Foreign qualification is the filing you make when your LLC is formed in one state and does business in another. The second state wants you registered with it. What that costs ranges from $63.50 in Hawaii to $1,020 in Massachusetts, a spread of about 16x. The median state costs $207.50 in year one.
Those year-one figures include the filing fee, the first periodic report if the state charges one in the first year, any entity-level tax with a minimum every LLC owes, and any general state business licence. They exclude your registered agent, which you buy separately, and the certificate of good standing your home state charges you for, which is usually $10 to $50.
The headline number is the least useful part. Three things below matter more, and none of them appear on a state's fee page.
To register is the one-time filing fee. Every year is what it costs to stay registered after that, counting a biennial report at half its face value so the column compares like with like. Year one is the two added together. A tag next to the state means part of that annual figure is an entity-level tax or a state business licence rather than a report fee. Every state name links to its full guide, where the charges are itemised.
| State | To register | Every year | Year one |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | $150 | None | $150 |
| Alaskalicence | $350 | $150 | $600 |
| Arizona | $150 | None | $150 |
| Arkansastax | $270 | $150 | $420 |
| Californiatax | $70 | $810 | $890 |
| Colorado | $100 | $25 | $125 |
| Connecticut | $120 | $80 | $200 |
| Delawaretax | $200 | $400 | $600 |
| Florida | $125 | $138.75 | $263.75 |
| Georgia | $235 | $60 | $295 |
| Hawaii | $51 | $12.50 | $63.50 |
| Idaho | $100 | None | $100 |
| Illinois | $150 | $75 | $225 |
| Indiana | $105 | $16 | $137 |
| Iowa | $100 | $15 | $130 |
| Kansas | $90 | $45 | $180 |
| Kentuckytax | $90 | $190 | $280 |
| Louisiana | $150 | $30 | $180 |
| Maine | $250 | $150 | $400 |
| Maryland | $100 | $300 | $400 |
| Massachusetts | $500 | $520 | $1,020 |
| Michigan | $50 | $25 | $75 |
| Minnesota | $205 | None | $205 |
| Mississippi | $250 | $250 | $500 |
| Missouri | $105 | None | $105 |
| Montana | $70 | None | $70 |
| Nebraska | $110 | $12.50 | $135 |
| Nevadalicence | $75 | $350 | $425 |
| New Hampshire | $100 | $100 | $200 |
| New Jersey | $100 | $75 | $175 |
| New Mexico | $100 | None | $100 |
| New Yorktax | $250 | $29.50 | $284 |
| North Carolina | $250 | $200 | $450 |
| North Dakota | $135 | $50 | $185 |
| Ohio | $99 | None | $99 |
| Oklahoma | $300 | $25 | $325 |
| Oregon | $275 | $275 | $550 |
| Pennsylvania | $250 | $7 | $257 |
| Rhode Islandtax | $150 | $450 | $600 |
| South Carolina | $110 | None | $110 |
| South Dakota | $750 | $55 | $805 |
| Tennesseetax | $300 | $400 | $700 |
| Texas | $750 | None | $750 |
| Utah | $59 | $18 | $77 |
| Vermont | $155 | $170 | $325 |
| Virginia | $100 | $50 | $150 |
| Washington | $200 | $70 | $270 |
| West Virginialicence | $150 | $55 | $205 |
| Wisconsin | $100 | $65 | $165 |
| Wyoming | $150 | $60 | $210 |
Sourced from each state's Secretary of State fee schedule, statute text, or official filing form. Figures are what a filer pays online where an online option exists. They exclude your registered agent and the certificate of good standing your home state charges for. Per-figure verification dates are held in the dataset behind this page.
Three notes on reading it. Figures are what a filer pays online where an online option exists; a handful of states have none, and their number is the paper rate. Amounts exclude your registered agent and the certificate of good standing your home state charges for. And "None" in the every-year column means no recurring charge, not no filing; several states require a report and charge nothing for it.
In 10 states, staying registered costs more every year than getting registered cost once. California is the clearest case: $70 to file, then $810 every year after, forever, whether or not the business made money.
