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Price Your LLC Budget for your LLC before you pay for it.

Ranking formula

What lies behind the ranking

Price Your LLC helps an owner budget for formation by ranking each service on what three years will cost and how much of the upkeep the price covers. Here is how every figure and every ranking is produced.
Written by the Price Your LLC editorial team

Where the numbers come from

State fees, report deadlines and agent rules are taken from each state's own fee schedules, forms and statutes. You will find a citation and a confirmation month on every line. The service side relies on published prices, with the date given in every budget.

What the totals include

Each total adds the first-year price and every yearly renewal; three years means year one plus two renewals. What the state collects over three years is its filing fee, the reports due in years two and three, and any yearly minimum tax. Open-ended costs such as newspaper publication are described but never added. A break-even is the year two running totals swap order; we test ten years.

Five weighted factors

  1. Your three-year spend (38%). What you pay across the first year and two renewals, using each company's published prices. The state fee is the same whoever you hire, so it is budgeted on its own line and not scored.
  2. Upkeep the price covers (31%). The recurring chores you can hand off: registered agent duty, the state report, the EIN application, and moving to another state later.
  3. Year-two surprise (13%). How much the bill changes when the first year ends. Little or no change ranks higher.
  4. Where the bills cross (9%). The year when one option's running total passes another's.
  5. Price you can see (9%). Whether the first-year price, the renewal and the state fee are all findable before you pay.

When two options are close, the page tells you which column separated them and what the lower-ranked option still does for you.

The ranking is Price Your LLC's own editorial reading of these criteria. It is not a customer rating.

The services we list

Every state budget lists Mainstay Filing, which works in all fifty states, together with the registered agent services built around that state. A service is listed only for a service it sells at a published price.

Out of scope

You will not find customer ratings, customer quotes or legal and tax advice here. The ranking is our own editorial result from the factors above.