Permit411: Business Permits & Licenses in Plain English

Starting or running a US small business means paperwork — an LLC filing here, a sales tax permit there, a city business license, maybe a food or contractor or short-term rental permit. Every state, county, and city has its own version of each. This site is the plain-English map: what the permit is, roughly what it costs, roughly how long it takes, and the direct link to the government office you actually file with.

Browse by permit type

Browse by state

How to read the numbers on this site

Two different kinds of figure appear on these pages, and we label which is which on every page:

Verified state figures. Where a page shows a box headed "What we verified for [state]", every number in it was read off that state's own government page — a fee schedule, a statute, an agency's published rate table — and the exact page is linked underneath with the date it was read. So far that covers LLC formation and the state business licence and registration, and it is being extended one permit type at a time.
Typical US ranges. Everything else — food truck permits, sign permits, health department permits and so on — is priced by whichever office issues it, usually a city or county. For those we publish the typical US range and send you to the issuing office rather than guessing at a local number.

We would rather tell you we don't have a figure than invent one. Nothing here is a quote, and a page with no verified box is a page where we had nothing verified to show you.

Who issues what

The single most useful fact on a permit page is which office issues it, and it is the one most permit sites get wrong — they list the Secretary of State on every page, including pages about liquor licences and home bakeries. This site maps each permit type to the kind of agency that actually issues it, then to a verified web address for that agency in that state.

Three things follow from that, and they are all visible on the pages:

Where the permit is issued by a city or county — sign permits, building permits, home occupation permits and more — the page says so and does not name a state agency as the issuer.
Where we hold a verified address for the state agency, the page names the agency and links it.
Where we could not verify the agency's current address, the page says that too and links nothing. A wrong government link is worse than no link.

The steps are the national pattern, not your state's rules

The numbered process on each page describes how the filing generally works across the US. It is labelled that way on every page, because applying one checklist to fifty-one jurisdictions guarantees it is wrong somewhere. Anything specific to one state — an exemption, a state licence a neighbouring state does not have, a fee cadence — appears in a separate, sourced block with links to the statute or agency page it came from.

What this site does not do

Permit411 doesn't file paperwork for you, doesn't take a cut of a filing service, and doesn't sell your info to lenders or lawyers. If that's what you were looking for, welcome. More about who runs this and where the data comes from.