The full Ohio LLC cost table
| Cost | Amount | Required? |
|---|---|---|
| Ohio state filing fee | $99 one-time | Yes |
| Recurring state cost | None — no annual report | Yes |
| Registered agent | $0 as your own agent, or ~$125/yr for a service | Yes (one or the other) |
| EIN (federal tax ID) | $0 direct from the IRS | Usually |
| First-year total | $99 as your own agent · $224 with a service | — |
| Five-year total | $99 as your own agent · $724 with a service | — |
One fee, ever
The Articles of Organization cost $99, filed with the Secretary of State. And then Ohio does something almost no state its size does: it never bills your LLC again. No annual report, no biennial statement, no franchise tax, no minimum tax. The only standing obligation is keeping a statutory agent on record — Ohio's name for a registered agent — which is free if you serve yourself. Among the ten most-populous states, none matches this; the next-cheapest big states still charge $25–$70 a year just to stay registered. An Ohio LLC left quietly running for a decade owes the state exactly what it owed on day one: nothing further.
The gross-receipts asterisk that mostly doesn't apply
Ohio's Commercial Activity Tax (CAT) is the caveat honest guides must mention and most small LLCs can ignore: since 2025, businesses with $6 million or less in taxable gross receipts are excluded entirely — no CAT owed, no CAT return filed. Cross that line and congratulations are more appropriate than sympathy. Owners pay Ohio personal income tax on pass-through profits, softened by the state's business-income deduction (the first $250,000 of business income is deductible for most joint filers, with a flat 3% above it). The practical summary: for a small business, Ohio's entire recurring compliance burden is remembering that you have none.
Our LLC cost calculator computes first-year and five-year totals for all 51 jurisdictions from the same verified dataset as this page — including Ohio — and the full table is downloadable as CSV.