Best States to Form an LLC in 2026, Taxes, Fees, and Privacy Compared

Why Your State of Formation Matters

Your state of formation determines your filing fees, annual report costs, tax obligations, and the level of legal protection your LLC receives. It also determines how much of your personal information becomes public record. Some states publish your name, home address, and the names of all LLC members in a searchable online database; others let you remain anonymous with no public disclosure.

If you form in a state where you do not physically operate, you will likely need to register as a foreign LLC in your home state as well. That means paying two sets of fees and filing two annual reports, which is why forming in your home state is often the most practical choice unless you have a specific reason to go elsewhere.

Top States for LLC Formation Compared

Wyoming stands out for low costs and strong privacy. The initial filing fee is $100. The annual report is not a flat fee, although almost every guide reports it as one: Wyoming charges $60 or two-tenths of one mill ($0.0002) on the dollar of assets located and employed in Wyoming, whichever is greater. That floor holds until you have roughly $300,000 of assets in the state, so for a business run remotely it is $60 and stays there. LLC member names are not listed in the Articles of Organization. For online businesses, e-commerce sellers, and solopreneurs who want privacy at the lowest cost, Wyoming is hard to beat. (The full ledger, including the costs your home state adds, is in what a Wyoming LLC actually costs.)

Delaware is the traditional choice for businesses that anticipate outside investment or complex ownership structures. The Court of Chancery handles business disputes without juries, making outcomes more predictable. The filing fee is $110 (filing fee plus municipality fee, per the Delaware Division of Corporations' current fee schedule), and the annual LLC tax is $400, raised from $300 effective January 1, 2026. Delaware does not tax out-of-state income, which benefits businesses that operate entirely outside Delaware. The state is popular among startups, venture-backed companies, and businesses planning to raise capital.

Florida charges no state personal income tax, making it attractive for LLC owners who want to keep more of their pass-through income. The filing fee is $125, and the annual report costs $138.75. Florida does require public disclosure of LLC member and manager names in its records. If you already live in Florida or plan to relocate, forming locally saves you from double registration.

Texas also has no state income tax and offers a large, business-friendly market. The filing fee is $300. Texas has no traditional annual report, but every LLC must file a Public Information Report (PIR) with the Texas Comptroller each May 15. There is no fee, but it is required regardless of revenue. Texas imposes a franchise tax only above the no-tax-due threshold, about $2.65M for 2026. For small businesses under that threshold, Texas is effectively tax-free at the state level, though the PIR still applies.

Nevada is known for strong asset protection. There is no state income tax and no franchise tax. Nevada's total initial cost is $425, which includes the $75 Articles of Organization filing fee, the $150 Initial List of Managers (or Members), and the $200 State Business License. Annual renewal runs about $350 per year, made up of the $150 annual list and the $200 business license renewal. Nevada's Annual List names a manager or managing member every year, which is why it fails the privacy test set out below. The higher upfront and ongoing costs make Nevada less appealing for bootstrapped startups, but the asset protection features attract established businesses with significant liability concerns.

Three of the states above are also marketed as anonymous LLC states, and only two of those three are. The next section adds New Mexico, which is not in this cost comparison, and sorts out which states get marketed as anonymous and which ones actually deliver.

Filing Fees and Ongoing Costs Side by Side

Here is the part most comparisons get wrong, and it is not the fees themselves. Almost every guide adds the formation fee to one year of the recurring charge and calls that the first year. In four of the states below the recurring charge is not billed until year two, and in a fifth, Texas, there is no recurring charge at all.

