How The Formation Desk makes its calls

1. Spend over three years (33%). Year one plus two renewals at the published service price. The state charges the same fees whichever company files, so they are listed separately and not scored.
2. Work the price removes (33%). The ongoing paperwork one price takes over: registered agent, report filing, EIN application, and use in more than one state.
3. What renewal looks like (12%). Whether the yearly price holds after year one and how simple renewing or leaving is.
4. Fit with the state (12%). How the service suits the state's report timing, late penalties, agent address rules and filing steps.
5. Plain price display (10%). Whether the total is shown before payment, with the state fee listed at cost on its own.

When two picks sit a few tenths apart the desk calls it close and names the criterion that tipped it.

The desk's scores out of 10 are editorial judgment from these criteria. They are not customer ratings. A score applies to one state and one service, so a company can score differently from one page to the next.

Prices come straight from each company's own pricing and service pages, read when the site is built, with the date printed on every page. State fees, forms, deadlines and agent rules come from official state schedules, forms and statutes, each listed with the month it was last confirmed. When a checkout adds a card or processing charge on top of the state fee, we print the service fee and skip the total.

Each state page picks from Mainstay Filing, which works in all fifty states, and the registered agent services built around that state. A company is ranked for a service only if its own pages sell it at a published price.

The desk runs no customer ratings and no customer quotes, and none of it is legal or tax advice. The order is our own editorial judgment, built on the criteria above.