Cost to Start a Business in 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Mia Scarlett | Last updated: August 11, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Prices verified on August 11, 2026. Every government fee in this report was retrieved from a state or federal source during production. Vendor prices were retrieved from the vendor’s own page. Where a price could not be retrieved from a primary source, it is marked as unverified and excluded from every calculation.
Quick Answer: How Much Does It Cost to Start a Business?
Forming a domestic single-member LLC costs between $100 and $500 in one-time state filing fees across the seven states verified for this report. That number is misleading. Measured over the first 24 months, including every mandatory renewal and flat entity tax, the same seven states range from $220 in Wyoming to $1,690 in California. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the median 24-month mandatory government cost is $402.50, and the formation filing fee accounts for just 4.1% of California’s total.
Key Findings
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, the mandatory 24-month government cost of a domestic single-member LLC ranges from $220 in Wyoming to $1,690 in California, a spread of 7.7 to 1 across seven verified states, as of August 11, 2026.
- Delaware raised its annual LLC tax from $300 to $400 under House Bill 400, signed May 21, 2026, and the current Division of Corporations formation packet (revised 8/2026) already states the $400 figure.
- California’s $70 Articles of Organization fee is 4.1% of the state’s $1,690 two-year mandatory cost, a 24.1 to 1 multiple between sticker price and real cost.
- Massachusetts is the only state in this set where the annual report costs exactly as much as formation itself, at $500 each, per the Secretary of the Commonwealth fee for a Certificate of Organization.
- An Employer Identification Number costs $0 from the Internal Revenue Service, which warns directly on its application page against sites that charge for it.
What Does It Actually Cost to Start a Business in 2026?
Ask that question of ten sites and you get ten averages, none of them traceable. The averages are the problem. A freelance designer registering in Wyoming and a restaurant group incorporating in Massachusetts are not in the same cost universe, and no blended national figure serves either of them.
So this report does something narrower and more useful. It prices one specific, extremely common configuration: a domestic single-member LLC, formed by the owner without a lawyer, filed by the standard method, with no expedited processing and no optional certificates. Every fee below was pulled from the state’s own document. Then it extends the clock to 24 months, because the interesting money is not in the filing fee.
The Federal Reserve’s 2026 Report on Employer Firms, drawn from 6,525 responses to the 2025 Small Business Credit Survey, found that 60% of small employer firms applied for financing in the prior 12 months, most commonly to cover operating expenses. Only 42% of applicants received the full amount they sought and 22% received none. Founders who model the filing fee and stop there are the ones who discover the rest of the bill at the moment they have the least room to absorb it.
Mia Scarlett: The filing fee is the number every formation service advertises because it is the number they can beat. Nobody advertises the second annual report. Read the state’s fee schedule the way you would read a lease, and the recurring line is the one that decides what the entity costs you.
LLC Filing Fees by State: The Verified Price Table
Every row below carries the date it was verified and the document it came from. Where a state charges a card convenience fee on top of the statutory fee, that is stated rather than folded in.
| State | Formation filing fee | Mandatory extras at formation | Recurring mandatory cost | Verified | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wyoming | $100 | none | $60 per year minimum annual report license tax | 2026-08-11 | Wyoming Secretary of State fee schedule |
| Delaware | $110 | none | $400 per year annual tax, due June 1 | 2026-08-11 | Delaware Division of Corporations LLC formation packet, rev. 8/2026 |
| Florida | $125 ($100 filing + $25 registered agent designation) | none | $138.75 per year annual report, due May 1 | 2026-08-11 | Florida Division of Corporations, Sunbiz annual report help |
| New York | $200 | $50 Certificate of Publication, plus newspaper publication (see below) | $9 biennial statement | 2026-08-11 | New York Department of State |
| Texas | $300 | none | none for entities below the franchise tax threshold | 2026-08-11 | Texas Secretary of State, Form 205 instructions |
| Massachusetts | $500 ($520 filed online) | none | $500 per year annual report ($520 online) | 2026-08-11 | Massachusetts General Laws ch. 156C, s. 12 |
| California | $70 | $20 initial Statement of Information, due within 90 days | $800 per year annual tax, plus $20 biennial Statement of Information | 2026-08-11 | California Secretary of State fee schedule; Franchise Tax Board |
The California figures come from two separate agencies, which is exactly why founders miss half of them. The $70 Articles of Organization fee and the $20 Statement of Information sit on the California Secretary of State Business Entities fee schedule. The $800 sits with a different agency entirely: the Franchise Tax Board states that every LLC doing business or organized in California owes an annual tax of $800, payable whether or not the business trades. The first-year exemption that ran for tax years 2021 through 2023 has lapsed, so a business formed in 2026 owes it in year one.