• Wyoming: $100 to file. The annual report license tax is $60 or two-tenths of one mill on Wyoming assets, whichever is greater, and it is keyed to your anniversary month, so the first one lands about a year after you file.
• Delaware: $110 to file. The LLC annual tax is $400, raised from $300 effective January 1, 2026, and it is paid for the prior year on June 1, so an LLC formed this year first pays it next June. There is no annual report for an LLC.
• Florida: $125 to file, which is $100 for the articles plus $25 for the registered agent designation. The $138.75 annual report is really two line items, a $50 filing fee and an $88.75 supplemental corporate fee, and the first one is due between January 1 and May 1 of the following year.
• Texas: $300 to file, and no franchise tax below the $2,650,000 no-tax-due threshold. The information report carries no fee but is mandatory, and the first one is due May 15 of the following year.
• California: $70 to file. California is the exception that makes the others look cheaper than they are, because the $800 annual tax is due in the formation year, on the 15th day of the 4th month after you file. Add the $20 Statement of Information due within 90 days and the first year is $890.
• New York: $200 to file, a $50 Certificate of Publication, and a $9 biennial statement. The newspaper publication itself has no official rate, which is covered below.
• Nevada: $425 first-year total ($75 Articles + $150 Initial List + $200 State Business License); $350 per year thereafter.

Two things fall out of that table that a first-year comparison hides. California's gap is not mostly about the size of the $800; it is that California is the only state here that bills it in year one, so the difference compounds from the start. And Delaware's number moved this year: the annual tax went from $300 to $400 effective January 1, 2026, which quietly added $400 to the five-year total above.

New Mexico does have one cost worth knowing, and it is the opposite of the one people expect. There is no Secretary of State annual report, but if your LLC elects to be taxed as a corporation, New Mexico charges a $50 annual franchise tax, and the state lists appointing a New Mexico registered agent among the indications of exercising a corporate franchise. A default pass-through New Mexico LLC owes nothing; one that elects corporate treatment does.

None of these numbers include the registered agent, which is a separate annual cost in each of the states above. If you are forming in a state you do not live in, a registered agent is mandatory, and it is a distinct purchase from your business address. A mailbox is not a registered agent, whoever sells it. If a provider offers both, they are still two things you are buying.

The Anonymous LLC States, and the One That Is Not

Search for the best state for LLC privacy and you will get the same four names from almost every result: Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming. It is repeated so consistently that it reads like a settled fact. It is not. One of those four does not do what the list says it does, and it happens to be the most expensive one.

The test that matters is simple. What does the state actually collect from you, and what does it then publish? Run each state against that test, rather than against the marketing copy, and the group breaks apart.

One important caveat on the list itself. Anonymous LLC is a marketing label, not a category in any statute, so treat the four-state grouping as a description of what gets recommended rather than an exhaustive legal set. We have checked that these three, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Delaware, do not collect owner names at formation. We have not checked all fifty, and neither has anyone else selling you the phrase.

It is also worth being clear about what anonymity does not survive. Your bank will identify and verify the beneficial owners when you open the account. That is a federal requirement of the bank, not something a state filing can wave off. Your EIN application needs a responsible party who is a real person with a real taxpayer number, and the IRS says plainly that nominees cannot apply for an EIN and should not be listed on the form. A court can order disclosure. None of that makes state anonymity worthless, and it is worth understanding precisely what it buys: it keeps your name out of a database that anyone can search for free, which is where competitors, data brokers, and cranks look. It does not keep your name from a bank, the IRS, or a judge, and it was never going to.

Then there is the way most privacy plans quietly collapse. If you form anonymously in Wyoming but actually operate in California, California expects you to register there as a foreign LLC, and its statute requires a registered foreign LLC to list its managers, or each member if it has no manager. The anonymous formation stays anonymous and the foreign registration puts you on a public California filing anyway. The privacy you were buying was undone by the state you live in, not by the state you chose.

Delaware and Nevada also have genuine asset-protection reputations independent of anonymity, including charging order protections that make it harder for a creditor to reach a membership interest. That is a real and separate reason to pick a state, and it should be weighed on its own rather than folded into the privacy question, which is what most of the comparison content does. Florida and Texas both put member or manager names into the public record, and are not privacy plays at all.

