US Business Application and LLC Cost Trends 2026

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 is business-application volume: EIN applications coded to the applicant's address, plus separate state-registry counts where a state publishes them. BFS is a real, citable signal of application activity, but it does not say where an LLC was formed and it does not count LLCs specifically. Pairing that signal with clearly separate registry and cost data gives a useful picture without pretending the measures are interchangeable. Every figure links to its government source in the methodology.

Six findings from the public record

1. 2025 was a record year for the series. The Census BFS recorded 5,671,836 EIN-based 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. Applicant-address growth was unusually fast in three often-discussed states. Since 2019, applications coded to Wyoming addresses rose +302%, New Mexico +133%, and Delaware +132%, versus the national +62%. Those are not formation-state growth rates.
4. Those address-coded shares remain small. In 2025 Wyoming addresses represented 1.4%, Delaware 1.1%, and New Mexico 0.7% of national applications. Florida addresses represented 11.4%, the largest state share in this series.
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 $1,260 — from $50 in New Mexico to $1,310 in Delaware — still small next to the potential cost of a missed required federal filing.

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.

Applicant-address growth in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Delaware

When the BFS series is grouped by the address supplied on the EIN application, Wyoming's count quadrupled from 2019 to 2025 (+302%); New Mexico and Delaware more than doubled (+133% and +132%). Those address-coded rates exceeded the national +62% and the rates for Texas (+78%), Colorado (+66%), and Florida (+65%). They show where applicant addresses were recorded—not where an LLC was legally formed.

It is tempting to read Wyoming's top row as proof of a non-resident formation boom, but BFS cannot support that inference. The growth is consistent with in-state entrepreneurs, holding companies, real-estate businesses, out-of-state owners, or changes in the addresses used on applications. The data proves that address-coded application volume moved; it does not prove who applied or where the resulting entity was formed. Wyoming's 79,023 applications in 2025 were roughly one-eighth of Florida's 647,734. For the legal and cost trade-offs between formation states, use our separate Delaware vs Wyoming vs New Mexico comparison.

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 state cost 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 charge plus three years of recurring state fees or taxes, where applicable. 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 $1,260. That is still small against the potential cost of missing a required federal filing. Whether a foreign-owned single-member LLC must file Form 5472 with a pro-forma 1120 depends on its status and reportable transactions; a quiet year may still contain owner-company transactions, and the initial penalty for a required form is generally $25,000. See the current IRS instructions. The full year-by-year breakdown is in our companion piece on LLC annual costs by state. Choosing a state from applicant-address trends or a $1,260 fee difference, while treating federal filing analysis as an afterthought, optimizes the wrong number.

So what should a founder abroad take from this?

The data supports that EIN-based US business applications are at record highs and still climbing; that applications using addresses in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Delaware grew faster than the national series; and that official LLC state-cost differences are measurable. It does not prove that LLC formations in those states grew at the same rates or quantify non-resident ownership. Pick a state for reasons you can verify—real operations, governance, state cost, and qualification requirements—then size the LLC costs with our US company cost calculator.

Methodology, sources & limitations

The core BFS, Delaware-registry, Colorado, and original state-fee source set was retrieved on 21 July 2026. Delaware's formation fee and annual LLC tax were rechecked against current official sources on 20 August 2026. Where we computed a figure, we summed or aggregated the preserved raw records and publish the derived tables alongside this article.

• 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 instructions ($400 annual; no LLC annual report), 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 and cannot measure formation-state popularity. No source in this study records founder residency, citizenship, or nationality, so we make no claim about foreign-owned shares. The Colorado series reflects entities currently in the registry by formation year, so recent years are more completely represented than older ones. State-fee figures use official published charges; the Delaware amounts were revalidated on 20 August 2026, while the remaining preserved fee sources were retrieved 21 July 2026. They exclude registered-agent service, professional work, and fact-specific federal filings. Florida's Sunbiz pages block automated retrieval, so its figures were confirmed from the official fee page in a browser rather than via script.

Reproducibility gap. The derived CSVs in data/ and sources.json (retrieved 21 July 2026) are the generation inputs that remain in the repository. This branch does not re-fetch live government files: Census BFS is a zip download, Florida returns 403 to automated clients, and we will not invent a rebuilt series. To reproduce, download the URLs in sources.json, keep the retrieval date, and compare against the published CSVs. Topic-specific charts on this page still use inline SVG rather than a generated image; the brand social card is the Article image.

How we help

We help founders abroad choose a state for reasons that survive scrutiny, then coordinate formation, the EIN, state upkeep, and federal filing analysis including Form 5472 when required. It is part of our US market-entry work. If you want a clear read on where to form and what it may cost to run, talk to us.