Texas publishes its number in the filing instructions themselves. Form 205 states a $300 filing fee and adds that card payments carry a statutorily authorized convenience fee of 2.7%, which puts a card-paid Texas formation at $308.10 rather than $300.
The Delaware Number Almost Every Cost Guide Still Has Wrong
The Delaware Division of Corporations LLC formation packet, revision 8/2026, states plainly that the fee to file the Certificate of Formation is $110 and that annual taxes of $400 are due by June 1.
Four hundred, not three hundred. House Bill 400, introduced in April 2026 and signed May 21, raised the annual tax on LLCs, limited partnerships and general partnerships from $300 to $400, with the registered-series fee going from $75 to $100. The Delaware House Democrats announcement of the bill sets out the increases and notes that taxes and fees collected from the state’s roughly two million registered entities account for about 37% of Delaware’s total revenue.
The tax increase applies retroactively to January 1, 2026, while most filing-fee changes took effect August 1, 2026. The practical consequence is a timing trap: the payment made by June 1, 2026 covered the 2025 tax year at $300, and the first $400 bill lands June 1, 2027. According to Axis Intelligence Research, a Delaware LLC’s mandatory two-year government cost is $910 under the new schedule against $710 under the old one, a 28.2% increase for doing nothing differently.
A source disagreement we are not reconciling. Professional-services commentators reporting on HB 400 disagree on the new annual-tax cap for limited liability partnerships. Wolters Kluwer and CSC both put the cap at $180,000. Strategy Law puts it at $210,000. The figure does not affect single-member LLC costs and it is not resolvable from the sources retrieved, so both are recorded and neither is adopted.
New York’s Publication Requirement: The Cost That Has No Price List
Every other cost in this report can be read off a fee schedule. New York’s cannot, and that makes it the most interesting line in the dataset.
Under section 206 of the Limited Liability Company Law, a new New York LLC must publish notice of its formation in two newspapers designated by the county clerk, one daily and one weekly, for six consecutive weeks, then file proof. The New York Department of State charges $50 for the Certificate of Publication. The $50 is the only part of the requirement the state prices. The newspapers set their own rates, and the county clerk decides which newspapers you may use.
Published ranges for the newspaper cost, from formation-industry sources rather than any official schedule, run from roughly $200 in upstate counties to $2,500 in Manhattan. Those ranges disagree with each other substantially: one source puts the national range at $300 to $1,500, another at $1,200 to $2,000, a third at $1,500 to $2,500 for New York County specifically. The high end is 12.5 times the low end.
According to Axis Intelligence Research, this is the only mandatory formation cost in the seven states studied that cannot be verified from a public fee schedule before it is incurred, and for that reason it is excluded from the index below and reported separately as a range with its basis stated. A founder in New York County should budget for it as a four-figure item and get written quotes from the two assigned newspapers before filing, because the assignment is made by county and cannot be shopped.
The rest of New York is cheap by comparison. The Articles of Organization fee is $200 and the biennial statement fee is $9, which is the lowest recurring state obligation in the set.
The Business Launch Compliance Index (BLCI™)
Sticker prices mislead because they measure a single transaction in a relationship that has a renewal schedule. So Axis Intelligence Research built a measure of the relationship.
BLCI™ — Business Launch Compliance Index. BLCI measures the total mandatory government cost of forming and maintaining a domestic single-member LLC over its first 24 months, indexed so that the median state in the panel reads 100.