The Federal Layer Changed, and New York Followed It Back

Any comparison written before 2025 is missing the federal change below, and a surprising number written since are missing it too. It is also the part of this topic where the confidently wrong answer is easiest to find, so it is worth going slowly.

So the federal answer, as of July 2026, is that the thing everyone spent 2024 preparing for does not apply to a US-formed LLC. That is genuinely good news for a privacy-minded founder, and it is the opposite of what most of the older comparison content still implies.

New York is where this gets misreported, and the misreporting runs in the scary direction. The New York LLC Transparency Act took effect on January 1, 2026, and you will find plenty of articles telling New York LLC owners they have a filing deadline of January 1, 2027. Read the Act and the deadline mostly evaporates, because of how it defines who has to report.

That is worth stating plainly because the false version of it is everywhere, and false urgency is expensive. It is also worth stating carefully. Both halves of this rest on things that can be undone: an interim rule that FinCEN has said it means to finalize, and a veto that a future legislature can revisit. Check fincen.gov and the New York Department of State before you conclude you are finished, and if your LLC was formed outside the United States, that conclusion does not apply to you at all.

The headline for anyone choosing a state on privacy grounds is that the map moves, and the guides do not move with it. The honest thing to check is not what a guide written in 2024 said, but what the agency itself says in 2026.

When to Form in Your Home State Instead

Now the part that undoes most of the five-year cost table. Registering somewhere does not move your obligations there. It adds one. If you have a physical presence, employees, or significant revenue in a state, you have to register in that state regardless of where you formed, and you keep paying the formation state as well.

Run the arithmetic on the most common version of this plan. Someone living and working in California forms in Wyoming to avoid the $800. California still treats the business as doing business in California, so the LLC registers there as a foreign LLC and owes the $800 anyway. Now the annual bill is $800 to California plus $60 to Wyoming, two registered agents instead of one, and two sets of filings. The saving is not small. It is negative.

That is why a cost ranking answers a narrower question than it appears to. It tells you what a state charges. It does not tell you which state gets to charge you, and that second question is settled by where you actually are and what you actually do. For most owners the honest answer is the boring one: form where you already operate, and read the five-year cost table as the price of the state you cannot avoid rather than as a menu.

The exception is a business with no physical presence anywhere in particular. If you sell digital products, run a consulting practice remotely, or operate an e-commerce store from home, you have more room to choose on cost and privacy rather than geography, and Wyoming or Delaware often makes sense. Even then the choice is narrower than the ranking implies, because two things override it. If you plan to raise institutional venture capital, investors will expect a Delaware C corporation, and converting later costs far more than the fee difference. And if a state's filings are the reason you picked it, check what that state publishes before you rely on it, which is what the anonymity section above is for.

Where a Business Address Fits, and Where It Does Not

Forming an LLC in a state you do not live in requires two separate things, and they are constantly conflated, including by companies selling one of them. You need a registered agent, meaning a person or company that consents to accept legal service of process at a physical street address in that state. And you need somewhere for the company's mail and its public-facing address to live. These are different purchases.

A virtual office is the second one. It gives you a real commercial street address for filings and correspondence, with mail scanned and forwarded so you can run the company from anywhere. A mailbox is not a registered agent, whoever sells it, and if a provider bundles the two, they are still two purchases. Check any claim to the contrary against the state before you rely on it, because the penalty for losing your agent is worse than the penalty for losing track of your tax: Wyoming charges $350 to reinstate a company dissolved for having no registered agent, against $100 if it was the tax.

So if you form in Wyoming for privacy, you appoint a Wyoming registered agent, and you use a Cheyenne address for your principal office and your mail. Both boxes get filled, by two different things.

save office provides commercial street addresses in New York, San Francisco, Wilmington, Tampa, Washington DC, and Cheyenne. Of the three states that genuinely deliver formation anonymity, we cover two: Wyoming and Delaware. We do not offer a New Mexico address, which is worth saying plainly given that New Mexico is the cheapest of the three to maintain. Check available locations and pricing to see whether the state you are considering is one we can actually support.