LLC Compliance Tracker

Forming an LLC is the easy part. Keeping it alive is where owners get hurt — not through dramatic lawsuits, but through a missed $50 filing that snowballs into late fees, loss of good standing, and eventually administrative dissolution. When a state dissolves your LLC, the liability shield you formed it for can evaporate, and getting reinstated costs multiples of the original fee. Compliance companies charge $139 to $199 per year per entity to watch these dates for you. This tracker does the watching for free.

Every state plays by different rules, which is why a single national reminder service is hard to build and why owners get confused. Some states want a simple annual report on a fixed date — April 15 in Maryland, March 31 in Connecticut, June 1 in Delaware. Others tie the deadline to your formation anniversary: Colorado gives you a three-month window ending in your anniversary month, while Illinois wants the report before your anniversary month even begins. A handful of states run biennial schedules — California, New York, Iowa, and the District of Columbia among them — so the deadline only comes every two years and is easy to forget entirely. Four states require no periodic LLC report at all.

The fees are just as scattered. Idaho and Mississippi charge nothing; most states land between $15 and $150; Massachusetts charges $500 every year on your anniversary. And the "annual report" is only half the story in some states: Alabama bundles it with a business privilege tax return, Texas demands a franchise tax report even when no tax is owed, and Nebraska's biennial occupation tax scales with the value of property in the state. The state lookup above untangles which filing applies where, with the official filing link for each.

Build a simple habit around the tracker: add every entity the day it is formed, set reminders at least 30 days out, and mark each filing done the day you submit it so the countdown rolls to the next period. File early in the window rather than on the deadline — state portals slow down and occasionally crash in the final days, and a failed submission on April 14 is still a missed deadline. Keep the confirmation number from each filing in the entity's notes field; if the state ever claims you did not file, that number is your proof.

• Foreign LLCs registered in a second state usually owe reports in both states — track each registration separately.
• Changing your registered agent or address mid-year does not change the filing deadline.
• When in doubt, file directly with the Secretary of State — never through a lookalike site charging "processing fees."