The cheapest companies in the world: which legal entity can you really run for almost €0?

A company with limited liability for €0, €17 or $50 sounds like the setup for a scam. In a handful of jurisdictions the numbers are real — as long as you look only at what the government charges to put the company on the register.

The interesting question is what happens afterwards. Does the company need a paid local address? A registered agent? A notary? Annual accounts, and an accountant to produce them? A yearly payment to the state? Does the owner turn up in a register anybody can search? And can somebody sitting in Luxembourg complete the whole thing without getting on a plane?

We compared the cheapest company forms we could verify against the registries and tax authorities themselves, with a founder resident in Luxembourg or elsewhere in the EU in mind. There is no single winner.

• New Mexico's LLC offers the best combination of low recurring state cost, simple administration and public-registry privacy.
• Lithuania's MB is the most interesting ultra-low-cost entity inside the EU.
• Latvia's reduced-capital SIA is the cheapest conventional EU limited company.
• Kosovo's LLC and Rwanda's private company limited by shares can genuinely be registered for nothing.
• Mississippi's LLC comes far closer to New Mexico than its reputation suggests.
• A Dutch BV is considerably more expensive to create, but earns its price when a conventional EU share company matters more than the fee does.

And one caveat governs everything below.

A €0 annual government fee is not the same thing as a €0 annual compliance cost.

What we counted, and what we left out

The theoretical formation floor is the mandatory government registration fee plus any mandatory initial capital. Capital belongs in the calculation because the founder has to produce it, even though it stays an asset of the company rather than disappearing as a fee.

The recurring state cost excludes optional lawyers, accountants and commercial address providers. It assumes the best case throughout: that any legally required address or registered agent can be arranged at no cost, and that the founder makes every permitted filing personally. Very few readers are actually in that position, which is what the second half of this article is about.

The cheapest company forms, at a glance

• Kosovo, LLC. €0 to register, no charter capital, no general renewal fee identified. Annual filings still apply and company information is deliberately public. Cheapest on paper.
• Rwanda, private company limited by shares. €0 to register online, no minimum initial capital, registration in about six working hours — but a local physical address is mandatory. Excellent registration system, with a local-address catch.
• Lithuania, small partnership (MB). €17.13 to register electronically, no minimum share capital, no general annual registry renewal. Members and their contributions are recorded. The best ultra-cheap EU candidate.
• Latvia, reduced-capital SIA. A €20 state fee plus capital below €2,800, one to five natural-person owners, non-residents allowed. Shareholder information is highly transparent. The best cheap conventional EU company.
• New Mexico, LLC. $50 once, no statutory capital, no annual state LLC report or renewal fee, and little owner information in the ordinary formation filing. The best overall cost-to-privacy combination.
• Mississippi, LLC. $50 once, no capital, an annual report every year — but the domestic LLC annual report is free. A very strong New Mexico alternative.
• Kentucky, LLC. $40 to form and $15 a year, the cheapest US entry price of the group; the annual report puts members and managers into the state's records. Cheap, but owners become searchable.
• North Macedonia, simplified LLC. Around €1 of founding capital, with a registration tariff we could not confirm in English. An interesting Balkan alternative.
• Wyoming, LLC. $100 to form and an annual licence tax of the greater of $60 or 0.02% of Wyoming assets. A good jurisdiction that is no longer a cost leader.
• Netherlands, BV. €0.01 of capital, but a compulsory civil-law notary at roughly €500 to €1,500 plus the KVK registration fee. Good structure, expensive incorporation.
• Luxembourg, SARL-S. Capital of €1 to €12,000, formed by private deed without a notary, plus RCS filing costs and a business permit. Shareholders and their holdings are public. Easy locally, poor for ownership privacy.
• Delaware, LLC. Higher formation cost than New Mexico or Kentucky and an annual tax now set at $400. Far too expensive for this particular objective.

New Mexico: the best cost-to-privacy ratio we found

A New Mexico LLC is difficult to beat if what you want is limited liability, no minimum capital, a low formation cost, no annual state report, no recurring franchise-tax-style payment, and relatively little about the owners in the ordinary formation filing.

New Mexico fixes the fee for filing the original Articles of Organization at $50, and business filings run through the Secretary of State's online portal. The state-level arithmetic is therefore unusually short:

• Formation: $50.
• Year two: $0.
• Year three: $0.
• Year ten: $0.

That is not the same as saying a foreign-owned LLC has no other obligations.

How the registration works

A minimal formation runs roughly as follows. The name is checked against the New Mexico business register. The company appoints a New Mexico registered agent for service of legal documents — theoretically free if a qualifying person or address is legitimately available, and otherwise the main recurring cash cost of the whole structure. The founder opens an account on the Secretary of State's system, files the Articles of Organization with the $50 fee, and adopts an operating agreement, which is an internal governance document rather than the publicly filed articles of association a European founder might expect. Most foreign owners then need an employer identification number from the IRS for banking and tax administration.

The catch that costs more than the company: Form 5472

For a foreign founder, New Mexico's light state administration creates a misleading impression of a light-touch structure.

A foreign-owned US disregarded entity is treated as a corporation for the limited purposes of the reporting rules, and has to file a pro-forma Form 1120 with Form 5472 attached. This is not a formality to forget. The IRS sets the penalty for failing to file a complete Form 5472, or to keep the required records, at $25,000 — with a further $25,000 for each 30-day period the failure continues once 90 days have passed after notification.