The full list: California, Rhode Island, Nevada, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Vermont, Florida.
If you are choosing between states, or deciding whether a second state is worth entering at all, the annual figure is the one to compare. A cheap entry into an expensive state is a bad trade that takes about eighteen months to notice.
At the other end, 10 states charge nothing recurring at all: Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas. In those states, registration is close to a one-time cost.
Two footnotes on that list. Montana's zero is a fee waiver the Secretary of State has announced for 2026 and the year after, not a permanent rate, and it only applies if you file between January 1 and April 15; filing later costs $35. And several states that look free annually are not, because their report is biennial rather than absent. Indiana charges $32 every two years and Iowa $30, which is a real cost that simply does not fall every year. We count those as recurring.
A common worry is that registering as an out-of-state LLC carries a penalty rate. Sometimes it does. In 20 of 50 states a foreign LLC pays exactly what a locally formed LLC pays in year one. In 29 states it pays more, and in 1 it pays less.
Where foreign costs more, the gap is usually small. The median difference is $55, and 16 of the 29 are under $100. The tail is what hurts. The widest is South Dakota, which charges $805 to register a foreign LLC against $205 to form a local one, a difference of $600.
This is worth knowing because it cuts against the usual advice to form in a cheap state and register everywhere else. In most states that structure saves nothing on the registration itself, and it adds a second set of annual obligations in your formation state on top of the ones where you operate.
A small group of states add a compulsory charge on top of the filing fee they advertise. It is not optional, it is not an expedite, and it is not a card processing fee. It is simply not in the headline number.
Florida adds $25 to a $100 fee; Washington adds $20 to a $180 fee; Kansas adds $15 to a $75 fee; Georgia adds $10 to a $225 fee; Nebraska adds $10 to a $100 fee; Hawaii adds $1 to a $50 fee.
The amounts are small. The reason to know about them is that a budget built from published fee schedules will be short in those states, and a fee that surprises you at checkout is the kind of thing that makes people abandon a filing halfway through.
Most states charge a report fee and nothing else. A minority also levy an entity-level tax with a minimum that every LLC owes regardless of revenue. A dormant LLC with no income still pays it.
California $800, Delaware $400, Rhode Island $400, Kentucky $175, Arkansas $150, Tennessee $100, New York $25.
These minimums dominate the annual cost wherever they apply, which is why California tops the recurring table at $810 a year despite having one of the cheaper filing fees in the country. If you are registered in one of these states and have stopped operating there, withdrawing formally is usually cheaper than leaving the registration open.
Four questions, in this order. What is the filing fee, including anything compulsory stacked on it. What is the periodic report fee and how often is it due, because biennial states look twice as expensive as they are if you read the figure as annual. Is there an entity-level tax with a minimum. Is there a general state business licence.
Add the first one once and the other three every year. That total is what registration costs you, and it is what our per-state guides show.
Every figure comes from a state agency fee schedule, statute text, or an official form, and each is stored with the date it was checked and whether the source was the agency itself or an independent one. Fees are recorded as what a filer pays online, including compulsory agency charges, and excluding card and portal convenience fees, which vary by how you pay rather than by what you are filing.
Some caveats we would rather state than hide. A handful of states do not offer online filing for these documents at all, so their figure is the paper rate. Fee schedules change, sometimes with months of notice and sometimes without. Where a state publishes a discounted rate for timely filing, we record the discounted figure and note the deadline, because that is what a reader who files on time actually pays.
If you find a figure here that disagrees with what a state charged you, we want to know. Corrections to this dataset get applied at the source and propagate to every page that cites them.
Each state guide carries the filing fee, the report fee and its frequency, any entity tax, the form name, and the processing time, along with what happens if you operate there without registering. Start with the state directory, or read what the penalties look like if you are already operating unregistered.
If you are working out whether you need to register in a second state at all, the foreign qualification guide covers what counts as doing business. If registration is settled and you need an agent in the new state, our pricing comparison covers what the major providers charge.