State business filing deadlines, seven states
What is due, when, what it costs, and what happens if it is late.
Every state runs its own calendar, and almost none of them care whether you traded. Delaware wants March 1 and June 1. Texas wants May 15. Florida wants May 1. California, Illinois and Washington move with your formation month. New York runs on two year cycles.
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What we take on
Fixed dates: Delaware, Texas, Florida
Delaware corporations file March 1 and Delaware LLCs pay June 1. Texas files with the Comptroller on May 15. Florida files by May 1. These are the easy three, because the date does not depend on you.
Anniversary dates: California, Illinois, Washington
California uses a six month window ending on the last day of your anniversary month. Illinois uses the sixty days before your anniversary month opens. Washington uses the last day of your formation month.
Two year cycles: New York, and California LLCs
A New York biennial statement and a California LLC Statement of Information both come round every other year. A gap that long is much easier to lose than an annual one, and nothing in the year between reminds you.
Almost none of it depends on revenue
Delaware calculates on shares or assets. Illinois calculates on paid-in capital. Washington calculates on gross receipts. California charges a flat $800. A dormant company owes in all four.
The penalties are not proportionate
Florida charges a flat $400 late, more than twice the filing fee. Illinois adds $100 for every further year an LLC stays delinquent. Delaware charges $200 plus 1.5 percent a month. None of them scale down for a small company.
Two agencies is the usual trap
California, New York and Washington each split the work between the Secretary of State and a revenue department. Doing one of the two feels like being finished, and is not.
Where each state actually catches people
Delaware is two dates for two entity types: corporations file an annual report and franchise tax by March 1, and LLCs pay a flat tax by June 1 with no report at all. The franchise tax has two calculation methods and most people pay the wrong one.
California is the one people believe they have handled. The Statement of Information goes to the Secretary of State, the $800 goes to the Franchise Tax Board, and filing one tells the other nothing.
Texas has no Secretary of State annual report at all, which sends people hunting in the wrong place. There is one May 15 filing with the Comptroller, and it is required even when no tax is owed.
New York has three obligations that look like one. A $9 biennial statement, an annual filing with Tax and Finance, and a publication requirement that happens once at formation and never again.
Florida is the simplest and the least forgiving. One date, one filing, a flat $400 penalty, and administrative dissolution in September for anybody still unfiled.
Illinois moves its deadline with your anniversary month, and its franchise tax is calculated on paid-in capital rather than income. A funded company with no revenue is more exposed than a profitable one.
Washington has no income tax and three separate obligations, including a gross receipts tax that allows no deduction for labor or materials. It is the state most often under-reported.
What these have in common is that none of them is difficult. They are calendar problems, and calendar problems happen when nobody owns the calendar. That is usually the same person who was supposed to be keeping the books. Checked against the official state pages in September 2026.
Questions we get
Which states are covered here?
Delaware, California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Washington. Between them they cover most of where American companies are formed and where they actually operate.
Each page carries the dates, the fees, the late penalties and what a dormant company still owes.
Do we file if the company made no money?
In almost every case, yes. Delaware, California, Florida, Illinois and Washington all want their filing regardless, and several want money with it.
The one real exception is a single member New York LLC with no New York source income, which should not file Form IT-204-LL.
We are registered in two states. What changes?
You run both calendars. A company formed in Delaware and operating in California owes Delaware its March or June date and California its Statement of Information and its $800.
Foreign registration usually carries its own dates too, which are often different from the domestic ones.
Are these figures current?
They were confirmed on official state pages in September 2026, and each page says so. Several states have stale pages of their own that still show superseded numbers.
Where an official source could not confirm a figure, it was left out rather than guessed.
Is this tax advice?
No. It is a calendar and a set of rules as the states publish them. What you file, and how, is between you and your CPA.
What we do is keep the books those filings come out of, and hold the dates so they do not arrive as a surprise.
Can you run the calendar for us?
Yes. Compliance calendars sit inside the bookkeeping and legal operations work, because the two share the same source: books that are current and an entity record somebody maintains.
Tell us the states and the entity types and you get the year mapped.
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Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built