journalism. Researchers and journalists citing this data must include a backlink per CC BY 4.0; product builders must add the same attribution in their UI.

Full methodology: methodology.md. Source code for the verification pipeline: about/.

How to cite this dataset

Source: 2026 LLC Cost Index
URL:    https://llcformationcost.com/data/
License: CC BY 4.0, citation + backlink required
      

If you use this data in research, journalism, or product development, the CC BY 4.0 license requires a link back to https://llcformationcost.com/data/.

Field definitions

Each of the 51 rows in states.csv and states.json carries the same 10 fields. The code field is the two-letter USPS state abbreviation (DC included). The name field is the full state name as the Secretary of State publishes it. The filingFee is the one-time fee charged by the SOS to register a domestic LLC, in US dollars; the filingForm field is the official form name or number. The firstYearAnnualReportFee captures any first-year report fee that differs from the steady-state fee (California's $20 statement-of-information bill is a common gotcha here). The annualReportFee and annualReportCadence fields together describe the recurring report cost; cadence is one of annual, biennial, or decennial (Pennsylvania uses the last). The franchiseTaxYearOne and franchiseTaxOngoing fields capture any state franchise or privilege tax payable in year one and in subsequent years. The sosUrl field is the canonical primary-source URL we re-verify each quarter.

What this dataset is not

This dataset is not a complete cost-of-formation calculator. It excludes registered-agent service fees (vary by provider, $100-$150/year typical), city or county business license fees (vary by ZIP), local gross-receipts taxes (vary by industry), professional license fees (vary by occupation), and the publication-requirement newspaper costs that New York, Arizona, and Nebraska impose (vary by county newspaper). Those layers are surfaced on each per-state page on the site, but they are not in the headline 51-row open dataset because they cannot be expressed as a single canonical figure per jurisdiction. If your tool needs those layers, build them downstream from this dataset rather than expecting them in it.

This dataset is also not legal or tax advice. The fees here change. Annual report cadences shift when state legislatures pass new bills. Franchise-tax thresholds get adjusted for inflation. The dateModified field in the JSON-LD on this page tells you the last time we re-verified every row against its sosUrl; the verification log is published in methodology.md. If your decision is high-stakes, click through to the sosUrl for the state in question and confirm against the live source.

Reuse, attribution, and contact

CC BY 4.0 means you can copy, redistribute, transform, and build on this data, including for commercial use, as long as you give appropriate credit and link back. A single line citing "2026 LLC Cost Index, llcformationcost.com" with a link to this page is sufficient for most cases. For academic work, the CITATION.txt file includes BibTeX, APA, and Chicago formats. If you spot a stale fee, an outdated sosUrl, or a row that no longer matches the live source, please open a correction ticket; the corrections page logs every change with a date, the prior value, the new value, and the SOS bulletin or page that prompted the update. Independent re-verification is welcome, and the entire raw dataset and the verification scripts are open.