How much does it cost to form a US LLC: the full accounting

Formation cost is two items: the registration fee the state takes, and the fee of the service that does the filing. The table below is calculated on a 39 dollar formation package that includes the first year of registered agent service. A registered agent is the service that gives you the US address the state sends official mail to, and takes on the duty of being present at that address. All four states require one.

Source: for Wyoming, the secretary of state's own fee schedule; for the other three, verified secondary sources, all stamped August 2026. Delaware's 110 dollar fee comes from a secondary source, because the state's official PDF returns closed to machine reading, so confirm the amount on the Delaware Division of Corporations page on the day you form.

My own company is in Florida and I formed it through the registered agent service described on this page, so the Florida row is the line I went through myself. If you form through that same service's link, I earn a commission and the amount you pay does not change.

The one mandatory item not in this table is the EIN, the federal tax number the IRS issues to your company. Its price is zero, because the IRS charges nothing for an EIN and says so plainly on its own page. If you have the registered agent do it for you, a 200 dollar service item shows up for people without an SSN, the US social security number. It is not required and it does not speed anything up. So "I formed it for 150 dollars" is not an exaggeration, it is the middle of the band.

The market band for having the same job done as a turnkey package runs from 449 to 1,495 dollars. The package pays the same state the same fee and sends the same IRS form. What you get for the difference is a single point of contact and support in your own language, so what you are paying for is handing the work over rather than the work itself. I am not naming the vendors, because the point here is the price gap and not the brand on the invoice.

If you want to see your own state's number in a minute, the LLC cost calculator is free. It holds setup and annual items for fifty-one states with a source stamp on each, and it works out the five-year total too.

The order is not arbitrary. Every gate wants the output of the one before it. The bank will not open an account without a formation document and an EIN document. Stripe, the online payment infrastructure, turns the application away if the EIN has not landed in the IRS database yet.

1. You pick the state

What you do: You choose the state you will form the company in. For a single-member structure run from outside the US with no physical activity in the US, the real race is between New Mexico and Wyoming. New Mexico has no annual state report requirement, Wyoming asks for a 60 dollar report and has the more familiar ecosystem.

How long it takes: Half an hour of thinking.

What it costs: The table above.

The trap: The formation state cannot be changed later. If you want to change it, you have to close the company and open a new one. People who pick Delaware because it sounds prestigious meet a 400 dollar annual LLC tax. That figure went up from 300 dollars in 2026 and is collected for the first time in the June 1, 2027 payment. Unless you are building a structure that will take investment, there is nothing you get in return for that money.

2. You form the company

What you do: You fill in the registered agent's order form. There are four steps: entity type and state, company name, account creation, payment. There is no passport upload screen, no ID upload screen and no SSN field on the form. At the payment step the country dropdown includes countries outside the US, and a non-US card clears.

How long it takes: 15-20 minutes to fill the form. Approval of the state filing takes 1-3 business days on standard processing.

What it costs: The 89-164 dollar band.

The trap: You choose right here whether the company name ends in LLC or L.L.C.. Whichever one is on your formation document gets written into every later form letter for letter. The version with periods and the version without are not treated as the same name, and a one-character difference will stop the bank and store verifications waiting further down the line.

The formation package includes all of these and none of them is billed separately: a domain, an open source website, a business email, a phone line and a business address. The first three will be useful on the Apple side later. The last one you will never touch. The reason is in step four.

3. You get the EIN

What you do: You get the company's US tax number. What an SSN is to a person, an EIN is to a company. The form is called SS-4 and it is one page. The IRS online application tool asks the responsible party for an SSN or an ITIN, and its address screen only takes a US address. An ITIN is the individual taxpayer number the IRS issues to people who cannot get an SSN. Most founders outside the US have neither, so your route is fax. If you do have an SSN you can try the online tool, and the kit covers both cases in section 3.

How long it takes: An hour to fill the form. If you sent it by fax and wrote your return fax number in the signature block of the form, the answer comes in about 4 business days. If you left the number out, about 2 weeks. If you sent it by mail, about 4 weeks.

What it costs: Zero. Nothing to pay beyond a few dollars for a fax service package.

The trap: The most critical line on the form is 7b. Instead of an SSN or ITIN you write Foreign there, and the IRS instruction says this word for word. The second trap is on line 10: you do not tick the Banking purpose box, because the IRS defines that box only for banking-purpose applications and your company will file Form 5472 every year. Form 5472 is the information return a foreign-owned US company files with the IRS annually. The right box is Started new business. The third is line 13: if you are not hiring employees, you write zero in all three boxes in the form -0-, because an empty box counts as unanswered.

You do not need to buy a fax machine. Online fax services upload a PDF from your browser and send it to a US number. Three things to check: does it send to international numbers, does it give you a delivery confirmation, and does it keep the resolution of the PDF you upload. The IRS wants 300 DPI and above.

