US LLC Formation Trends 2026: What the Data Shows

What the data can — and can't — say

Start with an honest limitation, because it shapes everything below. No public US dataset records the residency, citizenship, or nationality of the people who form companies. The IRS knows, but does not publish it; state registries collect a mailing address and a registered agent, not a founder's passport. So any headline claiming "42% of Wyoming LLCs are foreign-owned" is not measured — it is guessed. We won't do that here.

What is published, and published well, is formation volume: how many businesses are being created, where, and how fast that is changing. That is a real, citable signal, and it happens to run straight through the four states non-residents ask about most — Wyoming, Delaware, New Mexico, and Florida. Pair it with each state's official cost of ownership and you get a defensible, useful picture without inventing a single number. Below, every figure links to the government source it came from, with the retrieval date, in the methodology.

Six findings from the public record

1. 2025 was a record year. Americans and foreign founders filed 5,671,836 business applications in 2025 — the highest annual total since the series began in 2004, and up 62% from 2019.
2. 2026 is on pace to break it again. First-half applications (Jan–Jun 2026) reached 3,232,301, up 12.1% versus the same months of 2025.
3. The "formation-state favorites" grew far faster than the country. Since 2019, applications rose +302% in Wyoming, +133% in New Mexico, and +132% in Delaware — roughly two-to-five times the national +62%.
4. But those states are still small in absolute volume. In 2025 Wyoming was 1.4%, Delaware 1.1%, and New Mexico 0.7% of national applications. Florida alone was 11.4% — the single largest state.
5. Delaware's registry dwarfs its application count — 289,810 new entities formed in 2024, 72.9% of them LLCs — because the national series is coded by the applicant's address, not the state of formation. That gap is exactly why residency can't be inferred from either source.
6. Over three years, the state-fee gap between these states is about $960 — from $50 in New Mexico to roughly $1,010 in Delaware — a rounding error next to the federal filings that apply identically in all of them.

A record year, and another one coming

The backbone of this study is the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics (BFS), an administrative series that counts applications for an Employer Identification Number — the closest thing the government has to a real-time "new company" meter. It is not a survey and carries no sampling error; it simply tallies the EIN applications the IRS receives, by state and month, back to 2004. We summed the monthly not-seasonally-adjusted totals into calendar years.

The trend is unambiguous. Applications jumped during the pandemic and never came back down. After a record 2021, a small dip in 2024, 2025 set an all-time high of 5.67 million. The first six months of 2026 are running 12% ahead of 2025, which means — barring a sharp reversal — 2026 will set yet another record.

The formation-state favorites are growing fastest — from a small base

Here is where our audience's states come in. When you rank growth from 2019 to 2025, the three classic "form-here-from-abroad" jurisdictions sit at the very top. Wyoming applications quadrupled (+302%); New Mexico and Delaware both more than doubled (+133% and +132%). Every one of them outran the national +62% and outran big commercial states like Texas (+78%), Colorado (+66%), and Florida (+65%).

It is tempting to read that top row as proof of a non-resident boom, and it may well reflect one — Wyoming and New Mexico have marketed privacy and low cost hard, and both are structurally attractive to founders with no US footprint. But the honest caveat matters: the same growth is consistent with in-state entrepreneurs, holding companies, real-estate LLCs, and out-of-state Americans "shopping" for a friendlier registry. The data proves the volume moved; it does not prove who moved it. And the absolute scale keeps it in perspective — Wyoming's headline-grabbing 79,023 applications in 2025 is roughly one-eighth of Florida's 647,734. If you want the practical trade-offs between these three, we compare them directly in Delaware vs Wyoming vs New Mexico.

Delaware's own numbers — and why the national series undercounts it

Delaware is the one state that publishes a detailed registry report, and it is worth reading against the BFS number to see a genuine measurement gap. Delaware's Division of Corporations 2024 Annual Report counts 2,157,482 active entities and 289,810 new formations in 2024 — of which 211,464 (72.9%) were LLCs, with corporations at 20.1% and LPs/LLPs at 6.2%. It also restates the facts that make Delaware Delaware: 66.7% of the Fortune 500 and 81.4% of 2024 US IPOs are incorporated there.

Now hold that against the federal series, which recorded only about 59,463 Delaware "applications" in 2024 — roughly a fifth of Delaware's own 289,810 formations. The two are not contradictory; they measure different things. BFS attributes each EIN application to the address the applicant provides, which for a Delaware entity is usually the founder's home state or country, not Delaware. In other words, the national series systematically undercounts the classic formation states, and the state registry captures what the federal meter misses. This is the clearest reason a residency figure cannot be reverse-engineered from either dataset. It is also why our audience should treat "Delaware is only 1% of new companies" as an artifact of coding, not a real ranking.

