Mississippi has no deed tax, so the entire cost of the conveyance is what the chancery clerk charges for paper.

Mississippi Charges No Transfer Tax on the Deed

Start with where the tax would live if Mississippi had one. Title 27 is the part of the code where the state keeps its taxes (sales, use, income, severance, and the rest) and states that tax deeds put the levy there under a name that is easy to find, usually some variation on documentary stamps or realty transfer. Mississippi's Title 27 has no such chapter. There is nothing to be exempt from, which means there is no exemption form to file, no affidavit of consideration to swear, no nominal-consideration wording to get right, and no reason to structure the instrument around a revenue rule. The deed does the job a deed does and stops there.

The office matters more than usual here, because Mississippi does not call it what its neighbours do. Land instruments are recorded with the chancery clerk, not a county recorder or a register of deeds, which is worth knowing before you spend twenty minutes looking for the wrong office.

Miss. Code Ann. § 25-7-9 sets the fee for "Recording each deed, will, lease, amendment, subordination, lien, release, cancellation, order, decree, oath, etc., per book and page listed where applicable, each deed of trust, or any other document" as a flat charge for the first several pages plus a smaller charge for "Each additional page". The Chancery Clerks' Association schedule prices a warranty deed and a quitclaim deed identically to each other and adds a small archive fee in the counties that maintain one. Nothing on it asks what the property is worth.

That absence quietly settles two questions that consume whole pages about other states. The first is the mortgage. Where a state measures a deed tax on consideration, the balance the company takes the property subject to is usually swept into that measure, and a landlord who wrote a token figure on the deed gets a bill computed on the loan.

Mississippi's record leaves that field blank, and the blank is not a gap in the research. There is no measure for a mortgage balance to enter, so the question has nothing to attach to. The second is the sell-the-company workaround. States that tax deeds eventually notice that an owner can transfer the entity instead of the building and answer with a controlling-interest tax. Mississippi has neither the door nor the lock: there is no conveyance tax here for such a provision to backstop, and none appears in the taxation title.

hancockcounty.ms.gov

Does the Transfer Reset Your Property Tax in Mississippi?

No. Mississippi does not cap a property’s assessed value at what you paid for it, assessments track market value on the assessor’s own cycle regardless of who holds title. A deed from you to an LLC you own does not change the assessment, because there was never an acquisition-date value locked in to lose. This is the part of the California story that gets copied onto pages about states where it simply does not apply.

Mississippi values property annually and from evidence about the property, which is what leaves a deed nothing to reset. Miss. Code Ann. § 27-35-50 provides that "The true value of each class of property shall be determined annually", and defines the standard broadly, "True value shall mean and include, but shall not be limited to, market value, cash value, actual cash value, proper value", reached through the income capitalization, cost and market data approaches. Acquisition price is not one of the routes to it, and the section sets no ceiling on how far an assessment may move from one year to the next. A conveyance between a landlord and a company that landlord owns is not a valuation event under that section.

Homestead exemption is the part that does not survive, and the rule is unusually blunt about it. The Department of Revenue's homestead regulation states that "An applicant for homestead exemption must be a living person. The applicant cannot be an estate, a corporation, or a partnership."

The list of what an applicant cannot be does not name a limited liability company, but it does not need to: the operative sentence is the first one, and a company is not a living person. The same rule requires that an applicant "be the head of a family, have ownership and eligible property, occupy the dwelling as a home, and be a Mississippi resident", and Miss. Code Ann. § 27-33-17 carries the same occupancy limit, confining eligible ownership to one "who is entitled to and does occupy and use the property as a home". A house that already has a tenant in it failed the occupancy test long before anyone drafted a deed.

One disclosure about that homestead text. We read it in 35 Miss. Admin. Code Pt. VI, Subpt. 3, Ch. 03 on the Secretary of State's own host, in the filed-rule directory rather than the adopted-code directory, and we did not separately diff the two copies against each other. The Department's plain-language homestead and property tax pages, which would have been the obvious corroboration, sit on the host that would not answer us. The county tax assessor is the office that administers homestead applications and holds the record for your parcel, and that is the call to make if the property still carries the exemption.

