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 | — |
Optional $100 expedite.
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.
The registered agent is the recurring cost most Ohio fee tables leave out, and it is the one line on this page you actually choose. What a registered agent costs covers how the pricing works; the cheapest option in your state covers where the floor really sits, which is lower than most tables say.