New York in October 2016: the filing is cheap, the newspapers are not
A $200 formation fee, a 19th-century publication rule that costs more than the state does, and a biennial bill for $9
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New York LLC costs $200 to file. It then costs somewhere between $200 and $2,000 to be allowed to operate, depending on which county you list as your office. That second number is the publication requirement, and it is the single most consequential fact about forming in this state.
This is a guide for someone forming in October 2016. It assumes you know what an LLC is and that you have a reason to be in New York rather than Delaware or your home state. If you don't, form elsewhere; the publication bill alone is usually enough to settle the question.
The mechanics
You file Articles of Organization with the New York Department of State, Division of Corporations, in Albany. The form is two pages. It asks for the LLC's name, the county in New York in which its office is located, a designation of the Secretary of State as agent for service of process with a forwarding address, and a signature. There is no requirement to name members or managers on the articles, and most filers don't.
The fee is $200. You can file by mail, in person, by fax with a credit-card authorization, or online through the Department's portal. Standard turnaround is roughly seven business days; $25 buys 24-hour processing, $75 buys same-day, $150 buys two-hour. Walk-in filings at the Albany counter are same-day by default if you arrive before mid-afternoon.
Then the clock starts on the publication requirement. Under Section 206 of the Limited Liability Company Law, within 120 days of formation the LLC must publish a notice of its formation in two newspapers — one daily, one weekly — in the county where its office is located, for six consecutive weeks. The newspapers are not your choice; they are designated by the county clerk. After the run, each newspaper issues an affidavit of publication, which you submit to the Department of State along with a Certificate of Publication and a $50 fee.
In Manhattan, the designated papers price this run at roughly $1,500 to $2,000. Brooklyn and Queens are not much better. In the outer boroughs and Westchester you will pay on the order of $1,000. Upstate, the same six-week run runs $200 to $600. The disparity is not an artifact; the designated Manhattan papers are effectively a protected market for a statutorily required advertisement, and they price accordingly. This is why forming LLCs frequently list an Albany or upstate county office on their articles even when their actual business is in the city. The Department of State does not appear to police this aggressively, but the practice has its own risks, including that the address you list is where service of process will go.
If you do not publish within 120 days, the statute says the LLC's authority to carry on, conduct, or transact business in New York is suspended until it does. In practice, "authority suspended" in New York has meant that the LLC loses the ability to maintain an action or special proceeding in state court. Courts have been inconsistent about enforcing this — some have dismissed cases for non-publication, others have allowed late publication to cure the defect retroactively — but every New York commercial litigator has at least one story about a client who discovered the lapse on the eve of filing suit. Publication is cheap compared to the curative work.
Maintenance is simpler than formation
Once you are past publication, New York is one of the quieter states to maintain. LLCs file a Biennial Statement every two years with the Department of State. The fee is $9. The statement asks for the address to which the Secretary of State should forward service of process and nothing else. Most filers miss it because $9 does not feel like something the state would actually send a reminder about; the state does, but the notice is easy to throw away. An LLC that fails to file is marked "past due" on the Department's public database, which is visible to banks and counterparties and is a mild but real friction point.
The tax picture is where attention belongs. A New York LLC that is treated as a partnership or a disregarded entity pays an annual filing fee to the Department of Taxation and Finance under Tax Law §658(c)(3), calculated on New York–source gross income. The schedule starts at $25 for LLCs with under $100,000 in New York-source gross income and rises in brackets to $4,500 at $25 million and above. For a two-person consulting LLC doing $300,000 of New York work, the fee is in the low hundreds; for a real-estate syndicate with $30 million of New York rents flowing through, it is the top of the schedule. Single-member LLCs that are disregarded for federal tax purposes owe a flat $25 regardless of income. An LLC that has elected S-corp or C-corp treatment at the federal level is taxed on the corresponding New York corporate regime instead, which is a different article.
You will also collect and remit sales tax if you sell taxable goods or services, which in New York includes a long list of items that surprise first-time filers (certain information services, certain cleaning services, prepared food). That is not LLC-specific but it trips up founders who assumed services were categorically exempt.
Who this state actually makes sense for
Three kinds of entities belong in New York.
The first is a business that actually operates in New York — an office with employees, a storefront, a practice with New York clients seen in person. If you are going to be here anyway, domestic formation is cleaner than forming elsewhere and foreign-qualifying back in. The foreign-qualification fee is the same $250 range; the publication requirement applies to foreign LLCs too. There is no arbitrage.
The second is New York real estate. Title insurers, lenders, and counterparties expect New York real property to sit in a New York entity, and while a Delaware LLC holding a Manhattan building is not unheard of, it adds a layer of foreign qualification and a round of questions at every closing. Form where the asset sits.
The third is professional service firms — law, medicine, architecture, accounting — whose partners are licensed in New York and whose clients are in New York. Professional LLCs (PLLCs) are a New York subspecies with their own formation path through the Department of Education, but the basic arithmetic is the same.
Everyone else should think twice. A software company with one New York founder and customers across the country gets very little from a New York domicile and pays the publication tax for the privilege. A holding company is almost always better in Delaware or Wyoming. A one-person consultancy whose clients happen to be in New York can usually foreign- qualify a home-state LLC for less than the Manhattan publication bill, and with less administrative overhead.
If you are forming this quarter and your business is genuinely local, file this week, pick your county honestly, and budget the publication as part of formation rather than as a surprise in February. The $200 filing fee is not the cost of starting a New York LLC. The newspapers are the cost of starting a New York LLC, and they have been since 1806.