Separately, and this catches people converting a former home into a rental: the benefits that turn on owning and occupying the property as your residence, a homestead exemption, an owner-occupancy credit, a residential assessment rate, are not things an LLC occupies a home to earn. Where the property still carries one, the deed puts it at risk, and the bill goes up whether or not the assessment itself moves. Which benefit is at stake, and on what terms, is a question for the assessor in the county the property sits in.

Authority: Miss. Code Ann. § 27-35-50; 35 Miss. Admin. Code Pt. VI, Subpt. 3, Ch. 03, Rule 102; Miss. Code Ann. § 27-33-17, sos.ms.gov

Moving a Property You Already Own Into the LLC in Mississippi

1. 1

   Check with the county tax assessor whether the parcel still carries homestead

   This is first because it's the only part of the transaction that can change a recurring bill. If the property was your home recently and the exemption is still on the roll, the deed ends it. The Department's rule requires a living person as applicant and § 27-33-17 requires occupancy as a home. The assessor holds the record and can say what is on the parcel today.

2. 2

   Accept that separation means separate companies, then form the LLC

   Mississippi has no series statute, so a portfolio you want walled off is a filing per property with the Secretary of State, and a recurring cost per entity. Settle that arithmetic before you form anything, because unwinding two companies into one later means two more deeds through the chancery clerk.

3. 3

   Ask your servicer in writing before the deed exists

   Mississippi charging nothing for the conveyance doesn't touch your loan. Deeding to a company is a transfer of title, which is exactly what a due-on-sale clause is drafted to catch, and that's a matter of the loan contract and federal law rather than of the Mississippi code. A written answer before recording is worth more than a phone call after.

4. 4

   Record the deed with the chancery clerk

   There's no transfer tax return, no consideration affidavit and no exemption to claim, because there's no tax. The fee is the bracket for the first several pages plus a charge for each page after that under § 25-7-9, with a small archive fee in the counties that keep one. Length of the instrument is the only thing that changes the price.

5. 5

   Put the permit question to the Department of Revenue before the first short booking

   If the property will be let short-term, the sales tax permit is meant to be in hand before sales are made, not filed with the first return. Because we could not read the imposition section, describe the property honestly (whole house, no host on site, let to the public) and get the Department's own answer on whether it falls within "tourist courts or camps".

6. 6

   Move everything that still names you personally

   After recording, the landlord named in each lease, the named insured on the policy, the deposit account, the utilities and any municipal rental license still say your name rather than the company's. Nothing in the recording process prompts any of it, which is why this is the step most often left half done.

One LLC Per Property, or One for the Portfolio?

Mississippi has no series LLC statute, so separating properties means a separate LLC for each one.

Mississippi has no series statute, and the way that was established is worth more than the bare answer. The Revised Mississippi Limited Liability Company Act, Miss. Code Ann. §§ 79-29-101 to 79-29-1317, was read in full. All thirteen articles, from General Provisions through Transition Provisions, from the Secretary of State's own published text of the act, because the usual code mirrors returned a refusal to automated requests and Mississippi publishes its official code through a vendor portal we could not reach. The word "series" occurs five times in the whole act.

Every one of them is the phrase "class or series of interests" or "class or series of financial interests", sitting in the merger-voting and appraisal-rights provisions. That is the language of equity classes in a capital structure, not of segregated pools of assets. No article establishes a series, and nothing in the act shields the assets of one pool from the debts of another.

The corroboration is the detail that makes this more than a failed search. The Secretary of State's own Series Organizations Study Group materials, dated 21 August 2014, exist because Mississippi had not adopted series legislation and the office was working out whether it should. The memo's "Existing Series Legislation" section counts twelve adopting states at the time and charts which ones they were, with Mississippi's own adoption still an open question in front of the group. A state does not convene a study group about a statute it already has.