Formula, disclosed in full:
M24(state) = F + E + (R x C)
F = formation filing fee (statutory, standard processing, no expedite)
E = mandatory formation-stage extras (initial list, state business
license, initial statement of information, publication certificate)
R = each mandatory recurring obligation (annual report, flat entity
tax, license renewal)
C = number of times each obligation accrues within 24 months
(2 for annual, 1 for biennial)
BLCI(state) = M24(state) / median[M24(panel)] x 100
Excluded by design: registered agent service, expedited processing, optional certified copies, name reservation, card convenience fees, local and industry licensing, income-scaled taxes, and any cost a founder can choose not to incur. BLCI prices the obligation, not the shopping list.
Panel: California, Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Wyoming. Baseline: median M24 of the panel = $402.50 (Florida). Snapshot date: August 11, 2026.
| Rank | State | One-time at formation | Recurring in 24 months | M24 total | BLCI™ | RCS™ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wyoming | $100.00 | $120.00 | $220.00 | 54.7 | 54.5% |
| 2 | New York | $250.00 | $9.00 | $259.00 | 64.3 | 3.5% |
| 3 | Texas | $300.00 | $0.00 | $300.00 | 74.5 | 0.0% |
| 4 | Florida | $125.00 | $277.50 | $402.50 | 100.0 | 68.9% |
| 5 | Delaware | $110.00 | $800.00 | $910.00 | 226.1 | 87.9% |
| 6 | Massachusetts | $500.00 | $1,000.00 | $1,500.00 | 372.7 | 66.7% |
| 7 | California | $90.00 | $1,600.00 | $1,690.00 | 419.9 | 94.7% |
New York excludes newspaper publication, which is quote-based. Including a mid-range New York County publication quote would move New York from 64.3 to above 400.
This is the baseline reading of BLCI. There is no prior series to compare it against, and it does not claim one.
RCS™: Recurring Cost Share
RCS™ — Recurring Cost Share is the second column of the same arithmetic and, for most founders, the more actionable one.
RCS(state) = (M24 - one-time formation-stage fees) / M24 x 100
RCS answers a question no state publishes: how much of the two-year bill is the part that never stops. Texas reads 0.0%, because a small Texas LLC below the franchise tax threshold pays once and is done. California reads 94.7%, because the $70 everyone quotes is almost none of the money.
According to Axis Intelligence Research, the two states with the lowest formation fees in the panel, California at $70 and Delaware at $110, carry the two highest recurring cost shares, at 94.7% and 87.9%. Low entry price and high ownership cost are not a coincidence in state fee design; they are the design.
Where the Panel Stops
The index covers seven states because seven states published fee documents that could be retrieved and read during production. Nevada was researched and then dropped: its widely reported first-year total of $425 (Articles of Organization $75, Initial List $150, State Business License $200) and $350 annual renewal are consistent across every secondary source checked, but no Nevada Secretary of State fee document could be retrieved from a state source in this session. Rather than seed a proprietary index with a number we did not read ourselves, Nevada waits for the next revision. The same applies to the remaining 42 states and the District of Columbia.
Fully Loaded: What the First 24 and 60 Months Actually Cost
The government fee is the floor. Above it sit choices, and choices are where the fully loaded number is built. Here is the arithmetic laid out so it can be checked.
The Government Floor at 1, 2 and 5 Years
| State | Year 1 mandatory | 24 months | 60 months |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wyoming | $160.00 | $220.00 | $400.00 |
| New York (excl. publication) | $250.00 | $259.00 | $272.50 |
| Texas | $300.00 | $300.00 | $300.00 |
| Florida | $125.00 | $402.50 | $818.75 |
| Delaware | $110.00 | $910.00 | $2,110.00 |
| Massachusetts | $1,000.00 | $1,500.00 | $3,000.00 |
| California | $890.00 | $1,690.00 | $4,090.00 |
Five-year math, shown: California = $70 formation + $20 initial statement + ($800 x 5) = $4,090. Wyoming = $100 + ($60 x 5) = $400. According to Axis Intelligence Research, a California LLC and a Wyoming LLC that do exactly the same amount of business will have paid their respective states $4,090 and $400 over five years, a 10.2 to 1 gap that has nothing to do with revenue, headcount, or activity.