4. You open the bank account

What you do: You apply to Mercury, the digital banking service that opens US business accounts remotely. It is entirely online, you do not have to travel to the US. There is no requirement to be a US citizen or resident. Mercury publishes a prohibited countries list, so open it and check yours before you apply.

How long it takes: Variable. Mercury publishes no public turnaround commitment for business accounts. A realistic expectation is a few days to a few weeks.

What it costs: Opening the account is free.

The trap: A mistake in this step gets the application rejected outright. Mercury keeps two separate addresses. In the Company legal address field you write the US address on your formation document. In the Company physical address field you write where you actually work, meaning your home address in your own country. The free business address the registered agent gives you is a mail forwarding address, and Mercury explicitly rejects that category (PO box, mail center, virtual address, registered agent address) on its own eligibility page. Writing that address after formation because "now I have a US address" is the shortest path to a rejection.

Most third-party guides say "you need a real operating address in the US". Mercury's own eligibility page says the opposite: international addresses are accepted, and residential addresses are valid too.

Before you start the application, put four documents in one folder: the state-filed formation document, the EIN document the IRS issued (CP 575 or 147C), your passport, and a signed operating agreement. Your own copy of the SS-4 application does not stand in for the EIN document, because it has no IRS approval on it.

5. You add the card to your phone

What you do: The moment Mercury approves you, your virtual card is issued and it goes into Apple Wallet the same day. The operation takes five minutes. You do not need to wait for the physical card, that ships the next business day and reaches you internationally in 2-3 weeks.

The trap: Apple Pay is not officially available in every country, and Apple's own list of supported countries and regions is the only authority, so open it and check yours. A card issued in the US can be added to Wallet and is accepted at contactless terminals in many places, including countries where Apple Pay has not launched, but that is not a guarantee Apple gives and the result can vary with the merchant's terminal. There are also two products people constantly mix up: Apple Pay is adding your card to your phone and paying contactless with it. Apple Card is Apple's credit card product, it requires an SSN and US credit history, and it cannot be obtained with an LLC.

6. You connect Stripe

What you do: You set up your online payment infrastructure. Many countries are not on Stripe's supported countries list, and if yours is one of them, a US LLC, an EIN and a US bank account are the three things that open this door.

How long it takes: You have to wait 2-3 weeks after the EIN is confirmed.

The trap: Skipping the wait. A new EIN takes 2-3 weeks to land in the IRS e-file database, and applications made before that window closes are rejected automatically. Applying early and getting rejected takes longer than waiting in the right order. Uploading the CP 575 or 147C letter with the application lowers the risk but does not guarantee anything.

There are two permanent constraints. First, once a service has been activated on a live account, the country of origin of the business cannot be changed. Second, payouts go to a US bank account, and you cannot connect a personal account or an account abroad. That is why Mercury comes before Stripe.

You are not asked for an SSN. For US companies where the representative is not a US person, Stripe does not require an SSN or ITIN, and its own text says it expects a local tax identity and a supporting document from a non-US representative.

7. You move the store accounts to the company

What you do: You switch the account type to organization on the App Store and Google Play so the seller name is your company. The shared requirement for both is a D-U-N-S Number. It is a nine-digit business number, Dun & Bradstreet issues it, and it is free. From Apple's own lookup tool you can both search for a number you already have and submit an application if you do not. Apple also wants a working website and a business email on that site's domain, and that condition is in the trap below.

How long it takes: The official sources do not agree with each other. Apple says 5 business days plus 2 business days for the information to reach it, Dun & Bradstreet says 30 business days, Google Play says 30 days. Build your plan around the long number.

What it costs: The D-U-N-S Number is 0 dollars, the Apple Developer Program is 99 dollars a year, Google Play registration is 25 dollars one time. If you are publishing on both stores it is 124 dollars in the first year and 99 dollars in the years after.

The trap: Apple's organization enrollment asks for a working company website and a business email on that site's domain. Applications made with a Gmail address stop right here. The package you bought in step two already included a domain, site and business email, so you meet this requirement with no extra cost. Second trap: D&B can call you on the phone during verification, and Apple says so on its own page, so the number you write on the form has to be one you actually answer.

You do not need an EIN for a D-U-N-S Number. EIN does not appear on D&B's list of required information, which means you can request the number in parallel while you are still waiting on the EIN. This is the one place that buys you a week on the calendar.

Where the US phone number and Wise sit

These two items from the list are not mandatory steps, both are conveniences.

The US phone number is not bought from a separate service, a free line already comes with the 39 dollar formation package. Most forms accept a non-US number, and even the registered agent's order form lets you enter your own country code.

Wise is not inside the setup line, it sits at the exit. The company's US account is Mercury and the payment infrastructure is Stripe. Wise comes in when you move the money you earned to your home country at close to the market rate with a low fee. So write Wise not at the top of the setup list, but after your first payout.

