Every figure on Schedule A — the True Cost Worksheet carries a status tag and a date. This article is the rulebook behind those tags: what each one means, how the total is computed, what we deliberately leave out, and what happens when a state changes its mind. If you cite our numbers, cite this too.

FlagState is an independent registry, not a government agency and not a law firm. Nothing here is legal or tax advice.

What “verified” means

A fee is verified when we have read the figure directly from the state’s official source — a fee schedule, a statute, or the Secretary of State’s own published page — and stamped the row with the date we read it. Not a summary of the source. Not a filing service’s table. The primary document itself, read by us, on a recorded date.

That date is printed beside the figure on every row of the worksheet. A number without a date is, by our rules, a bug.

What “sourced” means

Some states make direct reading hard. A fee page sits behind a portal that only renders in a browser session, or the official figure reaches us through an indirect channel — official filed documents surfaced by search, a state page we could confirm but not fetch and read line by line. Those figures are sourced: we believe them to be the official numbers, and we hold them at lower confidence until we can read them from the primary source. The tag tells you exactly how much weight to put on the row.

What “pending” means

Pending means we assert nothing. No figure appears — withheld, never estimated. If a jurisdiction is still in the audit queue, the worksheet says so and shows you an empty row rather than a plausible guess. A wrong number dressed as a right one is worse than a blank, and the blank is honest about what it is.

We would rather show you a dated blank than an undated number.

The 3-year window

The worksheet’s headline total is a 3-year true cost: the formation filing fee, plus three occurrences of any annual recurring fee (or two occurrences of a biennial one, landing in years one and three), plus any state-mandated additional recurring fees on the same windowing. Exact state-specific timing quirks live in the notes for each row.

You can optionally add a registered-agent line. That line is a market estimate — a low-to-high spread reflecting what agents commercially charge — and it is labeled as such, because it is not a state fee and we will not dress it up as one. If we cannot assert a defensible spread for a state, the RA-inclusive total is withheld rather than padded.

One more rule from the same cloth: if any component of a row cannot be asserted — the row is unverified, or a fee figure is missing — the worksheet computes no total for that state at all. Partial confidence does not average up into a confident-looking number.

What the calculator excludes, and why

The worksheet’s scope is state filing and recurring state fees. It deliberately excludes:

  • Revenue-based taxes — franchise taxes, gross-receipts taxes, income taxes. These depend on your revenue, your structure, and your home country’s rules; a calculator that pretended to know them would be pretending.
  • Business licenses — local and industry-specific, unknowable without knowing your business.
  • Foreign-state registration — the cost of registering your LLC in a second state, which only applies if you operate there.

Where an excluded cost commonly bites in a given state, the row flags it. But we do not fold it into the total, because exclusion beats false precision. A total that quietly includes our guess about your tax bill is a worse product than a smaller total with an honest scope statement printed above it. The scope statement is printed above it.

Why fees drift

State fees are legislation, and legislatures legislate. In the current ledger alone: Delaware raised its annual LLC tax under HB 400. Kansas cut its fees sharply, effective February 2026. New Jersey cut its LLC filing fee, effective July 2026. Louisiana has an increase scheduled for October 2026. Vermont raised its fees recently, and many third-party sites still show the old ones.

That last clause is the whole reason this page exists. Third-party fee tables go stale silently — some official state pages lag their own legislatures. A figure is only as good as the date somebody last checked it, which is why every row on the worksheet wears one.

How corrections work

When a fee changes, or when we find we had one wrong, the row’s notes carry the change — the old figure, the new one, and what moved it (Delaware’s HB 400 increase is recorded exactly this way) — and the verification date resets to the day we re-read the source. We do not silently overwrite. A registry that erases its own history is just a blog with a table in it.

Why every row is dated

The verification date is the load-bearing element of the whole system. It tells you when a human last held the figure up against the official source, which lets you judge staleness for yourself instead of trusting our adjectives. It also keeps us honest: an aging date on a row is a visible debt, and the audit queue exists to pay it down.

If you want the numbers themselves — dated, tagged, and computed under exactly the rules above — they are on Schedule A — the True Cost Worksheet.