So separation in Mississippi means separate companies, and the recurring arithmetic that goes with them. There is a variant of the question that comes up often enough to name: forming a series company in a state that has the statute and having one of its series take title to Mississippi land. That is a foreign-entity question, and the Mississippi act does contain an article on Foreign Limited Liability Companies, but the act does not recognise series at all, so it says nothing about what a series of an out-of-state company is for Mississippi purposes, and we did not verify how a chancery clerk or a title underwriter here treats a deed that names one as grantee. That is a conversation to have with the clerk and with a Mississippi attorney before the deed is drafted, not at the recording counter.

Practically, that leaves the familiar trade-off. Separate LLCs mean separate filing fees, separate annual reports, separate registered agents and separate bank accounts, every year, for as long as you hold the properties. One LLC holding several properties means one set of costs and one pool of assets exposed to a claim arising at any of them. Which side of that you land on is a function of how much equity is in the portfolio, and it is worth pricing the recurring cost before deciding, our Mississippi LLC cost breakdown has the per-entity figures.

What Creditors Can Reach, What the Mississippi Statute Says

The reason to hold a rental in an LLC is usually to keep a claim arising at the property from reaching everything else you own. The reverse question matters just as much and gets far less attention: if someone wins a judgment against you personally, can they reach the rental inside the LLC? That is what a state’s charging-order provision decides.

Mississippi's LLC act makes the charging order the exclusive remedy, but does not address the single-member case one way or the other.

Miss. Code Ann. § 79-29-705 is headed "Rights of creditor" and runs to five subsections. Note the section number, because charts get it wrong: § 79-29-703 is the assignment-of-financial-interest section, and the charging order is at 705. Note the noun too. Mississippi's act charges the member's "financial interest", not a membership interest, and the distinction is the point. The economic entitlement is what a creditor reaches, and the governance rights are not part of the package.

Subsection (1) lets a court "charge the financial interest of the judgment debtor with payment of the unsatisfied amount of the judgment, with interest", and then confines what the creditor has become: "the judgment creditor has only the rights of an assignee of the financial interest, however, the judgment creditor shall have no rights to bring a proceeding under Article 11 of this chapter." Article 11 is the derivative-actions article, and that clause closes a door that bare assignee status might otherwise have left ajar, a charging-order creditor cannot turn around and sue in the company's name. Subsection (2) makes the order a lien.

Subsection (3) is the exclusivity sentence: "The entry of a charging order is the exclusive remedy by which a judgment creditor of a judgment debtor or its assignee may satisfy a judgment out of the judgment debtor's financial interest." Subsection (4) bars the other route into the building: no creditor "shall have any right to obtain possession of, or otherwise exercise legal or equitable remedies with respect to, the property of the limited liability company." Subsection (5) sends the whole subject to one court: "The chancery court shall have jurisdiction to hear and determine any matter relating to any such charging order."

Two things are absent, and both matter. The section never uses the words single member or sole member, and it draws no line between a one-owner company and a multi-owner one, so the structure most rental owners here actually have is neither singled out nor expressly covered. And there is no foreclosure or judicial-sale sentence in either direction: the section does not authorise a sale of the charged interest and does not forbid one. On sourcing, the text quoted here is the act as revised in 2010 and published by the Secretary of State. We could not reach a current-code host to confirm § 79-29-705 has not been amended since; the code index metadata shows the section range unchanged in the 2024 code, which is consistent with no new sections but is not a read of the current section itself.

We are reporting what the section says, not what a court would do with your facts. Outcomes turn on how the LLC was capitalised, how it has been operated and what the creditor is owed, and none of that is something a page can assess. If the answer above is load-bearing for you, it is a question for a Mississippi attorney.

