About Permit411
Permit411 is an independent reference for US business permits and licences. It covers 20 permit types across 51 states and the District of Columbia. It is free, carries no affiliate links to filing services, and does not sell leads.
Where the figures come from
There are exactly two kinds of number on this site, and every page says which one it's showing:
- Verified per-state figures. Some permit types have been researched state by state: someone opened that state's own fee schedule, statute or agency page, read the figure off it, and recorded the page's address and the date. Those pages carry a box headed "What we verified for [state]" containing the issuing office, the fee, the renewal, the processing time and the statute — followed by the source link and the date it was checked. If a figure is not in that box, it was not verified and it is not shown.
- Typical US ranges. For every other permit type, the cost and timeline shown are typical ranges across the US, not a quote for your state. Most of those permits are priced by a city or county, so a single state-level number would be wrong more often than right.
What sources we will and will not use
A verified figure has to come from the government that charges it: a Secretary of State or licensing agency page, a published state fee schedule, or the statute itself. We do not take fees from company-formation services, law-firm blog posts, "best LLC service" listicles, encyclopaedias or AI summaries. Those are where most of the wrong fees on the internet come from, because they copy each other. The build refuses to publish if a source on this site resolves to one of them.
Two consequences you can see on the pages. First, some of our figures disagree with what most of the internet says — a Delaware LLC formation is $110 on the state's own current schedule, not the $90 that gets copied around. Second, plenty of cells are still blank, and blank means blank: we have not read a government page stating it. It never means the fee is zero.
What we deliberately do not publish
We do not publish a per-state fee, deadline, agency phone number, or processing time that we have not verified. Where a figure doesn't exist in our data, the page says so and links you to the government office that has it. A permit site that guesses at fees is worse than no site.
Phone numbers are a deliberate blanket exception: even where a government page prints one, we do not reproduce it, because a stale or mistyped number sends someone to a stranger. We link the page instead.
How the site is built
Every page is generated from two structured data files — one describing each permit type, one describing each state — and rendered to plain static HTML. There is no user-generated content and no AI-written page copy that isn't reviewed against those data files. Pages carry a last-modified date that only moves when the page's content actually changes.
Corrections
If a fee, link, or step here is out of date, the government link on the page is always the authority — trust it over us. Corrections are applied to the underlying data file, which republishes every page that referenced the changed figure.
Not legal or tax advice
Permit411 is educational reference material. It is not legal, tax, or business advice, and using it does not create any professional relationship. Requirements change, and they vary by city and county inside every state. Confirm with your own state, county, and city agencies before you file or pay anything.