That gap is why founders ask whether to form somewhere cheaper. The answer is usually no: operating in a state you did not form in generally triggers foreign qualification in the operating state, which means paying that state’s fees anyway on top of the formation state’s. The cost you were trying to avoid arrives with a second registered agent attached.
Mia Scarlett: Delaware is worth its price when the legal infrastructure is the product you are buying, which is to say when you are raising institutional money and your investors expect the Court of Chancery. For a two-person consultancy operating entirely in Ohio, Delaware is a $2,110 five-year subscription to a courtroom nobody will ever visit.
Above the Floor
Three costs are effectively unavoidable for a real operating business and are not government fees.
Registered agent. Required in every state, and you can serve as your own if you are willing to put your home address in a permanent public record and be present during business hours. Northwest Registered Agent prices formation at a flat $39 plus state fees with the first year of registered agent service included. Renewal pricing across the category, drawn from formation-industry comparisons rather than vendor pages, clusters between $100 and $300 per year, with disagreement even on individual vendors: LegalZoom’s registered agent renewal is reported as both $249 and $299 by different comparison sites, which is a 20% spread on a recurring line item.
Employer Identification Number: $0. The Internal Revenue Service issues an EIN free and states on its own application page that you never have to pay a fee for one, with an explicit warning about sites that charge. Third-party EIN filing services price the same Form SS-4 submission between $50 and $300. The only defensible reason to pay is a foreign-owned entity with no responsible party holding a Social Security number or ITIN, where the application must be faxed or mailed.
Operating agreement. Not filed with the state anywhere in the panel, and free as a template. It becomes a real cost the moment there is more than one member and the profit split is not equal.
The Software Stack: Prices We Publish and Prices We Will Not
The second half of a founder’s launch budget is subscriptions, and this is where price verification gets uncomfortable.
Axis Intelligence Research attempted to verify list pricing for the standard early-stage stack directly from each vendor’s pricing page. Google Workspace failed verification. The Google Workspace pricing page renders plan prices client-side; the served document contains the plan structure, the 300-user cap on Business tiers, the storage allowances, and the statement that an annual commitment saves 16%, but the per-seat dollar figures are not present in the retrieved page.
Three independent pricing trackers checked during production report Business Starter on annual commitment at $7.00, $7.20 and $8.00 per user per month. That is a 14% spread on the single most common line item in a startup’s software budget. Axis Intelligence Research does not publish a Google Workspace price, does not average the three, and does not include the tool in any total below. A figure a buyer cannot confirm before purchase is not a price; it is an estimate wearing a price tag.
This matters more than it sounds. A subscription price that cannot be retrieved from a served page also cannot be tracked over time, which means per-seat software inflation across a stack is unmeasurable from public sources. It is one of the few categories in modern business costs where the buyer has less price information than the buyer of a used car.
What can be stated: the vendor-verified items in the launch stack are the ones with a static published number. Formation at $39 plus state fees, an EIN at $0, and the state fee schedules above are the verified spine of a launch budget. Everything else should be quoted, screenshotted, and dated at the moment of purchase.
What Moves the Price
Five variables account for nearly all the variance between a $400 launch and a $4,000 one.
Entity type. The panel prices LLCs. Corporations diverge sharply: Nevada’s state business license is $200 for an LLC and $500 for a profit corporation; Florida charges $70 to file Articles of Incorporation against $125 for an LLC but $150 for the corporate annual report against $138.75. The cheaper filing is not the cheaper entity.
The state you operate in, not the one you form in. Foreign qualification stacks a second state’s fees on the first. This is the single most common expensive mistake in the category.
Filing method. Massachusetts adds $20 to file online or by fax. Texas adds 2.7% for card payment. Wyoming adds a processor convenience fee online. California charges $350 to $750 for expedited service and $250 to $500 for preclearance, per its fee schedule. None of these are in BLCI, and all of them are real.
