SHEET IN-01 · FORMATION DOSSIER

Indiana

Form an LLC in Indiana 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: $95
Total with Formation Complete: $494
Annual duty cost: $15.5/yr
Report pattern: Business Entity Report due every other year (biennial) in the anniversary month in which the en

On fee alone, Indiana is the 15th 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 Indiana LLC by filing Articles of Organization with the Indiana Secretary of State, Business Services Division. The state fee is $95, 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. Quirk confirmed: biennial, not annual, for for-profit entities (nonprofits file annually).

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 Indiana Secretary of State, Business Services Division. A name that implies a regulated activity (banking, insurance, trust) or a government affiliation invites rejection or a consent requirement in Indiana 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

Indiana 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 Indiana Secretary of State, Business Services Division. The formation document is the Articles of Organization; most Indiana filings can be made online, and online filings are acknowledged faster than paper ones as a rule. Indiana publishes no standard processing time for LLC formation and offers no paid expedite for it — the Secretary of State's INBiz pages state neither a turnaround nor a rush tier (checked 2026-11-05) — so this sheet prints no day-count for Indiana. (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 Indiana 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 Indiana

Report must include registered agent information required by IC 23-0.5-4-3(b); entity maintains a commercial or noncommercial registered agent with an Indiana address who has consented to appointment (SOS business entity report/form)

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 Indianapolis 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

Biennial report — Business Entity Report due every other year (biennial) in the anniversary month in which the entity was originally created; may be submitted up to 90 days before the due month — $31.

Pattern cell = the duty follows your formation anniversary or fiscal year rather than a fixed statewide date — the date is set by your own formation record.

The recurring duty is the line that decides what Indiana costs you in year three, not just year one. Biennial report — Business Entity Report due every other year (biennial) in the anniversary month in which the entity was originally created; may be submitted up to 90 days before the due month — $31. Priced into the five-year table on this sheet at $15.5 a year (annualised), it is the difference between a cheap formation and a cheap company.

If it is late. The Secretary of State publishes no late fee for this report; $31 is the online for-profit fee, paper filing is $50

If the duty is missed altogether. SOS will administratively dissolve or revoke the entity for failure to timely submit; SOS states after five months overdue the business will be administratively dissolved, with reinstatement possible if less than 5 years since dissolution

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	$494	$399 package + $95 state fee; agent year 1 included
By end of year 2	$658.5	Year 1 + $149 agent renewal + $15.5 state duty
By end of year 5	$1,152	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.

Where Indiana sits in this Atlas: 15th of 49 by formation fee ($95), and 18th by the five-year cost of ownership ($1,152). The year-one total of $494 is the $399 package with the state fee passed through at cost; after that, the meter runs at the $149 yearly agent renewal plus the state duty of $15.50 a year. The state duty itself makes up 5.4% of the five-year total; the rest is the package and the registered-agent renewal. That sits below the Atlas median five-year cost of $1,260. Judged on five years instead of filing day, Indiana is one of the cheaper states to keep — and that longer view is the one a non-resident owner actually lives with.

Non-resident specifics in Indiana

Indiana’s recurring state cost for a domestic LLC is the duty on this sheet — Biennial report — Business Entity Report due every other year (biennial) in the anniversary month in which the entity was originally created; may be…. Two cautions decide whether that stays the whole story. First, tax follows activity, not paperwork: if your customers, property or people are in another state, that state can require foreign qualification there and tax the activity there, whatever this sheet says. Second, an LLC is a state-law shell around a federal tax position: a foreign-owned single-member LLC is disregarded for federal income tax by default, which is exactly the status that carries the Form 5472 duty described in the non-resident section below — the state choice does not change it.

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 Indiana 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 Indiana; “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 Indiana in the Atlas

Sources: formation fee and duty verified against official state sources — Indiana Secretary of State, Business Services Division: https://www.in.gov/sos/business/files/20250326-IR-075250155FNA.pdf · duty record: https://www.in.gov/sos/business/business-entity-reports/ · fees verified 2026-11-03, duties verified 2026-11-04. Federal figures (Form 5472 penalty) per IRS instructions for Form 5472.