How to Form a Company in the US: A Complete Guide for New Founders

Starting a business can be overwhelming. There are a lot of things you need to take care of and it can be hard to keep track of exactly what you need to do, and when. This section of the site has useful guides and research to help you navigate the legal process of actually forming a company.

State Guides

Our state formation guides are an essential resource for anyone looking to start a business or apply for an LLC. Each guide provides detailed information about the requirements and procedures for forming an LLC in a specific state, including the necessary forms and fees.

These guides are especially helpful because the requirements for forming an LLC can vary widely from state to state. For example, some states require LLCs to have a registered agent, while others do not. Some states have relatively low filing fees, while others can be quite expensive. By consulting our state LLC formation guides, you can make sure that you're meeting all of the necessary requirements and avoiding any costly mistakes.

If you are deciding betweeen two states, we also have comparison pages to quickly compare one state to another.

Formation Services

If you don't want to form the LLC yourself, you can use a formation service. These services will handle all of the paperwork and filing for you, and they can often do it for a very reasonable price.

Below are links to all of the services we have collected data on and reviewed.

Formation Service Comparisons

We also have comparison pages for the most popular formation services. These pages compare the prices, features, and customer reviews of the most popular formation services.

The state guides show you how you can form the LLC yourself, but formation services are very price-competitive and it's often a huge time-saver to use one. If you're not sure which service to use, our comparison pages can help you decide.

As you can see, we have done a lot of comparison research and collated almost 30 pieces of data on each service. If the list below is too much, you can click the specific service you're considering above and see just the comparisons with that service.