Wyoming LLC structure and cost: the privacy and zero taxes are real, and they stop at the state line

Wyoming will keep your name off the public formation record. It will take no income tax, no franchise tax, and no transfer tax when you move property into your LLC. It will let you build a series of walled compartments in one filing, and it was the first state in the country to let a decentralized organization register as an LLC. Every one of those is real. None of them follows you home if you live and work somewhere else.

That is the tension this page is about. Wyoming’s structural advantages are genuine and, for the right owner, worth the trip. For the wrong owner, the one who forms in Wyoming but operates in California, the trip buys a second annual fee and less protection than an honest home-state LLC.

Wyoming’s privacy and its zero taxes are real, and none of them cross the state line with you.

Where the entity actually lives

Your Wyoming LLC has a birthplace and a residence, and they are not the same thing. The where your LLC lives doctrine governs the rest of this page, so start there.

Form in Wyoming and operate in California, and you have bought a Wyoming address and a California tax bill.

The formation state governs the company’s internal affairs, the family matters covered on the governance page. Almost everything else, including the tax on this page, is decided by where the company does business. Own a California rental through a Wyoming LLC and you must register that company in California, disclose it in California, and pay California, while the charging order protection you formed for waits behind a state line where the lawsuit will not be. The sound version of the Wyoming plan is a holding company that owns and does nothing else, with operating companies that register where they each work. The unsound version is the $150 off-the-shelf package sold as portable armor.

Privacy, and the one place your name still shows

Wyoming is sold on anonymity, and the core of it is true. The state does not require member or manager names on the articles of organization, so the people behind the company do not appear on the public formation record. The anonymous LLC page covers how far that goes.

Wyoming keeps your name off the formation record, but the annual report still asks who filed it.

Two honest qualifications. The annual report requires the name of the person filing it, so if the beneficial owner files, the beneficial owner is on a public document. Use a third party and the leak closes. And privacy at the state level does not touch the federal beneficial ownership regime, which is a separate system that overrides state anonymity.

No income tax, no franchise tax, no transfer tax

This is the short, strong section, and its shortness is the point. Some states need a thousand words on the tax of moving property into an entity. Wyoming needs a sentence.

Wyoming takes no income tax, no franchise tax, and no transfer tax when you move property into an LLC.

Wyoming imposes no personal or corporate income tax and no franchise tax. It has no real estate transfer tax, so contributing property into a Wyoming LLC, or restructuring who owns it, does not trigger a state transfer levy the way it would in a state like Delaware. The only recurring state charge is the annual report license tax, and that is where the one number worth understanding lives.

Wyoming’s annual tax is charged on Wyoming assets, which is why a holding company full of out-of-state property pays the $60 minimum.

The license tax is the greater of $60 or two-tenths of one mill, $0.0002, per dollar of assets located and employed in Wyoming. A holding company whose assets sit outside the state has almost no Wyoming assets to tax, so it pays the $60 floor no matter how much it holds. Set that against a Delaware LLC’s $300 franchise tax or a California LLC’s $800 minimum and the holdco math is clear. The saving is a mechanism, not magic: it works because the tax follows Wyoming assets, and it collapses the moment the company’s assets and activity are actually somewhere else.

Series LLCs: one filing, many walls, no case law

Wyoming authorizes the series LLC inside its own act, at W.S. 17-29-211. You form one parent company and create series beneath it, each meant to be walled off from the others, for $10 per series. The series LLC page explains what the structure is and what it is not.

Wyoming lets you build ten walls in one filing, and no court has yet tested whether they hold.

The Wyoming-specific facts are two. The filing saving is real but small, and the bookkeeping burden of ten series equals the burden of ten separate LLCs, because the internal walls only hold if each series keeps its own accounts and titles its own assets. And Wyoming, like every series state, has almost no case law telling you whether a court will honor the walls when a creditor attacks them.

The DAO LLC, and other variants

Wyoming was the first state in the country to let a decentralized autonomous organization register as an LLC, under the DAO Supplement at W.S. 17-31-101 through 17-31-116. The entity variants page covers the family of alternatives.

Wyoming was the first state to let a decentralized organization be an LLC, and the law is younger than the case law it will need.

A Wyoming DAO must carry “DAO,” “LAO,” or “DAO LLC” in its name, state whether it is managed by members or by code, and publish an identifier for the smart contract that runs it or dissolve within thirty days. It may reduce or eliminate fiduciary duties. Wyoming later added a separate vehicle, the decentralized unincorporated nonprofit association, for nonprofit-style organizations. Both are genuine firsts and both are close to untested, so they are tools for someone who wants to be early, not someone who wants settled ground. Wyoming also offers a close LLC variant with tighter transfer restrictions and fewer formalities for a small, fixed group of owners.

Moving a company in or out

Wyoming lets you bring a company in or send one out as the same legal entity, through conversion, continuance, and domestication, so the company keeps its EIN, its accounts, and its history rather than dying and being reborn.

Wyoming lets you move a company in or out as the same entity, but a clean legal conversion can still breach the company’s own contracts.

Two cautions carry over from the rest of the site. A change-of-control or assignment clause in one of the company’s own contracts, a loan, a lease, a franchise agreement, can be tripped by a move that is otherwise a clean legal conversion, so the paper the company already signed has to be read before it moves. And the timing rule from the charging order material applies with full force: move while the sky is clear, because a company that changes states after a creditor appears has converted a routine filing into evidence of a fraudulent transfer.

The bottom line

Wyoming charges no income tax, no franchise tax, and no real estate transfer tax, which makes contributing or restructuring property genuinely cheap here.

The annual license tax is charged on Wyoming assets, so a holding company that holds out-of-state property pays the $60 minimum.

None of that survives operating in another state, where you register, disclose, and pay under that state’s rules regardless of where you formed.

Wyoming keeps member names off the formation record, but the annual report names the filer, and the federal ownership-reporting regime is separate and in flux.

Wyoming authorizes series LLCs and was first to recognize DAO LLCs, and both rest on strong statutes with almost no case law behind them.

You can move a company in or out as the same entity, but read its contracts first and move before any creditor is on the horizon.

What this page does not cover

This page is about where the entity lives, what it can be, and what moving property costs. How creditors reach you, including charging orders and asset protection trusts, is on the protection page. What the statute lets your operating agreement do is on the governance page. The fees, forms, and deadlines behind every filing named here are on the filing page.

Last verified July 2026.