Timing. Delaware’s LLC tax rose 33% for tax year 2026 with the first bill arriving June 2027. Florida’s annual report costs $138.75 through May 1 and $538.75 on May 2, a $400 penalty with no waiver provision. The deadline is a price.
Publication and licensing. New York’s publication requirement, and local and industry licensing everywhere, are the two categories that turn a modeled cost into a wrong one.
Buying Guidance: How to Price Your Own Launch
Work in this order and the number you get will be defensible.
- Pull your state’s own fee schedule and read it, not a summary of it. Every figure in this report came from a document a founder can open in ninety seconds. The gap between what state documents say and what aggregators say is the entire finding of the Delaware section above.
- Price 24 months, not one. Multiply every recurring obligation by two and add it to the filing fee before you decide anything. If the recurring share of your two-year cost is above 60%, you are buying a subscription, not paying a fee.
- Get the EIN yourself. It takes about fifteen minutes and costs nothing.
- Decide on the registered agent as a renewal decision. The first year is frequently free or bundled. The renewal is the price. Compare year two through year five, not year one.
- Quote the unquotable items in writing. In New York, that is the two assigned newspapers. Everywhere, that is local licensing.
- Screenshot and date every vendor price you rely on. If a vendor’s price is not in the served page, it is not a price you can hold them to.
Founders modeling the wider picture should read this alongside our business formation statistics analysis for application and formation volumes, startup statistics for funding access, and startup failure rate statistics for survival curves by cohort. Broader operating benchmarks sit in our small business statistics and business operating costs statistics pages, and stage-by-stage capital requirements in startup funding statistics by stage.
Methodology
Scope. One entity configuration: a domestic single-member limited liability company, formed by its owner, standard processing, no expedited service, no optional certificates, no professional fees.
Retrieval. Every government fee was retrieved on August 11, 2026 from a state or federal source: the California Secretary of State Business Entities fee schedule and the California Franchise Tax Board; the Texas Secretary of State Form 205 instructions; the New York Department of State formation, publication and biennial statement pages; the Delaware Division of Corporations Certificate of Formation packet (rev. 8/2026); the Florida Division of Corporations Sunbiz annual report help; the Wyoming Secretary of State business fee schedule and business FAQ; and, for Massachusetts, the statutory fee at General Laws ch. 156C, s. 12 as confirmed against a vendor filing page.
Construction. BLCI™ and RCS™ are computed by the formulas printed above from the fee values in the table above. Every arithmetic step was run programmatically. The index is baselined to the panel median rather than to a fixed dollar amount so that it stays readable as states are added.
Vendor prices. Retrieved from the vendor’s own page where possible. Prices that could not be retrieved from a served vendor page are named as unverified, attributed to their reporting source, excluded from every calculation, and marked in the dataset.
Source disagreements are recorded rather than reconciled. Three appear in this report: the HB 400 partnership tax cap, the LegalZoom registered agent renewal, and Google Workspace list pricing.
Scope and Caveats
BLCI prices legal obligation, not the cost of running a business. It excludes registered agent service, professional fees, local and industry licensing, income-scaled taxes such as California’s LLC fee tiers that begin at $900 above $250,000 in California income, and every discretionary purchase. It covers seven states and one entity type. It is a snapshot, not a series: this is its baseline reading, and it makes no claim about direction until there is a second one. New York’s index value understates that state’s real position because the publication requirement has no public price.
About This Dataset
cost-to-start-a-business62026.csv contains every figure in this report, one observation per row, with source organization, source document, URL, retrieval date, primary-source flag, an Axis-calculated flag and a method note for every derived value.
Coverage: United States; seven states plus federal; fee schedules and vendor list prices current as of August 11, 2026.
License: CC BY 4.0
Format: UTF-8, comma-separated, single header row, ISO 8601 dates, raw numeric values with units in a separate column.
Distribution: Hugging Face, Kaggle and GitHub, in addition to direct download.
Cite as:
APA — Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Cost to start a business in 2026: Verified state fees and the Business Launch Compliance Index. https://axis-intelligence.com/cost-to-start-a-business/
MLA — Axis Intelligence Research. “Cost to Start a Business in 2026: Verified State Fees and the Business Launch Compliance Index.” Axis Intelligence, 11 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/cost-to-start-a-business/.
