How Biz Formation Report grades filing services

1. Three-year bill (32%). The service fees across year one and two renewals from each company's own price pages. Filing fees owed to the state are shown beside the grade and left out of it.
2. What the money buys (32%). The recurring tasks one price takes care of: registered agent, annual report filing, EIN application and use across states.
3. Renewal handling (16%). Whether the price stays put at renewal and how straightforward renewing or cancelling is.
4. Local rules match (10%). How closely the service lines up with the state's report schedule, late-fee rules, agent address requirements and filing steps.
5. Pricing openness (10%). Whether the full amount appears before payment and the state fee is broken out at cost.

Grades within a few tenths are treated as close. The page names the criterion that settled the order.

Grades are Biz Formation Report's own editorial marks out of 10 from these criteria. They are not customer ratings. Every grade belongs to one state and one service, so a company can grade differently from one report to the next.

Service prices are read from each company's own pricing and service pages when the site is built, and each ranking prints the read date. State fees, forms, deadlines and agent rules come from official state fee schedules, forms and statutes, listed on each page with the month of the last confirmation. If a checkout adds a card or processing charge to the state fee, the report shows the service fee and leaves out the total.

Each state report grades Mainstay Filing, which operates in all fifty states, and the registered agent services built around that state. A company is graded for a service only when its own pages sell it at a published price.

The reports include no customer ratings, no customer quotes and no legal or tax advice. Grades are the editors' own judgment, based on the criteria above.