10-Year Delaware LLC Cost Projection (free 2026 tool)

What this tool does

Projects total Delaware LLC ownership cost over 10 years: $300/year franchise tax, $50-$125/year registered agent, $500-$1,200/year CPA, plus one-time formation cost. Identifies inflection points.

Who needs it

Founders evaluating long-term cost commitment.

How it works

1. Enter formation service choice and registered agent.
2. Tool projects 10-year total.
3. Compares with alternative-state projections.

Inputs

• Formation service
• Registered agent
• CPA fee assumption

Output

10-year cost projection with year-by-year breakdown.

What does the 10-year cost projection actually compute?

This tool takes the recurring costs of owning a Delaware LLC and rolls them forward across a full decade so you can see the real number, not the headline formation price. You enter your formation service choice, your registered agent fee, and an assumption about annual CPA or bookkeeping cost. From there the tool stacks one fixed line item that every Delaware LLC pays, the $300 annual franchise tax, on top of your variable costs, then sums year one through year ten. The one-time formation outlay sits in year one only. Everything else repeats. The output is a year-by-year table plus a grand total, so you are not guessing what a Delaware LLC costs to keep alive over the period most founders actually hold an entity.

The reason this matters is that the formation fee is the smallest part of the picture. Delaware charges $110 to file a Certificate of Formation, and a one-time bundled formation package commonly runs $297. Those are single events. The franchise tax of $300 is due every June 1 for the life of the company, and it does not scale down for a dormant or pre-revenue LLC. Add a registered agent and annual accounting, and the recurring block dwarfs the setup cost within the first two or three years. The projection makes that crossover visible instead of letting a low formation price hide a long tail of annual obligations you signed up for.

How do you read the three inputs?

The three inputs map directly to the three cost categories that drive a Delaware LLC's lifetime spend. The first, formation service, sets your year-one one-time cost. If you file the Certificate of Formation yourself, that line is the $110 state fee. If you use a bundled package, it is commonly $297 for a one-time setup that includes the state fee plus service work. The second input, registered agent, is a recurring annual fee. Delaware law requires every LLC to keep a registered agent with a physical address in the state, and that service typically runs between $50 and $125 per year depending on the provider. The third input, CPA fee assumption, is the most variable. It captures annual tax preparation and bookkeeping, which can sit anywhere from $500 to $1,200 per year depending on how complex your filings are.

Treat each input as a deliberate assumption rather than a fixed truth. The registered agent and CPA figures are ranges for a reason. A single-member LLC with a handful of transactions sits near the bottom of the CPA range. A foreign-owned LLC that must file Form 5472 alongside a pro forma Form 1120 sits higher, because that filing carries real preparation work and a $25,000 penalty for getting it wrong or missing it. When you choose your CPA assumption, pick the figure that matches your filing reality, not the cheapest number on the page. The projection is only as honest as the inputs you feed it, and the recurring lines are where small annual differences compound into large 10-year gaps.

A worked 10-year example for a US-owned single-member LLC

Suppose you form the LLC yourself for the $110 state fee, pick a registered agent at $100 per year, and assume $600 per year for a CPA. Year one looks like this: $110 formation plus $300 franchise tax plus $100 agent plus $600 CPA, which totals $1,110. Every year after that drops the one-time $110 and repeats the recurring block of $300 plus $100 plus $600, which is $1,000 per year. Across years two through ten that is $1,000 multiplied by nine, or $9,000. Add the $1,110 from year one and the 10-year total lands at $10,110. That single figure is what the tool exists to surface, because almost nobody arrives at it by intuition when they are staring at a $110 or $297 formation price.

Now flip one assumption to see the sensitivity. Keep everything the same but use a $297 bundled formation package instead of filing yourself. Year one becomes $297 plus $1,000, or $1,297, and the 10-year total rises to $10,297. The $187 difference is real but small against the decade. Compare that to the effect of your CPA assumption: moving from $600 to $1,200 per year adds $600 every year, which over ten years is an extra $6,000. The lesson the worked example teaches is that the recurring lines, especially accounting, dominate the lifetime number far more than any one-time formation choice. The tool puts that ordering in front of you so you optimize the line that actually moves the total.

Why the $300 franchise tax is the anchor of every projection

The Delaware franchise tax is the one line item no LLC escapes, and it anchors the entire model. For an LLC, the tax is a flat $300 per year, due every June 1 regardless of revenue, profit, or activity. A company that earned nothing still owes $300. A company that never opened a bank account still owes $300. This is different from the income-based taxes some founders expect, and it is the reason a Delaware LLC has a hard floor on annual cost. Across ten years, the franchise tax alone contributes $3,000 to the total before you add a single dollar of agent or accounting fees. The projection treats this as a fixed spine and builds your variable costs around it.