Chicago — Axis Intelligence Research. “Cost to Start a Business in 2026: Verified State Fees and the Business Launch Compliance Index.” Axis Intelligence, August 11, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/cost-to-start-a-business/.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the state filing fee the same as the cost to start a business?
No, and treating it that way is the most expensive assumption in the category. The filing fee is one transaction. According to Axis Intelligence Research, recurring obligations account for 94.7% of California’s mandatory two-year government cost and 87.9% of Delaware’s. In Texas they account for 0%. The filing fee tells you almost nothing about which of those three you are signing up for.
Should I form my LLC in Delaware or Wyoming if I operate somewhere else?
Only if you have a reason beyond price. Operating in a state you did not form in generally requires foreign qualification there, which means paying the operating state’s formation-equivalent fee, maintaining a registered agent in both states, and filing in both. The five-year Delaware government cost is $2,110 against Wyoming’s $400, and neither number includes the second state you will still owe. Delaware earns its premium when institutional investors require it.
What is the difference between an annual report fee and a franchise tax?
An annual report fee buys the filing that keeps your entity information current with the Secretary of State. A franchise tax or annual entity tax is a charge for the privilege of existing as an entity, collected by the revenue agency, and owed whether or not you traded. California illustrates the split precisely: the $20 Statement of Information goes to the Secretary of State, the $800 annual tax goes to the Franchise Tax Board, and missing either has different consequences. Delaware LLCs pay the tax and file no annual report at all.
How much should I budget for New York’s LLC publication requirement?
Get quotes before you file rather than budgeting from a published range, because there is no official schedule and the county clerk assigns which two newspapers you must use. Industry-reported ranges run from roughly $200 in upstate counties to $2,500 in Manhattan, and those sources disagree with each other by a factor of up to 12.5. The only state-set component is the $50 Certificate of Publication fee. Failure to complete publication within 120 days suspends the LLC’s authority to conduct business in New York.
Do I need to pay anyone to get an EIN?
No. The IRS issues it free and posts a warning on its own application page about sites that charge for it. Services quote $50 to $300 to submit the identical Form SS-4. The one case where paying is defensible is a foreign-owned entity whose responsible party has no Social Security number or ITIN, because the online tool is unavailable and the application must be faxed or mailed.
Which state is cheapest to keep an LLC alive?
Of the seven states verified here, Texas over five years, at $300 total for a business below the franchise tax threshold, because the recurring obligation is zero. Wyoming is cheapest to enter at $160 in year one and cheapest overall among states that do charge annually, at $400 over five years. The ranking flips depending on horizon, which is why a single-year comparison is close to useless.
What happens if I miss an annual report deadline?
It varies enough to matter to your budget. Florida adds a flat $400 late fee on May 2 with no waiver provision, taking the annual report from $138.75 to $538.75, and administratively dissolves non-filers by the third Friday in September. Delaware adds a $200 penalty plus 1.5% monthly interest on both tax and penalty. Massachusetts has no late fee but can administratively dissolve after two consecutive missed years. The penalty structure, not the fee, is the real compliance cost.
Does forming a corporation instead of an LLC cost more?
Not uniformly, and the cheaper filing is frequently the more expensive entity. Florida charges $70 to incorporate against $125 for an LLC, then $150 for the corporate annual report against $138.75. Nevada’s state business license is $500 per year for a profit corporation against $200 for an LLC. Price the entity across the same 24-month window before choosing, using the formula disclosed above.
Why does this report cover only seven states?
Because seven state fee documents could be retrieved and read during production. Nevada was researched, found consistent across secondary sources at $425 in year one and $350 annually, and excluded anyway because no state-published fee document could be retrieved in this session. Seeding a proprietary index with figures we did not read ourselves would make every reading built on it unverifiable.
Editorial independence: Vendor orderings and verdicts in this report are independent of any commercial relationship. Affiliate links, where present, are labelled, and no vendor paid for inclusion, position, or the outcome of price verification.