Authority: Miss. Code Ann. Section 79-29-705, sos.ms.gov

Three Problems No State Transfer Rule Solves

These land the same way in Mississippi as everywhere else. One because it is federal law, two because they are contracts you signed. Which is exactly why they get left off state pages. They are also the three most likely to actually cost a landlord money, so they are here rather than buried.

The due-on-sale point is the one that generates the most bad advice. The Garn-St Germain Depository Institutions Act, at 12 U.S.C. § 1701j-3(d), bars a lender from enforcing a due-on-sale clause on nine categories of transfer of residential property of fewer than five dwelling units. The one people cite is the eighth: a transfer into an inter vivos trust in which the borrower is and remains a beneficiary and which does not relate to a transfer of rights of occupancy in the property. Neither that paragraph nor any of the other eight names a transfer to a limited liability company. The protection quoted for an LLC transfer is written for trusts, and the occupancy qualifier is the limb that matters most to a landlord, because a rental is occupied by someone else.

One honest caveat on that list. The ninth category is open-ended. It reaches any other transfer described in regulations issued under the Act, at 12 C.F.R. § 591.5(b), so it is a list that can be extended by regulation rather than a closed set fixed by the statute. We have not read those regulations end to end, and say so rather than describing the statute as more settled than we checked.

In practice lenders often do not call a loan when payments keep arriving, and that is genuinely what usually happens, but “usually not enforced” is a different thing from “not permitted,” and only one of them is a plan. The way to find out is to ask your servicer for written consent before you record, not after.

Which deed you use is a decision, not a formality. A quitclaim deed transfers whatever interest you happen to have and warrants nothing, which is why it is the cheap default for a transfer between yourself and your own company, and why title professionals warn against it. It can leave a gap in the chain of title that surfaces years later when you sell or refinance, and because it warrants nothing it gives the LLC no recourse against you if a defect turns up. A warranty deed carries the covenants across. Which one is appropriate depends on how the property was acquired and what your title history looks like, and it is a question worth asking before the deed is drafted rather than after it is recorded.

Tell your title insurer before you record. An owner’s title policy insures the person named in it. Convey the property to an LLC and the insured owner and the record owner are no longer the same. Which is the fact pattern in which coverage gets argued about at the worst possible moment, when a claim is already live. Some insurers will endorse an existing policy across to the entity, sometimes for a modest fee; some will not, and a new policy means a new premium on the current value. Either way it is a phone call before the deed rather than a discovery afterwards, and it belongs in the same budget as the tax above.

On the fourth thing people ask about: beneficial ownership reporting. Under 31 C.F.R. § 1010.380, a “reporting company” is an entity formed outside the United States and registered to do business in a State, and paragraph (c)(2)(xxiv) separately exempts any entity created by filing with a Secretary of State. A rental LLC you form in Mississippi is therefore exempt and files no beneficial ownership report. Pages telling you to file within 30 days of formation are describing the rule as it stood before March 2025. The exception runs the other way: an LLC formed in another country and registered to do business in Mississippi does still report. More on what compliance actually requires →

Does Mississippi Make You Register the Rental?

Not for a long-term tenancy. Mississippi does run a statewide registration through the Mississippi Department of Revenue, under Miss. Code Ann. § 27-65-23 (tax on hotels and tourist courts); Mississippi Department of Revenue sales tax permit requirement, but it is scoped to a category a conventional residential lease does not fall into. If you rent to a tenant on an ordinary lease, there is nothing to file with the state, and nothing that changes when the deed moves to the LLC. What follows sets out what the registration does cover, so you can check your own arrangement against it.

The registration duty on a Mississippi short-term rental is a tax registration, not a housing one, and that is why it is so easy to miss. The Department of Revenue states the rule in its own words: "All in-state businesses that have retail sales in Mississippi must register for a sales tax permit and number", and "An out-of-state person, corporation or other entity that operates a business located in Mississippi is required to register, collect, and remit sales taxes." Lodging is inside the taxable base, the Department's rate schedule lists "Hotels, motels, tourist courts or camps, trailer parks" among the activities it taxes on the gross income of the business. A permit is something you hold before you make sales, not something you sort out at the first return.

