Short answer
Wyoming charges $100 to file the Articles of Organization, the same state fee whether you file online or on paper, plus a published 2.4 percent card fee if you pay online, which brings the online total to $102.40. After that the recurring state cost is the annual report license tax, which is $60 or two-tenths of one mill on the dollar of assets located and employed in Wyoming, whichever is greater. For a business run remotely with no Wyoming property, that is $60. On top of the state fees you will pay a registered agent every year, because Wyoming requires one with a physical address in the state. The largest cost is usually not Wyoming at all. It is the state you actually live and work in, which will still apply its own registration and tax rules to you.
Key takeaways
- The state filing fee is $100, identical online and on paper, and unchanged since 2021. Filing online adds the state's published 2.4 percent card fee, so the online total is $102.40. Any much larger number you were quoted is either a service package or a different form.
- The $60 annual report is not a flat fee. Wyoming's rule is $60 or two-tenths of one mill on the dollar of assets located and employed in Wyoming, whichever is greater. The state's own worked example puts an entity with $1,210,000 in Wyoming assets at $242.
- The floor holds up to $300,000 in Wyoming-situated assets, which is why $60 is the right number for almost everyone reading this, and why it is still wrong to call it a flat fee.
- A registered agent is a mandatory recurring cost, not an optional one, and it is a service, not just an address. Wyoming requires a physical street address in the state and will not accept a drop box.
- Forming in Wyoming does not move your business out of your home state's reach. Wyoming itself fines unregistered out-of-state companies $5,000 plus 18 percent interest, and your home state almost certainly has a version of that same rule pointed back at you.
Before you start
- Work out where you actually operate before you compare state fees, because the home-state cost is usually larger than everything Wyoming charges combined.
- Have a registered agent lined up before you file. Wyoming will not process a formation without one, and it has to be a real agent at a physical Wyoming address.
Who this is for
- Founders comparing the true cost of a Wyoming LLC against the marketing pages that quote only the formation fee.
- Anyone who read that Wyoming costs $60 a year and wants to know what that number leaves out.
Ask what a Wyoming LLC costs and the first page of results will tell you $50, $100, $102, $104, $154, and $200 to $300. They are all describing the same filing.
One of those numbers is the state fee. The rest are something else entirely, and none of the pages quoting them tell you which is which. So let us take the whole thing apart: what Wyoming charges, what it charges every year after that, what the state's own rules say the annual report really is, and the one cost that is usually bigger than all of them and does not appear on any Wyoming page at all.
The State Fee Is $100, and Only $100
Wyoming's filing fee schedule lists Articles of Organization at $100.00. The state fee is the same whether you file online or send paper, and filing online adds the state's published 2.4 percent card fee on top. It has not changed since 2021, and it did not move when the state issued a new fee schedule effective July 2026. Every other figure floating around the search results decomposes cleanly once you know what you are looking at.
| The number you saw | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| $100 | Correct. The Articles of Organization filing fee, online or paper, per the Wyoming Secretary of State fee schedule. |
| $50 | A real Wyoming fee, for the wrong form. It is the Articles of Incorporation fee for a nonprofit, sitting a few lines away on the same schedule. |
| $102 | The $100 fee plus the card fee for filing online, and the state does publish the rate. Wyoming's filing portal states a credit card processing fee of 2.4 percent, minimum $1, of the filing fee. On a $100 filing that is $2.40, so the online total is $102.40. That is where $102 comes from. $104 does not follow from the state's published rate. |
| $154, or $200 to $300 | Not state fees. These are formation service packages, with the state's $100 bundled inside them. |
Some widely shared guides put the state fee at $200 to $300. It is not. The state fee is $100.
One line item did change with the July 2026 schedule, and no guide on the first page mentions it. Wyoming introduced expedited processing that was not on the previous schedule: $700 for next business day and $1,400 for same business day. Until this year the state's own guidance said flatly that the Business Division did not offer expedited services at all.
What the expedite does not buy you
It does not buy you a faster LLC. File the Articles of Organization online and Wyoming says the entity is active immediately. The filings that actually sit in a queue are the ones the state takes by mail, such as a Certificate of Authority for an out-of-state company, Articles of Continuance, or Articles of Domestication, which are reviewed in the order received with a maximum of fifteen business days. That queue is what an expedite is for. If you are forming a Wyoming LLC online, you are already at the front of it.
The $60 Annual Report Is a Floor
This is the part almost every guide gets wrong, and it is the reason this article exists. They will tell you the Wyoming annual report costs $60. That number is right for most people and it is not a flat fee, and the difference matters the moment your business owns anything in Wyoming.
What the state actually says
Wyoming's own guidance puts it this way: the tax is $60 or two-tenths of one mill on the dollar, meaning $0.0002, whichever is greater, calculated on all assets located and employed in Wyoming. It is a license tax with a minimum, not a filing fee with a price.
Wyoming publishes worked examples, which is more than any of the guides summarizing it do. An entity with $300,000 or less in Wyoming assets pays $60. That is the break-even, and it falls exactly where the arithmetic says it should, since $60 divided by $0.0002 is $300,000. Above that the tax scales. The state's own example takes an entity with $1,210,000 in Wyoming assets and arrives at $242. There is even a threshold buried in the process itself: if your annual report tax comes to more than $500, you cannot e-file it, which quietly tells you that somewhere north of $2.5 million in Wyoming assets the state stops expecting you to be a self-service customer.
So why is $60 still the right number for almost everyone reading this? Because of four words in the rule: located and employed in Wyoming. The tax counts Wyoming-situated assets, not everything your business owns. If you formed in Wyoming while living somewhere else, and the only thing you have in the state is a registered agent, then your Wyoming-situated assets are close to nothing and your tax is the floor. The guides that print $60 are not lying to you. They are giving you the answer without the condition, and the condition is the part that tells you whether the answer applies.
