How this book is put together

Every fee, deadline and rule is copied from the state's own fee schedule, form or statute. The source and the month we last checked it sit next to each figure, and each chapter repeats its sources at the end.

The LLC rank adds the formation fee, the reports in years two and three (a biennial report counts once) and any yearly minimum tax. The agent rank uses the yearly state charges: the report at its yearly rate and any minimum tax. The foreign LLC rank adds the registration fee to the reports in years two and three. Costs with no fixed amount, such as newspaper publication, are explained in the chapter and left out of the totals. Equal totals share a rank, and rank 1 is the state with the smallest bill.

1. Three-year service charge (34%). The amount a service bills beyond the state fee across years one to three, worked out from its published first-year and renewal prices. State fees are the same for every service, so they are printed in the guide and not scored.
2. Paperwork the price takes on (26%). How many of the state's repeating jobs the price covers: the registered agent, the periodic report and the EIN application.
3. Year-two price (16%). What the service asks for from year two onward, and whether it matches the first-year figure.
4. Match to the state's calendar (12%). How well the plan lines up with the state's report cycle, late penalties and registered office rules.
5. Fee labeling (12%). Whether the state fee is shown apart from the service fee and passed through at cost.

If two services land within a few points of each other, the entry says which criterion split them and what the lower one does better.

Every state list has Mainstay Filing, which works in all fifty states, together with the registered agent services built around that state. A service appears for a topic only if its own pages sell that service at a published price, read on the build date shown in the chapter.

There are no customer ratings or customer quotes here, and nothing in the book is legal or tax advice. The order of the services is our editorial judgment, applied through the criteria above.