Here is the honest limit on that, and it is a real one. We could not read Miss. Code Ann. § 27-65-23, the imposition section the Department itself cites. The code mirrors refused automated requests, one returned nothing at all, and the official code sits behind a vendor portal we could not reach; the session's search budget ran out before a Department regulation or notice addressing short-term rentals specifically could be found. So the proposition that a whole-house, non-hosted short-term rental is a "tourist court or camp" for this purpose is the ordinary reading of the phrase combined with the Department's flat statement that in-state businesses making retail sales must hold a permit. It is not something we saw the Department say about single-family houses in terms. Before treating the permit as settled either way, put the question to the Department directly and describe the property as it actually operates.

A conventional twelve-month tenancy sits outside all of this. Renting a house to a resident on a lease is not a retail sale of lodging, so no state permit follows from it, and rental licensing for ordinary tenancies in Mississippi is a municipal matter. We did not reach a Mississippi housing or consumer agency page to corroborate that negative, so it rests on where the taxable activity list draws its own boundary rather than on an agency saying there is no registry.

dor.ms.gov

If You Rent Short-Term in Mississippi

A short-term let is a different tax animal from a twelve-month tenancy, and the LLC has nothing to do with it. The lodging tax follows the stay, not the owner.

Mississippi has no dedicated state lodging tax. It reaches a short stay through the ordinary sales tax on services, and the base is worth reading twice: the Department's schedule taxes the activities it lists on "the gross income of the business", not on a per-room charge. For an operator that means the measure is what the business takes in from the activity, and cleaning fees and the rest of what a guest pays are not obviously outside it. That is a question for the Department rather than for a booking platform's help page.

There is no length-of-stay threshold in this record, and the absence is a finding rather than a hole. We found no day limit at all on the state-level charge, the tax attaches to the character of the business being carried on, which is how the enumerated list is written, rather than to how many nights a particular guest happens to stay. Because the imposition section itself could not be opened, we would not invent a thirty- or thirty-one-day rule that we never saw. If someone tells you Mississippi has one, ask them which provision it is in.

Two more things are deliberately unstated above. Whether a booking platform is obliged to collect and remit for you is recorded as unknown, not as no: Mississippi does have a marketplace facilitator regime, but the operative collection provisions could not be read, and a boolean nobody has read the text for is worse than a blank. And local tourism levies do stack, Mississippi funds convention and tourism promotion through a large body of local and private legislation letting individual cities and counties tax hotel and restaurant gross proceeds, which the Department administers under the heading "Tourism and Economic Development Taxes". The page carrying the detail returned only site navigation to us, so no cap and no rate is asserted here. The city and county the property sits in are the ones that can tell you what applies.

Authority: Miss. Code Ann. § 27-65-23, dor.ms.gov

Who to Ask in Mississippi

The chancery clerk of the county where the property sits records the deed, charges the page-based fee under § 25-7-9, and can tell you what it expects alongside the instrument. The county tax assessor administers homestead exemption and holds the record showing whether the parcel still carries one, the call to make before recording rather than after.

The Department of Revenue is the office for the sales tax permit question, for whether a whole-house short-term rental falls inside the taxable list, and for the tourism and economic development levies it administers on behalf of cities and counties; note that we couldn't reach its site at all from here, which says nothing about whether it will answer a phone. The Secretary of State publishes the full text of the Revised Mississippi Limited Liability Company Act and the 2014 series study materials, and is where the company itself is formed.

Forming the LLC Itself

Nothing about the formation process changes because the LLC will hold rental property, the articles, the registered agent requirement and the annual filing are the same as for any other Mississippi LLC. The walkthrough lives in the formation guide rather than being repeated here.

How to start an LLC in Mississippi →

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