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Formation Rated

Rankings of registered agents, LLC formation and foreign registration services in all 50 states.

Rating method

How Formation Rated rates filing services

From the Formation Rated editorial team
Each service is rated on cost over three years and on what one price includes, with renewals, state fit and price clarity making up the rest. Five weighted criteria set every rating, and each page names the one that decided it.

What each rating counts

  1. Cost over years one to three (27%). The service fee in year one plus two renewals, from published prices. State fees are the same for every provider and sit in their own lines.
  2. Inclusions per price (27%). The yearly paperwork covered by the price: registered agent, report filing, EIN application, and whether the account works in other states.
  3. Renewal price and terms (20%). Whether the renewal price matches the first-year price, and how renewing or cancelling works.
  4. Fit with state rules (16%). How the service fits that state: report cadence, late fees, agent address rules and filing steps.
  5. Price clarity (10%). Whether the amount due is clear before you pay and the state fee is shown separately at cost.

Near ties

Ratings a few tenths apart are close calls. The page says which criterion decided and what the runner-up does better.

What a rating means

Ratings here are Formation Rated's own editorial marks out of 10. They do not come from customers. A rating covers one state and one service, so one company can carry different ratings in different places.

Where each amount comes from

Service amounts are read from each company's own pricing and service pages when the site is built, with the read date printed on every ranking. State fees, forms, deadlines and agent rules come from official state fee schedules, forms and statutes, and each page lists them with the month they were last confirmed. If a checkout adds a card or processing charge to the state fee, the page shows the service fee and omits the total.

Who is rated

Each state page rates Mainstay Filing, which serves all fifty states, and the registered agent services built for that state. A company is rated for a service only when its own pages sell that service at a published price.

What the site leaves out

There are no customer ratings or customer quotes here, and none of it is legal or tax advice. The ratings are editorial judgment based on the criteria above.