If you form an LLC based on a fee table that's wrong, the consequences aren't abstract: you budget the wrong amount, you miss a filing you didn't know existed, or you pay for something that was abolished two years ago. State fees change quietly — a legislature passes a fee bill, a Secretary of State posts a new schedule, and nobody sends the internet a memo. The guides ranking at the top of Google are supposed to absorb those changes. This audit measures whether they actually do.
What we did, exactly
On August 8, 2026 we captured the state-by-state LLC fee tables published by five widely-read sites: LLC University (llcuniversity.com, table dated June 10, 2026), ZenBusiness (zenbusiness.com, dated February 18, 2026), Chamber of Commerce (chamberofcommerce.org, undated), llc.org (dated February 18, 2026) and WorldPopulationReview (worldpopulationreview.com, undated). That's 253 published figures across formation fees and recurring state fees.
We diffed every figure against our own verified dataset — the one behind our LLC cost calculator, where each figure carries the official source it was checked against and the date it was checked. Then the important step: every disagreement was re-verified against the official state source before we called anything an error. Where a difference came down to defensible framing rather than fact — a site quoting fees with card-processing surcharges included, or a paper fee versus an online fee — we classified it as methodology, not error, and it does not count in any total below.
Three fairness rules we set before starting: figures are wrong only if they contradict the official source as of the capture date (sites may have fixed them since — good); any state where the official record is itself ambiguous is excluded from every site's count, including ours; and anything the audit caught on our site gets published here with the same prominence as everyone else's mistakes.
Start with what we got wrong
The audit's first confirmed error was ours. Delaware's House Bill 400, signed May 21, 2026, raised the LLC annual tax from $300 to $400 — confirmed on the Division of Corporations' official tax instructions page. Our Delaware page still said $300, and worse, we had recently "re-verified" that figure from cached search snippets rather than the live official page. LLC University, to its credit, was the only site in this audit with the new $400 figure — they had it before we did. We corrected every affected page the day we found it.
The verification round then caught a second one: we quoted Georgia's formation fee as $110, which is the paper fee. Per georgia.gov, filing online costs a flat $100 — and since our policy is to quote what an online filer actually pays, our figure was wrong by our own standard. Also fixed the same day.
We're leading with our own mistakes for a simple reason: a fee audit from a site that claims to be perfect isn't credible, and shouldn't be. The claim we can make is narrower and more useful — every figure in our dataset now carries a named official source and a check date, our verification ledger is a permanent public record of what was checked when, and when we're wrong, we say so in public and fix it the same day.
Finding one: everyone still charges Alabama a repealed tax
Alabama used to require every LLC to pay a minimum $100 Business Privilege Tax each year. Act 2022-252 phased it out: for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2023, tax due of $100 or less is fully exempt — no payment and, per the Alabama Department of Revenue, no return to file. Since 2024, LLCs also no longer file the Secretary of State annual report that used to ride along with it — that requirement now applies to corporations.
In other words: a typical small Alabama LLC has owed the state nothing per year since 2024. Yet as of our capture date, LLC University, Chamber of Commerce and llc.org all still quote $50 a year, and WorldPopulationReview quotes $165. Two full years after the repeal, not one of the four sites that publishes an Alabama annual fee has it right.
Finding two: Kansas cut its fee 47% — four of five sites didn't notice
Effective February 27, 2026, Kansas cut its LLC formation fee from $160 to $85 and moved reports to a $90 biennial cycle. It was one of the biggest state-fee changes in years — the kind of thing a fee guide exists to catch.
Six months later: LLC University ($160, on a table dated June 10 — updated after the cut), Chamber of Commerce ($160, plus a biennial fee that's also wrong), llc.org ($160) and WorldPopulationReview ($160) all still show the old fee. Only ZenBusiness has $85.
