Short answer
It depends on which filing the state uses to ask, and the six jurisdictions we read do four different things with it. The LLC chapter's list of formation contents names no owner in any of them. After that they split: one has no recurring filing at all, two have one that asks for an address rather than an owner, and two name people on it. The sixth never waits: the District of Columbia asks at formation, under a statute that sits outside the LLC chapter entirely.
Key takeaways
- The LLC chapter's list of what the formation document must contain names no owner in any of the six jurisdictions we read (Delaware, New York, California, Florida, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia). In five of them the document really is silent. In the District of Columbia a different chapter puts the ownership question back onto the same form, which is why reading the LLC statute and stopping gives the wrong answer.
- Delaware never asks, and New York and Wyoming ask for an address rather than an owner. Delaware LLCs file no annual report at all, only a flat $300 tax, so there is no later filing that could collect a name. New York's biennial statement carries only a process address, and Wyoming's annual report asks for an address and a certification rather than a member roster.
- California and Florida ask on the recurring report. California's Form LLC-12 takes each member's name if no manager was elected, and Florida's annual report takes at least one person with authority to manage. In those two states anonymity has an expiry date measured in months, not a permanent state.
- Washington DC asks at formation, and the requirement is not in the LLC chapter. D.C. Code 29-802.01 lists no names, but 29-102.01(a)(6) requires the names plus residence and business addresses of anyone holding more than 10 percent, and of anyone below that line who controls the financial or operational decisions, and DLCP's own form DLC-1 cites both sections on its authority line.
- DC then republishes it. We queried the Open Data DC beneficial owners service without logging in and counted 488,823 rows, 159,327 of them domestic LLCs, carrying name and address fields under a CC-BY-4.0 license.
- A business address changes which address is printed. In every filing requirement we read, it never changes whether a name is printed, and where a state asks for residence and business addresses together, a business address can fill only one of the two.
Who this is for
- Founders comparing formation states on privacy rather than on tax.
- Owners who already formed and want to know what is visible now.
- Anyone who read that a state is an anonymous LLC state and wants to see the statute that decides it.
Why the formation document keeps giving the wrong answer
The question sounds like it should have one answer per state, and the natural place to look is the document that creates the company. That instinct produces the familiar guidance that an LLC keeps ownership private. The instinct is half right.
It is half right because of where you have to look. In all six jurisdictions we read, the LLC chapter's list of what the formation document must contain asks for a company name, an address, and an agent for service of process, and never for a roster of members. But that list is not the whole filing requirement, and the document it describes is not the last filing either. The six jurisdictions we read do four different things from there, which is why a single sentence about LLC privacy is wrong somewhere no matter how it is phrased.
Six jurisdictions, four different answers
These are the six places save office operates, read as two layers: the filing that creates the company, and whatever recurring filing the state requires afterwards. The rows run from the jurisdiction that never names anyone to the one that names you twice. The surprise is which one sits at the far end.
| Jurisdiction | Formation filing | Recurring filing | Net result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delaware | No names required. 6 Del. C. 18-201(a) asks for the company name, the registered office and agent, and anything else the members choose to add. | None exists. Delaware LLCs pay a flat $300 annual tax and, in the Division of Corporations' own words, there is no requirement to file an Annual Report. | Never named, no filing exists |
| New York | No names required. LLC Law 203(e) asks for the county and an address for the Secretary of State to forward process. | Biennial Statement, $9, carrying only the address for forwarding process. | No owner roster |
| Wyoming | No names required. W.S. 17-29-201(b) asks for the company name, a registered office street address, and the agent. | Annual report under W.S. 17-29-209(a): principal office address plus a certification about assets. The Secretary of State asks for officer and director names on corporation reports, not LLC reports. | No owner roster |
| California | No names required. Corp. Code 17702.01(b) asks for the principal office and mailing addresses and the agent. It records whether the company is manager-managed without naming the manager. | Form LLC-12, first within 90 days and then biennially. Corp. Code 17702.09(a)(5) takes the name and business or residence address of any manager and the chief executive officer, or of each member if no manager was elected. | Named on the recurring report |
| Florida | No names required. Fla. Stat. 605.0201(2) asks for the principal office and mailing addresses and the registered agent, and manager names are optional under 605.0201(3). | Annual report between January 1 and May 1. Fla. Stat. 605.0212(1)(e) takes the name, title or capacity, and address of at least one person with authority to manage. | Named on the recurring report |
| Washington DC | Names required. 29-802.01 lists none, but 29-102.01(a)(6) requires the names and residence and business addresses of each person holding more than 10 percent, or holding less while controlling the financial or operational decisions, and form DLC-1 asks for them at item 7. | Biennial report under 29-102.11: the name of at least one governor, the 10 percent disclosure repeated, and a look-through to the owners of an out-of-District parent. Omitting the ownership information is grounds for administrative dissolution. | Named at both layers |
Ownership disclosure at the formation layer and the recurring layer, across the save office jurisdictions. Statutes cited inline; confirm before relying on any of it, since filing requirements change without notice.
