SHEET MT-01 · FORMATION DOSSIER

Montana

Form an LLC in Montana 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: $35
Total with Formation Complete: $434
Annual duty cost: $0/yr
Report pattern: April 15 of each year

On fee alone, Montana is the 1st 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 Montana LLC by filing Articles of Organization with the Montana Secretary of State, Business Services. The state fee is $35, 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 annual report is due April 15 for all LLCs and corporations, with the fee waived for on-time filing (Secretary of State help article 'How do I file my annual report' and the SOS fee schedule, whose waived/$35 split turns on the April 15 date).

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

Montana 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 Montana Secretary of State, Business Services. The formation document is the Articles of Organization; most Montana filings can be made online, and online filings are acknowledged faster than paper ones as a rule. Montana publishes expedited tiers rather than a standard clock on its Secretary of State fee schedule: Priority Handling (24 hours) for $20 and Expedited (1 hour) for $100 on top of the filing fee; no standard turnaround is published (checked 2026-11-05). (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 Montana 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 Montana

Montana law requires all corporations and LLCs to have a registered agent with a physical Montana address (not a PO Box) who is available during business hours (Secretary of State help centre). The SOS fee schedule lists a Statement of Change of registered office/agent at no fee. The registered-agent detail on this sheet follows the Secretary of State’s published help-centre material.

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 Helena 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 — due Apr 15 — $20 (waived when filed on time).

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

The recurring duty is the line that decides what Montana costs you in year three, not just year one. Annual report — due Apr 15 — $20 (waived when filed on time). Priced into the five-year table on this sheet at $0 a year (annualised), it is the difference between a cheap formation and a cheap company.

If it is late. The annual report fee is WAIVED for reports filed between January 1 and April 15; after April 15 the fee is $35 (SOS fee schedule, both corporation and LLC sections: 'Annual Report - Prior To April 15th: WAIVED / Annual Report - After April 15th: $35.00'). The $35 is the total post-deadline fee under the current schedule, not a $20 fee plus a separate $15 penalty.

If the duty is missed altogether. Involuntary dissolution follows failure to file; SOS help articles give final filing cutoffs of November 1 for foreign entities and December 1 for domestic entities, with reinstatement available within 5 years for domestic entities. Reinstatement fee per the official SOS fee schedule: $35 plus $35 for each delinquent report year.

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	$434	$399 package + $35 state fee; agent year 1 included
By end of year 2	$583	Year 1 + $149 agent renewal
By end of year 5	$1,030	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 Montana sits in this Atlas: 1st of 49 by formation fee ($35), and 1st by the five-year cost of ownership ($1,030). The year-one total of $434 is the $399 package with the state fee passed through at cost; after that, the meter runs at the $149 yearly agent renewal plus a state report that costs $0 to file. Not one dollar of that five-year total is state duty — the recurring part is entirely the registered-agent renewal. That sits below the Atlas median five-year cost of $1,260. Judged on five years instead of filing day, Montana 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 Montana

Montana’s recurring state cost for a domestic LLC is the duty on this sheet — Annual report — due Apr 15 — $20 (waived when filed on time). 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 Montana 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 Montana; “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 Montana in the Atlas

Sources: formation fee and duty verified against official state sources — Montana Secretary of State, Business Services: https://sosmt.gov/business/fees · duty record: https://sosmt.gov/business/fees/ · fees verified 2026-11-03, duties verified 2026-11-04. Federal figures (Form 5472 penalty) per IRS instructions for Form 5472.