Where it stops being $60
Buy Wyoming real estate, hold equipment there, or move inventory into the state and the mill rate starts doing work. Wyoming's asset rules are specific about valuation too: depreciable assets, depletable assets, and land are counted at assessed value rather than book value.
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The Registered Agent Is a Service, Not an Address
Wyoming will not form your LLC without a registered agent, and this is a recurring cost for as long as the company exists. It is also the line item most consistently misdescribed, including in ways that could cost you the company.
The state requires the agent to maintain a physical street address in Wyoming, and it says explicitly that a drop box is not acceptable. Wyoming takes this seriously enough that it charges commercial registered agents an annual fee simply to be listed as one, which tells you the state regards this as a licensed function rather than a mailing arrangement. And the consequence of letting it lapse is the harshest number on the whole fee schedule: reinstating a company that was dissolved for having no registered agent costs $350, against $100 to reinstate one dissolved for unpaid tax.
A business address is not a registered agent, and that includes ours
This is worth being blunt about, because plenty of pages in this industry are not. A commercial mailing address, including the Cheyenne address we provide, is where your business receives mail. A registered agent is a person or company that has agreed to accept legal service of process on your behalf at a physical Wyoming address. They are two different things, they are bought separately, and if anyone tells you their mailbox product satisfies your registered agent requirement, check that claim against the state before you rely on it.
We are not going to print a price table for other people's registered agent services. We could not verify a single one against a first-party source, the figures circulating in the search results span an implausibly wide range, and quoting competitor pricing in an article on our own site is not a comparison anyone should trust. What we can tell you is the shape of the cost: it is annual, it is mandatory if you do not live in Wyoming, and you should get the current figure from the provider directly.
The Cost That Is Usually Bigger Than Wyoming
Here is the part the cheap-state framing leaves out, and it is often larger than every Wyoming fee added together. Forming in Wyoming does not relocate your business. It relocates your paperwork.
The cleanest way to see this is to look at what Wyoming does to everyone else. Wyoming's own guidance warns that a business entity doing business in Wyoming without authority is liable for a penalty of $5,000, plus fees and license taxes, plus 18 percent interest. That is Wyoming protecting its register from out-of-state companies that operate there without registering. Now turn it around. Your home state almost certainly has a version of that rule, and it is pointed back at you.
California is the expensive illustration because so many founders are sitting in it. The Franchise Tax Board says every LLC doing business in or organized in California owes an annual tax of $800, and that it is due even if you are not conducting business, until you formally cancel the LLC. What counts as doing business is not a single bright line but a set of tests, any one of which can catch you, and the first of them is engaging in any transaction for the purpose of financial gain within California. If you meet it, you would generally be expected to register as a foreign LLC, which California charges $70 for, file a Statement of Information at $20, and pay the $800 annually. Above $250,000 of California income there is a further tiered fee on top.
One thing that changed, and the guides have not caught up
California used to waive the $800 for an LLC's first year. That relief applied to tax years beginning before January 2024, and it has expired. If you form in 2026 and California considers you to be doing business there, the $800 applies from year one. Guides still promising a free first year are describing a rule that is gone.
Where exactly the line falls is genuinely fact-specific, and it depends on what you do, where you do it from, and how much of it touches your home state. This is the point in the ledger where a conversation with an accountant licensed in your own state is cheaper than the mistake. What is not in doubt is the direction: the Wyoming savings are real but small, and the home-state obligation is real and often much larger.
The Whole Ledger
| Line item | Year 1 | Year 2 and after |
|---|---|---|
| Wyoming filing fee (Articles of Organization) | $100 | None |
| Wyoming annual report license tax | None. The first one is not due until your first anniversary month. | $60, or $0.0002 per dollar of Wyoming-situated assets if that is greater |
| Registered agent | Required. Priced by the provider, paid annually. | Required. Renews annually for the life of the company. |
| Business mailing address | Optional, and separate from the registered agent | Optional, and separate from the registered agent |
| Home-state foreign qualification | Whatever your state charges. California: $70 to register, $20 statement, $800 tax. | Recurring. California: $800 a year, plus a tiered fee above $250,000 of state income. |
| Expedited filing, if you need it | $700 next business day, $1,400 same business day. This is for filings the state takes by mail. An online formation is active immediately, so most founders never need it. | Not applicable |
The Wyoming column is small and predictable. The home-state row is the one that decides whether any of this saved you money.
There are conditional costs too, and they are worth knowing before they surprise you. An amendment is $60. A certificate of good standing, which your bank may ask for, is free from the state's online system and $20 on paper. Miss the annual report and you are delinquent quickly, with administrative dissolution following inside a couple of months, and then you are paying to reinstate: $100 if it was the tax, $350 if it was the registered agent.
Where the Address Fits, Honestly
We sell a Cheyenne business address, so it would be convenient for us to end this by telling you it solves the registered agent problem. It does not, and we said so above. What it does is a different job, and the ledger is the reason it exists.
If you form in Wyoming from somewhere else, you need a place for the company's mail that is not your kitchen. State correspondence, bank documents, and anything a customer or a payment processor sends you have to arrive somewhere, and the alternative to a commercial address is usually your home address, which then travels onto whatever public records your business ends up in. That is a real problem with a real price, and it is a separate line from the registered agent above it.
If a Wyoming LLC is what you are actually building, the mechanics of filing one with a Cheyenne address are laid out in filing a Wyoming LLC with a Cheyenne address. And if you have not settled on Wyoming yet, the fee ledger above is only one column of a wider comparison: see best states to form an LLC.
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Published July 13, 2026
I'm Henry, a hedgehog in a bow tie who explains the dull, scary parts of building and running a U.S. business.