Four different shapes across six places. The intuition that formation is quiet and the annual report eventually tells is true in California and Florida. It is meaningless in Delaware, which has no annual report to file. It is true but empty in New York and Wyoming, where the recurring filing exists and asks for an address rather than an owner. And it is backwards in the District of Columbia, where the name is collected on the way in.
Delaware, New York, and Wyoming: three kinds of silence
Delaware is the cleanest case, and it is clean for a reason that rarely gets said plainly: there is no second filing. The Division of Corporations' own instructions state that limited liability companies, limited partnerships, and general partnerships formed in Delaware pay an annual tax of $300 and that there is no requirement to file an Annual Report. A state cannot collect a name on a filing that does not exist. One page over on the same site, domestic corporations do file an annual report, which is the contrast that shows the LLC treatment is a choice rather than an oversight.
New York makes the same point inside a single web page. Its Department of State describes the Biennial Statement for corporations as setting forth the name and business address of the chief executive officer, the principal executive office address, the process address, and the number of directors. For limited liability companies, the same page describes the Biennial Statement as setting forth the address to which the Secretary of State shall mail a copy of any process accepted on its behalf. One sentence names a person. The other does not. They sit next to each other, written by the same office.
Wyoming, stated narrowly
Wyoming does not ask an LLC for a member or manager roster on its annual report, and the Secretary of State's own checklist asks for officer and director names only for corporations. We are stating that narrowly on purpose. W.S. 17-29-209(a) requires a certification signed under penalty of perjury by the treasurer or another fiscal agent, so a signature line exists. Whether that signer's name is displayed in the public filing image is something we did not test.
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California and Florida: anonymity with an expiry date
In California and Florida the formation filing really is quiet, and the recurring report really does undo it. What differs is how much it undoes. Florida asks for the minimum: Fla. Stat. 605.0212(1)(e) requires the name, title or capacity, and address of at least one person who has the authority to manage the company. One person, not a roster.
California asks for more, and the amount depends on a choice made at formation. Corp. Code 17702.09(a)(5) requires the name and complete business or residence addresses of any manager or managers and the chief executive officer, if any, appointed or elected in accordance with the articles of organization or operating agreement, or, if no manager has been so elected or appointed, the name and business or residence address of each member. A member-managed California LLC publishes every member on Form LLC-12 within 90 days of formation.
Manager-managed is a substitution, not a subtraction
Electing a manager does not remove a name from California's Form LLC-12. It changes whose name goes on it, and it adds the chief executive officer, if there is one, to the line. If the members are also the managers, which is the usual arrangement in a small LLC, the privacy gain is zero. This is the same finding we reached when we looked at member-managed versus manager-managed structures generally: the election changes who appears in an existing record rather than creating or removing one.
The practical consequence is that in these two states privacy is not a property of the entity. It is a countdown. A California LLC formed in member-managed form is unnamed for at most 90 days. A Florida LLC is unnamed until the first annual report window opens on January 1 of the year after it was formed.
Washington DC: the rule is not in the LLC chapter
If you research this question the way the search results do, by opening the LLC statute, the District of Columbia looks like the others. D.C. Code 29-802.01 sets out what the articles of organization must contain, and no member or manager name is on that list. That is a complete reading of the LLC chapter and a wrong answer to the question. Of the seven results on the first page of this search that we could open, none cites the District statute that decides it, and none mentions the District's ten percent threshold that triggers it.
The requirement lives in a different chapter entirely, in the general filing-requirements section. D.C. Code 29-102.01(a)(6) provides that for entity registration filings made on or after January 1, 2020, the filing shall state the names, residence and business addresses of each person whose aggregate share of direct or indirect, legal or beneficial ownership of a governance or total distributional interest of the entity exceeds 10 percent, or does not exceed 10 percent where that person controls the financial or operational decisions or has the ability to direct the day-to-day operations. Subsection (a)(8) provides that an entity that files without that information shall not be allowed to register or do business in the District.
The form knows where the rule lives
DLCP's form DLC-1, the Articles of Organization for a Domestic Limited Liability Company, asks the ownership question at item 7 and prints its authority line as 29-802.01 and 29-102.01. Two sections from two different chapters, on the form that creates the company. The agency's own registration FAQ says the same thing in plain words: sections 29-102.01 and 29-102.11 stipulate that all formation and registration filings, as well as biennial reports, include beneficial ownership information.
The biennial report then repeats it. Under 29-102.11 the report states the name of at least one governor, the 10 percent ownership disclosure, and a look-through provision reaching the owners of an out-of-District parent entity. Omitting the ownership information from a biennial report is grounds for administrative dissolution. It is also worth noting what the governor line alone does: the District defines a governor to include the manager of a manager-managed LLC or a member of a member-managed one, so a member-managed DC LLC names a member on the biennial report regardless of the 10 percent rule.
We downloaded the District's list
A filing requirement and a public record are not the same thing. A government can require information and still keep it out of public search, which is exactly what the federal government does with its own beneficial ownership register. So we checked whether the District's disclosure is actually reachable, rather than assuming it either way.