Missing the June 1 deadline is expensive and the tool's projection assumes you do not. If the $300 is not paid on time, Delaware adds a $200 late penalty plus interest at 1.5% per month on the unpaid balance. That can convert a routine $300 obligation into well over $500 in a single year, and the interest keeps accruing monthly until you settle. If you want a worst-case view, you can mentally add these penalties to any year where you expect cash to be tight. The cleaner approach is to build the on-time $300 into your annual budget so the penalty never enters your real numbers. Either way, understanding the penalty structure is what separates a tidy projection from an unpleasant surprise.

How does inflation change the picture over a decade?

A 10-year horizon is long enough that not every line stays flat. The $300 franchise tax is set by Delaware statute and does not drift with inflation, so it stays at $300 in every year of the projection unless the state changes the law. Your variable costs are different. Registered agent fees and CPA fees are set by private providers, and those tend to rise over time as labor and service costs increase. The base projection holds your inputs constant, which gives you a clean nominal total. If you want a more conservative figure, you can step your agent and CPA assumptions up slightly in later years to reflect likely price increases.

Here is how that plays out in practice. If your CPA fee starts at $600 and creeps up by a modest amount each year, the back half of the decade carries noticeably heavier accounting costs than the front half. The same is true for registered agent renewals, which providers sometimes raise after an introductory first year. The franchise tax staying fixed actually shifts the composition of your cost over time: in year one the fixed tax is a large share of the total, but by year ten the variable services may dominate if they have risen. Reading the projection with this in mind keeps you from treating a flat 10-year number as a guarantee. It is a planning baseline, and the variable lines are the ones most likely to move against you.

What does a foreign-owned single-member LLC change?

If a non-US person owns the LLC, the cost structure shifts in one important place: federal filing. A foreign-owned single-member LLC that is treated as disregarded for US tax purposes must file Form 5472 attached to a pro forma Form 1120 every year, even when there is no US income tax due. This is an information return about transactions between the LLC and its foreign owner. It is not optional, and the penalty for failing to file, filing late, or filing incomplete information is $25,000. That single fact usually pushes a foreign-owned LLC toward the upper end of the CPA range, because the filing requires specific expertise and carries real downside if mishandled.

For the projection, this means a foreign-owned LLC should not assume the floor CPA figure. If you set the CPA input at $1,000 to $1,200 per year to cover competent Form 5472 and Form 1120 preparation, the 10-year accounting block alone runs $10,000 to $12,000. Stacked on $3,000 of franchise tax and roughly $1,000 of registered agent fees over the decade, the lifetime total for a foreign-owned LLC commonly clears $14,000 before any formation cost. The tool lets you model exactly this by raising the CPA assumption. The takeaway is that ownership structure, more than formation choice, determines which end of the cost range you live in across ten years.

Do you still owe a BOI report in this projection?

Beneficial ownership reporting under the Corporate Transparency Act used to be a planning item for new LLCs, but the rules changed. Under the FinCEN interim final rule issued March 26, 2025, US-formed LLCs are exempt from the beneficial ownership information (BOI) reporting requirement. That means a Delaware LLC formed by a US person carries no BOI filing fee and no associated compliance cost in this projection. If you were budgeting for a filing service to handle BOI, you can remove that line entirely for a US-formed entity. The tool does not include a BOI cost because, for the entities it models, there is no longer one to include.

This matters for how you read older cost guides. A 10-year projection written before the March 26, 2025 rule might have stacked a BOI filing or update cost into the recurring block, inflating the total. The current exemption for US-formed LLCs removes that line. Keep in mind the exemption is specific to the domestic formation status described in the rule, so if your situation is unusual you should confirm your own filing obligations rather than assume. For the standard US-owned Delaware LLC this tool is built around, the practical effect is simple: your 10-year total is driven by franchise tax, registered agent, and accounting, with no BOI line padding the number.

Why does the projection identify inflection points?

An inflection point is a year where the cost story changes shape, and the tool flags these so you do not read the total as a smooth line. The clearest one is the gap between year one and year two. Year one carries the one-time formation cost, so it is the only year where setup spending appears. Year two onward is pure recurring cost. If you compare the two, you can see exactly how much of your first-year outlay was a permanent commitment versus a single event. For a self-filed LLC, year one might be $1,110 and year two $1,000, which tells you the recurring burden is nearly the whole story and formation was a rounding error.

Other inflection points show up when you model rising variable costs or a change in your filing situation. If you plan to add bookkeeping in year three, or you expect to take on a foreign owner who triggers Form 5472, the year that change lands is an inflection point where the annual cost steps up. Watching for these helps with two decisions. First, it tells you whether to hold the LLC at all, since a long run of $1,000 years on a dormant entity is real money. Second, it tells you when to revisit your provider choices, because the years around an inflection point are where switching registered agents or CPAs has the most leverage on the remaining decade.