Colorado offers a useful cross-check because, unlike most states, it publishes its entire business registry as open data. Computing new entities by formation year straight from that file shows the same shape as the national trend — roughly 124,976 in 2019 rising to a 193,538 peak in 2023, then easing to 185,256 in 2025 — with the caveat that a live registry favors recent years, since older dissolved entities have dropped out. We publish the query and the derived table so anyone can reproduce it.

What these states actually cost over three years

Growth is one axis; the cost of living there is the other. Using each state's official 2026 fee schedule, here is the pure state cost of forming and then keeping an LLC in good standing for three years — the one-time formation filing plus three annual renewals. This is the state's own charge only; a registered agent (about $50–$150/year) is required everywhere and is excluded so the states compare like-for-like.

The chart makes the real lesson visible: the entire three-year spread between the cheapest and priciest of these states is about $960. That is genuinely small money against the filing that actually carries risk — a foreign-owned single-member LLC owes an annual federal Form 5472 with a pro-forma 1120, identical in every state on this chart, whose penalty starts at $25,000 per form. The full year-by-year breakdown, including that federal layer, is in our companion piece on LLC annual costs by state. Choosing a state on formation trends or a $960 fee difference, while treating the federal filing as an afterthought, optimizes the wrong number.

So what should a founder abroad take from this?

Three things the data supports, and one it doesn't. It supports that US company creation is at record highs and still climbing; that the low-cost, privacy-oriented states are growing fastest, which is why they dominate the advice you'll read; and that their cost advantage, while real, is measured in hundreds of dollars, not thousands. What the data does not support is any precise claim about how much of that growth is non-resident — so be skeptical of anyone who quotes you a percentage. Pick a state for reasons you can verify (cost, banking track record, whether you actually operate there), size the full annual number with our US company cost calculator, and keep your attention on the federal filings where the money and the risk really sit.

Methodology, sources & limitations

Every number on this page comes from an official, publicly downloadable source, retrieved on 21 July 2026. Where we computed a figure, we summed or aggregated the raw records ourselves and publish the derived tables alongside this article so the work is reproducible.

• National and state application counts, and all growth rates — U.S. Census Bureau, Business Formation Statistics, full time-series file (BFS-mf.csv download), dataset updated 9 July 2026. We used "Business Applications" (all NAICS, not seasonally adjusted) and summed the monthly values to calendar years; 2026 covers January–June only.
• Delaware entity and formation counts, Fortune 500 and IPO shares — Delaware Division of Corporations, 2024 Annual Report.
• Colorado new-entity counts by formation year — computed from the Business Entities in Colorado open dataset via the Socrata API (date_extract_y(entityformdate)).
• State fee schedules — Wyoming Secretary of State (LLC formation $100; annual report license tax $60 minimum), Delaware Division of Corporations fee schedule (LLC formation $110) and alternative-entity tax ($300 annual), Florida Sunbiz LLC fees (new filing $125; annual report $138.75), and the New Mexico Secretary of State (LLC formation $50; New Mexico imposes no annual or biennial report on LLCs — only corporations file a biennial report).
• Derived data (downloadable): national series (CSV), by-state series (CSV), Colorado by year (CSV), and the source manifest (JSON).

Limitations. BFS counts EIN applications, not LLCs specifically, and not all applications become active companies; it is geo-coded by the applicant's address, which understates the classic formation states (see the Delaware gap above). No source in this study records founder residency, citizenship, or nationality, so we make no claim about the share of formations that are foreign-owned. The Colorado series reflects entities currently in the registry by formation year, so recent years are more completely represented than older ones. Fee figures are the states' own published charges as of 21 July 2026 and exclude registered-agent service and all federal filings, which apply regardless of state. Florida's Sunbiz pages block automated retrieval, so its figures were confirmed from the official fee page in a browser rather than via script.

How we help

We help founders abroad choose a state for reasons that survive scrutiny, then handle the parts that actually carry cost and risk — the formation, the EIN, the annual state filing, and the federal Form 5472 that trips up dormant companies. It's part of our US market-entry work, where formation, compliance, and books are handled together rather than left as loose ends. If you want a clear read on where to form and what it will really cost to run, talk to us.