It is. Open Data DC publishes a dataset titled Beneficial Owners, described as the Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection's data view containing live snapshot information for beneficial owners of entities registered with the Corporations Division. The license is CC-BY-4.0 and access is listed as public. The dataset is backed by a feature service that answers queries without an account, and its published capabilities are Query and Extract.
We queried it without logging in and counted the rows. The service returned 488,823 records in total, of which 159,327 carry the model type Domestic Limited Liability Company and 86,904 carry Foreign Limited Liability Company. The fields include the business name, the person's name, and an address. We are reporting counts and field names only, and we have not reproduced any individual record here.
What that means for a DC founder
If you hold more than 10 percent of a DC LLC, or less than that while controlling its financial or operational decisions, your name and your residence address are collected when the company is formed, repeated every two years, and republished in a dataset that anyone can download without an account. That is the most exposed position among the six jurisdictions we read, and it is the one least likely to be mentioned in a list of anonymous LLC states, because the requirement is not in the chapter people read.
The federal register runs the other way
Beneficial ownership reporting to FinCEN is the piece of this that changed most recently, and it is easy to confuse with the state question. Two things about it are settled enough to state plainly.
First, it does not currently apply to companies formed in the United States. The alert on FinCEN's beneficial ownership information page, updated March 26, 2025, states that all entities created in the United States, including those previously known as domestic reporting companies, and their beneficial owners are now exempt from the requirement to report beneficial ownership information to FinCEN. A US-formed LLC has nothing to file.
Second, and more useful for this question, the federal register was never a public record in the first place. 31 U.S.C. 5336(c)(2)(A) provides that, except as that subsection and its protocols authorize, beneficial ownership information reported under the section shall be confidential and may not be disclosed by an officer or employee of the United States, of any State, local, or Tribal agency, or of any financial institution or regulatory agency receiving the information. The authorized exceptions run to law enforcement, national security, regulators, and to a financial institution that already has the company's consent. They do not run to the public. The federal database of owners is sealed by statute. The District of Columbia's database of owners is a download. Those are opposite designs, and only one of them is the answer to whether ownership is public record.
Nevada saw the workaround coming
Nevada is worth a paragraph because it appears on most of the anonymity lists we saw and does not belong there. NRS 86.263(1) requires an annual list containing the names and titles of all of a company's managers or, if there is no manager, all of its managing members, together with an address, either residence or business, for each one. That is filed at formation and then every year.
The provision that shows the state thought about this is subsection (10). It provides that a person who files a list identifying a manager or managing member with the fraudulent intent of concealing the identity of any person exercising the power or authority of a manager, in furtherance of unlawful conduct, is subject to a penalty. Nevada did not merely decline to offer anonymity. It anticipated the nominee-manager arrangement and attached a consequence to it.
A note on sourcing
The Nevada legislature's own statute pages returned an access block to us on the day we checked, from two different clients. The quotations above come from an archived capture of that same official page taken on July 16, 2026. We are saying so rather than presenting it as a live read.
What an address can and cannot do
This is where a virtual business address is relevant, and where it is important to be exact about what it touches, because the statutes treat the name and the address as separate fields and the conjunctions matter.
- Where the statute says name and address together, as Florida's 605.0212(1)(e) does, choosing a different address does not affect the name.
- Where the statute says business or residence, as California's 17702.09(a)(5) and Nevada's 86.263(1)(d) do, the filer picks which address to print. The choice is real, and it is a choice about the address only.
- Where the statute says residence and business addresses, as the District's 29-102.01(a)(6) does, the conjunction is not a choice. A business address fills one of the two fields. The residence address is still required.
- Where the filing asks for an address with no name attached, as Wyoming's annual report and New York's biennial statement do, the address is the entire disclosure.
The honest limit
A business address changes which address is printed. In every filing requirement we read, it never changes whether a name is printed. save office sells an address and does not sell anonymity, and in the District of Columbia in particular our address cannot help with the part of the disclosure that matters most, because the statute asks for the residence address as well.
How save office fits
Every filing described above has at least one address field, and several of them have more than one. A real US business address from save office can occupy the business address lines, which keeps a home address off the filings that ask for a business address and gives the company a consistent address of record across the formation filing, the recurring report, and the mail that follows both. The address checker reports what USPS says about any address before you commit it to a state filing.
What it does not do is decide whether your name appears. That is set by the statute of the state you filed in, and in the six jurisdictions above it varies from never to twice. If keeping a name off a public record is the goal, the choice that matters is where the company is formed, and it is worth making that choice by reading the filing the state actually uses to ask.
Scope of this article
We read the statutes and filing instructions for the six jurisdictions save office operates in: Delaware, New York, California, Florida, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia. We also read Nevada, because it is named on most of the anonymity lists we saw, and we read it from an archived capture of the legislature's own page rather than a live one. We did not read all fifty state codes, and nothing here should be read as a claim about states we did not check. This is general information about public filing requirements, not legal advice.
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