How does this compare to an alternative-state projection?

The tool can run your numbers against an alternative-state projection so you are not evaluating Delaware in isolation. Different states use different annual structures. Some charge a flat annual report fee, some charge a franchise tax, and some charge an income-linked fee that scales with revenue. Delaware's LLC structure is a flat $300 franchise tax with no income scaling, which makes it predictable but not always cheapest. The comparison view lets you see whether the recurring obligations in another state would total more or less than Delaware's over the same ten years, using the same registered agent and CPA assumptions so the only thing that changes is the state-level fee.

Read the comparison carefully, because a lower headline annual fee elsewhere does not always win. Delaware offers a well-developed body of business law and a court system founders often value, and those benefits do not appear as a line in any cost table. A state with a $50 annual report might look cheaper on paper, but if your business reasons for Delaware are strong, the difference of a few hundred dollars a year may be worth it. Conversely, if you have no operational tie to Delaware and your home state offers a simpler, cheaper structure, the 10-year gap the comparison reveals might be the deciding factor. The point of the comparison is to make the trade-off explicit, not to declare a winner for you.

What about the free EIN, and where does it fit the cost?

A common source of confusion is the Employer Identification Number, and the answer is that it costs nothing, so it adds nothing to your 10-year total. You obtain an EIN from the IRS by filing Form SS-4, and the IRS does not charge a fee for it. For applicants without a US Social Security number, the SS-4 route by mail or fax typically takes around 8 to 10 business days to process. Any service that quotes you a price for "getting your EIN" is charging for the convenience of filing the form on your behalf, not for the number itself. If you want your projection to reflect true government cost, the EIN line is zero.

Where the EIN does touch your cost is indirectly, through bundled packages. A $297 one-time formation package may include EIN filing as part of the service, which is fine as long as you understand you are paying for the bundle, not for the EIN as a standalone government fee. When you compare a self-filed path against a bundled package in the projection, do not double-count the EIN. The self-filed path already has a free EIN baked in at zero cost, and the bundled path includes the filing service inside its one-time price. Keeping this straight prevents you from inflating the formation line and distorting the year-one figure that anchors the whole decade.

Common mistakes when budgeting a 10-year LLC cost

The most frequent error is anchoring on the formation price and ignoring the recurring block. A founder sees $110 or $297 and mentally files the LLC as a cheap, one-time decision. The projection exists precisely to break that habit, because the recurring $300 franchise tax plus agent plus CPA is what defines the lifetime cost. A second mistake is assuming a dormant LLC stops costing money. It does not. The $300 franchise tax is due every June 1 whether or not the company traded, and a registered agent must be maintained the entire time. Letting an unused LLC sit idle for years quietly accumulates real cost.

Other recurring mistakes cluster around deadlines and filing scope:

• Forgetting the June 1 franchise tax date, which triggers a $200 late penalty plus 1.5% per month interest on the unpaid balance.
• Budgeting the floor CPA fee for a foreign-owned LLC that actually needs Form 5472 and pro forma Form 1120 work, where a missed or wrong filing carries a $25,000 penalty.
• Paying a service for an EIN when the IRS issues it free via Form SS-4.
• Still budgeting a BOI filing for a US-formed LLC, which has been exempt since the FinCEN interim final rule of March 26, 2025.
• Treating a single-year cost as the whole story instead of multiplying the recurring block across the full holding period.

What should you do with the projected total?

The 10-year total is a decision input, not a bill. Use it to answer three concrete questions. First, can you sustain the recurring cost across the period you realistically expect to hold the entity. If your business plan does not generate enough margin to absorb roughly $1,000 to $1,400 a year comfortably, that is a signal to reconsider timing or structure. Second, which line should you optimize. The worked examples show that accounting cost moves the total far more than formation choice, so your energy is better spent finding a right-sized CPA than shaving a few dollars off the formation package. Third, is Delaware the right state given the alternative-state comparison and your actual business reasons for choosing it.

Once you have the number, turn it into a budget line rather than leaving it as a one-time realization. Set a recurring reminder for the June 1 franchise tax so you never pay the $200 late penalty or the 1.5% monthly interest. Confirm whether your ownership structure pushes you into Form 5472 territory, since that single fact can add thousands across the decade and carries a $25,000 penalty for getting it wrong. Revisit the projection annually and update your CPA and registered agent assumptions with the real invoices you received, so next year's view reflects actual spend rather than initial estimates. Treated this way, the projection stops being a scary total and becomes a steady planning tool you check once a year.