Finding three: the statistics site journalists cite is wrong on 45 of 51 rows
WorldPopulationReview ranks on page one for state-comparison searches and gets cited by newsrooms as a data source. Its LLC cost table diverged from official figures on 45 of 51 jurisdictions. We only counted the unambiguous ones, and they include:
| State | WorldPopulationReview says | Official figure |
|---|---|---|
| Illinois — formation | $500 | $150 (Articles of Organization, ilsos.gov) |
| Illinois — annual report | $305 | $75 |
| New Mexico — annual fee | $100/yr | $0 — New Mexico has no annual report at all, which is the state's defining feature |
| Pennsylvania — annual | $125, "renews every 10 years" | $7 annual report — the decennial filing was replaced in 2025 |
| Ohio — annual fee | $125/yr | $0 — Ohio has no annual report |
| Minnesota — annual fee | $160/yr | $0 — the renewal is free |
| Connecticut | $175 filing / $20 annual | $120 filing / $80 annual |
| Kentucky — formation | $55 | $40 |
| Montana — formation | $70 | $35 |
| Missouri / South Carolina / Idaho — annual | $58 / $135 / $101 | $0 in all three |
A reader using that table would believe Illinois costs more than three times its real fee, that three no-annual-report states charge three-figure annual fees, and that New Mexico — the cheapest state in the country to maintain an LLC — bills $100 a year. If you've seen these numbers quoted in an article, this is probably where they came from.
Site by site
| Site | Confirmed wrong figures | The ones that matter |
|---|---|---|
| WorldPopulationReview | 20+ (45 rows diverge; we counted only slam-dunks) | Illinois $500; phantom annual fees in NM, OH, MN, MO, SC, ID; Pennsylvania on a 10-year cycle |
| Chamber of Commerce (chamberofcommerce.org) | 8 | California's ongoing cost shown as roughly $10 a year — the $800 annual franchise tax is simply absent; Nevada at $75, omitting the mandatory bundle that makes forming cost $425; Delaware filing $90 (it's $110); Kansas; Alabama; Vermont pre-increase |
| llc.org | 8 | Kansas $160; Alabama $50; Colorado annual $10 (raised to $25 in 2024); Vermont $125/$35 (now $155/$45); "$7 every 10 years" for Pennsylvania |
| LLC University | 6 | New Jersey $100 (officially $125 — on a page updated July 10, 2026); Louisiana $125 (officially $100); Kansas $160 on a June 2026 table; Washington annual $60 (now $70). Credit where due: the only site with Delaware's new $400 tax — ahead of us. |
| ZenBusiness | 0 | Quotes fees with mandatory processing surcharges folded in — a methodology choice, disclosed, and internally consistent. Kansas correct at $85. |
Two honest caveats on the scoreboard. These are errors as of August 8, 2026 — any site may have corrected them since, and we hope they do. And an error count is not a quality ranking: LLC University's six errors sit inside by far the most detailed per-state coverage of the group, and they caught Delaware's increase before we did.
The one state we excluded — including from our own count
Nebraska's LLC biennial report fee is quoted as $13 by one site, $25 by ours, and $30 on the Secretary of State's own reinstatement forms — while the state's main reporting page states no figure at all. When the official record is this inconsistent, calling anyone wrong would be dishonest, so Nebraska counts against nobody. We're resolving it directly with the Secretary of State's office, and our deadline calendar flags the figure as unconfirmed in the meantime.
Why fee tables rot
None of this is because the people behind these sites are careless. It's structural. A fee table covering 51 jurisdictions sits exposed to every legislature in the country, and fee changes don't announce themselves: Kansas's cut was in a budget bill, Alabama's repeal was a tax act phased over two years, Delaware's increase was signed in May with staggered effective dates. A table is accurate the day it's built and decays from then on — which is why every figure on this site carries the date it was last checked against the official source, and why the answer to "how do you know?" should always be a link to the state, not to another guide.
The next test is already scheduled: Louisiana raises its Commercial Division fees on October 1, 2026 under Act 921. As of our capture date, one site already quotes Louisiana's formation fee wrong in the current schedule ($125 against the official $100). We'll re-run this comparison after the Louisiana change takes effect and update this page — it will be a clean measure of how fast each table absorbs a pre-announced change.
Corrections
If you run one of the sites named here and believe a classification is unfair — or you've fixed a figure — email hello@registeredagenthub.com and we'll verify against the official source and update this page with a dated note. The same offer applies to any reader who finds an error in our tables: every figure we publish lists its official source, and we correct publicly, as the Delaware and Georgia entries above show. The full verification methodology behind our dataset is on the calculator page, and the raw fees are downloadable there as CSV under a CC-BY license.