Cross-cutting

Analysis

14 questions that can only be answered by reading across all 54 jurisdictions at once. Each page is computed at build time from the same records the jurisdiction pages render, so a figure here can never drift from the figure there.

• Cost to keep an LLC aliveFormation plus mandatory first-year filings plus annual report plus the recurring entity-tax minimum, ranked cheapest to most expensive.
• Cost to keep a corporation aliveThe same model for a corporation, where the franchise-tax minimums land: formation, annual report and the recurring entity-tax floor, ranked.
• Formation fee, and what is actually remittedThe statutory fee against the amount that leaves the bank, and the surcharge column most published comparisons omit.
• The same filing as a corporationWhere the entity type changes the price, and by how much.
• Which states levy a recurring entity taxFranchise tax and its equivalents: who levies one, what the floor is, and where the record does not resolve the LLC case.
• Who mandates meetings, bylaws, and operating agreementsCorporate and LLC governance rules compared: annual meetings, written consent, and the handful of states that make an operating agreement mandatory.
• States that make you buy newspaper spaceFormation publication and DBA publication, who requires it, and what it costs.
• Where a DBA is filed, and where none existsState, county, municipal and no-mechanism regimes across 53 jurisdictions, with county-level fees for 17 states.
• Days the filing office is shut and the federal government is notState filing-office closures expressed as a delta against the federal baseline.
• What an agency status string actually means2,774 observed status strings decoded to a good-standing verdict, with the ones we refuse to guess at.
• Enacted, not yet in forceFee and tax changes already on the statute book with a future effective date.
• Which states require a general business licenseTwelve jurisdictions issue a general state business license; the rest license by occupation and locally. Fees, cadence, penalties and the local layer, each cited to the agency.
• Which filings ask for an industry codeNAICS, SIC, the state's own list, a description or nothing - read across every jurisdiction and filing type.
• What a certificate of good standing costsThe fee to prove your entity exists, ranked across 54 jurisdictions - two states charge nothing online, one charges $175, and five states call it something else entirely.

How these pages are built

Every number is arithmetic performed at build time on records held in the repository. No total, average, rank or count on any analysis page is stored anywhere; they are all recomputed from source on each build, which means a correction to one fee record propagates to every ranking that touches it without anyone remembering to update a summary. Where a computation cannot be performed for a jurisdiction, the cell is a gap with a reason, never a zero.

incFACTS, "Analysis - cross-jurisdiction findings," FACTS repository v0.10.08 (data as of 2026-09-21), https://www.incfacts.com/analysis/ (accessed 2026-09-21).

incFACTS, Analysis - cross-jurisdiction findings, https://www.incfacts.com/analysis/ (last visited 2026-09-21).

@misc{incfacts_analysis_2026,
  author = {incFACTS (FACTS repository)},
  title = {Analysis - cross-jurisdiction findings},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.incfacts.com/analysis/},
  note = {v0.10.08, data as of 2026-09-21, accessed 2026-09-21}
}