SHEET FL-01 · FORMATION DOSSIER

Florida

Form an LLC in Florida as a non-resident: the verified state fee, the duty that follows you every year, the agent rule, and the traps that are specific to this state — each figure sourced on this sheet.

State formation fee: $125
Total with Formation Complete: $524
Annual duty cost: $138.75/yr
Report pattern: Annual report due by May 1 of each year (filing window January 1-May 1; check/money order payme

On fee alone, Florida is the 30th cheapest of the 49 jurisdictions in this Atlas to form in. Fee is the smallest part of the decision — the duty below is the part that repeats.

What it takes here

You form a Florida LLC by filing Articles of Organization with the Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations. The state fee is $125, collected by us at cost as a pass-through — the state keeps its fee; our $399 is separate and labelled as ours on the pricing page. The Sunbiz (Florida Division of Corporations) annual report instructions list the LLC fee ($138.75 by May 1) alongside the corporation fees and apply the $400 late fee and September dissolution rule to LLCs and profit corporations.

Name rules

Your company name must contain a limited-liability designator — “Limited Liability Company” or an accepted abbreviation such as “LLC” — and must be distinguishable from names already on the records of the Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations. A name that implies a regulated activity (banking, insurance, trust) or a government affiliation invites rejection or a consent requirement in Florida as in most states. For a non-resident there is a second, quieter naming point: the name on the Articles of Organization is the name the IRS will print on your EIN confirmation (the CP 575), and it is the name your bank and payment processors will match against your documents. Pick the final name before filing; amending it later is a second state filing with a second fee.

Publication

Florida imposes no newspaper-publication requirement on a new LLC. The publication duty that founders read about belongs to a small set of states — New York, Arizona and Nebraska are the ones in this Atlas — and it does not travel with you if you form here.

Forms, office and processing

The filing office is the Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations. The formation document is the Articles of Organization; most Florida filings can be made online, and online filings are acknowledged faster than paper ones as a rule. Florida publishes a queue, not a promise: the Division of Corporations' Document Processing Dates page (updated 2026-11-04 when checked for this sheet) showed new online entity filings received 10/31–11/02/2026 being processed and mail filings received 10/29/2026 — a lag of a few business days that moves with volume. There is no paid expedite. (Processing source: the office’s own page — checked 2026-11-05.) What we commit to in writing, before anything is filed, is the fee, the duty and the due pattern on this sheet.

The foreign-registration warning

Forming in Florida does not licence you to operate everywhere. If your LLC will have an office, employees, inventory or a sustained physical presence in another state, that state will generally require foreign qualification there — a second registration, a second agent and a second set of duties, on top of this one. Non-residents most often trip on this by forming in a low-fee state while living-adjacent operations, warehousing or staff sit somewhere else. The state of formation should follow the business, not the other way round; the diagnostic on this site asks where your customers and operations are for exactly this reason.

Your registered agent in Florida

A registered agent name and address is required; the agent may be an individual or a registered business entity, an entity cannot serve as its own agent, and the registered office must be a Florida street address (post office box not acceptable); a new agent must electronically sign/accept the designation

Formation Complete includes the registered agent for year one. From year two the renewal is $149 a year — the same figure on every sheet in this Atlas, because the agent’s job (a real address, a person or service that can receive process, and forwarding that actually reaches a founder overseas) costs the same diligence in Tallahassee as anywhere else. If you move the agent elsewhere, the duty calendar below does not move with it: the report duty belongs to the LLC, not to the agent.

Duty calendar

Annual report — Annual report due by May 1 of each year (filing window January 1-May 1; check/money order payment voucher must be postmarked on or before May 1) — $138.75.

Filled cell = a month in which this state’s duty falls due.

The recurring duty is the line that decides what Florida costs you in year three, not just year one. Annual report — Annual report due by May 1 of each year (filing window January 1-May 1; check/money order payment voucher must be postmarked on or before May 1) — $138.75. Priced into the five-year table on this sheet at $138.75 a year (annualised), it is the difference between a cheap formation and a cheap company.

If it is late. $400 late fee if filed after May 1; there is no provision to abate or waive the $400 late fee

If the duty is missed altogether. Failure to file by the 3rd Friday of September results in administrative dissolution or revocation at the close of business on the 4th Friday of September; reinstatement is available on application with fees due

Cost of ownership

Formation Complete $399 one-time + state fee at cost; agent renewal $149/yr from year 2; state duty annualised from the verified figure on this sheet.
Horizon	Total paid	What it contains
Year 1	$524	$399 package + $125 state fee; agent year 1 included
By end of year 2	$811.75	Year 1 + $149 agent renewal + $138.75 state duty
By end of year 5	$1,675	Year 1 + four renewals + four years of state duty

Compare that five-year figure, not the formation fee, against any other state you are considering — the compare tray in the Atlas does it side by side for up to three states. A state that is $100 cheaper to form and $300 a year heavier to keep is the expensive state.

The Atlas arithmetic for Florida: formation fee $125 (30th of 49), year one $524 including the $399 Formation Complete package, five years $1,675 (41st of 49). Between year one and year five the only recurring items are the $149 agent renewal and the state duty of $138.75 a year. The state duty itself makes up 33.1% of the five-year total; the rest is the package and the registered-agent renewal. That sits above the Atlas median five-year cost of $1,260. A formation fee is a one-afternoon number; the five-year total is the cost of actually owning the company, and on that measure Florida runs above the median state.

Non-resident specifics in Florida

Florida levies no state income tax on individuals and does not tax an LLC itself; the recurring state cost is the $138.75 annual report, due May 1, with a steep $400 late fee if the report is filed after May 1 — the date discipline on the Florida sheet matters more than the fee. Florida’s popularity with non-residents rests on that simple structure: one report, one date, no state-level tax layer for a pass-through with no Florida operations.

The federal layer, which no state choice removes. A single-member LLC owned by a non-resident is, by default, a disregarded entity for US federal income tax — and since 2017 that status carries an annual information duty: Form 5472 attached to a pro-forma Form 1120, due each year the LLC exists, reporting reportable transactions with its foreign owner (funding the company counts). The penalty for a missing or late Form 5472 starts at $25,000. Multi-member LLCs are taxed as partnerships by default and file Form 1065, with their own withholding questions when US-source income reaches foreign partners. None of this is a reason not to form; all of it is a reason to form with the calendar already drawn. The EIN guide on this site walks the Form SS-4 route for founders with no SSN or ITIN, the CP 575 you receive, and the 5472 duty in full.

Address and banking reality. Your Florida LLC’s address on the state record is its registered office — the agent’s address — which is a service address, not your trading address, and should never be sold to you as one. Banks and payment processors will ask for the beneficial owner’s foreign address and passport-grade identification, and many will ask why the company sits in Florida; “my operations and customers are there” is an answer, a fee table is not. Form where the answer is true.

Plot my route — the 5-question diagnostic Compare Florida in the Atlas

Sources: formation fee and duty verified against official state sources — Florida Department of State, Division of Corporations: https://dos.fl.gov/sunbiz/forms/fees/ · duty record: https://efile.sunbiz.org/sbs_ar_instr.html · fees verified 2026-11-03, duties verified 2026-11-04. Federal figures (Form 5472 penalty) per IRS instructions for Form 5472.