The realistic band for this line is 4 to 8 weeks. The lower bound assumes every gate opens fast, the upper bound assumes the IRS is busy and the bank asks for extra documents. Six weeks is the middle of the band.

Source: IRS SS-4 instructions, Mercury support center, Stripe documentation, August 2026.

If you want to speed this up there is one real lever: send the SS-4 by fax rather than mail, and write your return fax number in the signature block. That single field decides two weeks of your life. The second accelerator is starting the D-U-N-S application the moment your formation document is in hand, because that process is not waiting on the EIN.

I have an SSN. Do I still have to fax? No. If you have an SSN or an ITIN you can try the IRS online assistant, and if it approves, the number appears on screen immediately. There is no citizenship requirement. The address screen only takes a US address and a US phone number; founders abroad enter the registered agent's address there and the system does not verify residence, but the IRS's written condition is a US principal place of business, so it is a grey area. If the application ends with an "unable to provide you with an EIN" screen (most often a name similarity, reference 101), you switch to fax and write your own SSN on line 7b instead of Foreign. When the application finishes, the number appears on screen and the confirmation letter is given as a PDF on that same screen, so download it right away. The system is open weekdays 6:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m., Saturdays 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., Sundays 6:00 p.m. to midnight (ET), and one EIN is issued per responsible party per day. The 50 dollar EIN service the registered agent sells to SSN holders has no speed advantage, because the online application already finishes instantly. (Source: IRS "Get an EIN" page, August 2026.)

Do I need a passport? Not at the formation step, there is no ID upload field on the order form. The passport is asked for the first time at the bank application.

Can I open PayPal? That is the hardest gate. On top of the EIN, a valid ITIN is required, and the ITIN process is long. If PayPal is the only reason you are forming an LLC, look at the ITIN side first.

Do I have to file a BOI report? No. BOI means reporting the company's beneficial owners to FinCEN. Under the final rule FinCEN published on August 11, 2026, effective August 14, 2026, all companies formed in the US are exempt from this report. You will still find texts online saying "report within 30 days", and all of them are stale.

Will I pay federal tax? If the work is done from outside the US and there is no US trade or business and no US-source effectively connected income, federal tax may not arise. Effectively connected income means earnings tied to a trade or business carried on inside the US. This is not a ruling. The source test runs on "where the work is done" rather than "where the customer is", and you need to show your own situation to a tax advisor. Even where no tax arises, the Form 5472 requirement continues. There is a second half to this on your own side, and it has two headings: how the profit you take out of the LLC is treated as personal income where you live, and whether a company run in practice from your country gets treated as a tax resident there. This page does not give tax advice, so check your own country's rules with a local accountant.

Formation is a one-time job. The annual side is the bigger one, and that is also the part that does not fit in a tweet.

The items in the table are these: registered agent renewal at 125 dollars a year (the first year is included in the formation package), the state's annual report (none in New Mexico, Wyoming 60, Florida 138.75, Delaware 400) and a mid-band 399 dollars for Form 5472 preparation. Filing preparation is a service that spreads from 80 to 999 dollars, and the mid-band is the most common price point for standard preparation signed by a licensed accountant.

The 399 dollars is the only variable item in this table. It is not fixed the way state fees are, so get two or three quotes before you form and put your own number in its place.

There are four dates to put in your calendar: April 15 (Form 5472 and the pro forma Form 1120 that goes with it, an otherwise blank corporate return where only the identity and ownership sections are filled in), May 1 (Florida annual report), June 1 (Delaware annual tax) and the first day of your formation anniversary month (Wyoming report and agent renewal). The penalty for Form 5472 is 25,000 dollars per form, and it is filed even if you had no income. Florida's late penalty is 400 dollars and it is not waived. For someone who puts a reminder in their calendar, neither of those two lines ever comes up.

I am not giving advice here, I am doing arithmetic. The fixed annual load runs 524 to 924 dollars depending on the state, and it is paid whether or not the company earns anything. If that figure stays above ten percent of your annual dollar revenue, the company is not covering its own cost. Below roughly the 3,000 to 5,000 dollar band, not forming one is a valid answer too.

That is the whole list. Formation runs 89 to 164 dollars, the EIN is free, the store side is 124 dollars in the first year, and the fixed annual load is 524 to 924 dollars. The duration is 4 to 8 weeks, with six weeks in the middle of the band. The information sits here in full, with no step held back.

There are two places I can make this easier. If you want to see your own state's number and the five-year total, the calculator is free and runs with a source stamp on every line. If you want to see line by line what goes in which box on the forms, the US Company Formation Kit does that job: the eighteen lines of the SS-4, the free-text questions on the bank application, the field list for the store forms, the annual calendar, and the Formation Journey that walks the same line screen by screen.

This page is not tax or legal advice, it is for information. The figures were verified as of August 2026 and are checked monthly, but opening the official source one more time on the day you form costs you a minute.