Your New Mexico LLC Is Doing Business in Another State
The short answer. You keep one LLC. It stays registered in New Mexico, which charges no recurring state filing fee, though the LLC keeps whatever obligations New Mexico attaches to it, and a state that finds you are doing business there adds its own registration and its own filings on top. Whether your activity counts is decided by that state's own rule, not by this page. Of the 47 other states that have one figure to compare, 45 cost more in year-one registration than New Mexico's own first-year total of $50, and 2 cost the same. Tennessee and Washington are outside those figures: Tennessee's fee scales with member count from $300, and Washington's $180 is before back fees, so neither has one figure to compare.
What you keep paying in New Mexico
Every New Mexico fee behind these figures is broken out on what an LLC costs in New Mexico.
What a second state adds
These are the states closest to New Mexico’s own cost line, plus the three dearest to enter. Each figure is that state’s first-year registration cost for an out-of-state LLC, beside what it charges every year after. Whether your activity counts as doing business there depends on the facts, and each state defines it differently.
| State | Year one to register | State charges, each year after | Against your year one ($50) |
|---|---|---|---|
| South Dakota | $750 | $55/yr | $700 more |
| Texas | $750 | None | $700 more |
| Massachusetts | $500 | $520/yr | $450 more |
| Colorado | $100 | $25/yr | $50 more |
| Ohio | $99 | None | $49 more |
| Kentucky | $90 | from $190/yr | $40 more |
| California | $70 | $810/yr | $20 more |
| Montana | $70 | None | $20 more |
| Utah | $59 | $18/yr | $9 more |
| Hawaii | $50 | $12.50/yr | the same |
| Michigan | $50 | $25/yr | the same |
A state charge of None is not a tax of none. The column is the recurring charge our fee dataset records, and a state that asks for no recurring filing may still levy an entity-level tax that sits outside it.
What we verified about New Mexico's own costs
Our notes, from New Mexico's published fee schedules and statutes.
New Mexico is one of the cheapest states to keep an LLC alive: $50 for the Articles of Organization and then nothing recurring, because the Limited Liability Company Act requires no annual or biennial report and a default-classified LLC owes no entity-level state tax (the $50 Corporate Franchise Tax reaches only LLCs taxed as corporations). NMAC 12.3.4.11 lists the complete set of documents a domestic New Mexico LLC must file - articles of organization and a registered agent statement - with no report among them, in contrast to the cooperative-association rule in the same part, which does list annual reports. Registering an out-of-state LLC costs twice as much as forming one, at $100. Ancillary charges are $20 to reserve a name, $25 for a certificate for any purpose not otherwise specified, and $25 to certify documents.
No annual report does not mean no registered agent duty. Because New Mexico has no annual report, there is no yearly nudge from the State. An LLC that quietly loses its registered agent or registered office can still be administratively revoked under NMSA 1978 Section 53-19-66.1 with no missed filing to warn you.
Foreign registration costs double the domestic fee. NMSA 1978 Section 53-19-63(J) charges $100 to issue a registration to a foreign LLC, versus $50 for filing original articles of organization under subsection A.
Fees are not published on the public SOS website. New Mexico moved all business filings online and no longer publishes a fee schedule on sos.nm.gov; the amounts are only in NMSA 1978 Section 53-19-63 and inside the enterprise.sos.nm.gov portal, so quoted totals can be hard to verify before you pay.
Frequently Asked Questions
Edmond Hui · Founder, MyStateLLC
Edmond Hui is a software engineer and serial entrepreneur based in New York who has founded multiple online businesses across e-commerce, media, and information publishing. Before transitioning into tech, he spent years as a commercial real estate professional closing deals totaling over 100,000 square feet, giving him firsthand experience with business formation and entity structuring. He built MyStateLLC to provide the free, state-specific LLC guidance he wished existed when forming his own companies.