New Mexico is therefore extremely cheap at the level of the state company, and potentially expensive at the level of federal tax information reporting if the owner does not understand the rules.

What changed this month for beneficial-owner reporting

The US picture on ownership registers changed very recently. A FinCEN final rule, effective on 14 August 2026, permanently exempts companies created in the United States from beneficial-ownership reporting under the Corporate Transparency Act, and FinCEN has said it will delete information already reported by US persons.

That makes New Mexico genuinely interesting for public-registry privacy. It should never be confused with invisibility: banks, payment providers, registered agents, the IRS and competent authorities can still require the same identifying information, and in practice they do.

Étude assessment

• Registration cost — ★★★★★
• Recurring state cost — ★★★★★
• Administrative simplicity — ★★★★☆
• Public ownership privacy — ★★★★★
• Foreign-owner tax simplicity — ★★☆☆☆

Best for inexpensive holding or online-business structures where US LLC treatment is appropriate and the owner understands the cross-border tax consequences.

Lithuania's MB: the cheapest real company in the EU

The mažoji bendrija, universally abbreviated to MB, deserves far more attention than it gets in discussions of cheap European companies. It is a Lithuanian private legal person with limited liability, and unlike a conventional Lithuanian UAB it has no statutory minimum share capital. Members make contributions on terms they set themselves, and there can be up to ten of them, all natural persons.

The remarkable part is the fee. Lithuania's Centre of Registers charges €17.13 to register an MB.

How the registration works

The cheap route is the electronic one. An MB can be founded by one eligible natural person or several; the founders use the Centre of Registers' self-service system with standard formation documents rather than a traditional incorporation notary, which is what removes most of the drafting cost. Every founder needs a qualified electronic signature, and Lithuania's participant information system explicitly accommodates foreign natural persons — where a foreign person's details cannot be verified automatically, a passport or identity-document copy is supplied instead. Filed electronically and without defects, the company is registered within one working day, against three on paper.

The catch: an MB is not a conventional share company

An MB has members and contributions rather than a BV or SIA-style share capital divided into shares. That distinction is irrelevant for a one-person consulting, holding or micro-enterprise structure. It is close to decisive if you want investors holding ordinary shares, different share classes, conventional equity financing, or a legal form that international counterparties recognise on sight.

Ownership is also on the record: the register keeps the member's identity, contribution and membership dates, with additional identification data for foreign members. On public-registry privacy, Lithuania is not New Mexico.

What it still costs to run

An MB is a proper legal entity, not a register-once-and-forget structure. Accounting and financial-reporting obligations continue, and the registry actively tracks entities that fail to file annual financial statements. The absence of share capital removes a payment, not a duty.

Étude assessment

• Registration cost — ★★★★★
• Recurring registry cost — ★★★★★
• Administrative simplicity — ★★★★☆
• Usefulness inside the EU — ★★★★★
• Public ownership privacy — ★★★☆☆

Best for an EU resident who wants an extremely cheap EU limited-liability entity and does not specifically need conventional shares.

Latvia's reduced-capital SIA: a conventional EU company for €20

If you specifically want something that behaves like a normal private limited company, Latvia becomes the stronger answer. The standard Latvian limited company is the SIA, and alongside it the Register of Enterprises operates a reduced-capital SIA whose parameters are published in the register's own comparison of business types:

• it is a legal person;
• it has one to five owners, who must be natural persons;
• non-residents may be owners;
• equity capital is below €2,800;
• the state fee is €20, with an option to pay triple for processing within one working day.

How the registration works

The sequence is conventional, which is the point. Check the name; prepare a founding decision for a single founder or an incorporation agreement for several; draft the articles of association; establish and document the share capital under the reduced-capital regime; prepare the shareholder-register division; identify the beneficial owners, which in Latvia generally means any natural person owning or controlling more than 25%; provide the legal address; sign, using a qualified electronic signature to avoid traditional certification; and file with the Register of Enterprises with the €20 fee.

Is it really a €20 company?

At the level of the registry fee, essentially yes. Capital is extra but belongs to the company rather than being consumed as a fee, and commercial address services, accounting and advice are separate purchases. A founder with a legitimate Latvian address, an accepted electronic signature and the ability to handle bookkeeping personally can hold the external cash requirement to something very small indeed.

The problem is the shop window

Latvia is the weakest of our finalists for anyone whose objective is to keep majority ownership out of ordinary company searches. Shareholders and their holdings are part of the record, alongside the articles and the annual reports, and current entity data is free to search — document downloads and data on natural persons require authentication with a Latvian eID or an eIDAS credential, which is a friction, not a wall.

So Latvia is an excellent answer to "what is one of the cheapest normal EU limited companies?" and a poor answer to "what is the cheapest EU company where nobody can find out that I own 90% of it?"

Étude assessment

• Registration cost — ★★★★★
• Recurring registry cost — ★★★★★
• Conventional company structure — ★★★★★
• Usefulness inside the EU — ★★★★★
• Ownership privacy — ★☆☆☆☆

Kosovo: the €0 headline that survives contact with the registry

Kosovo produces the most dramatic number in the comparison. The country's investment and enterprise support agency states that registering a business is free of charge, and Kosovar law requires no minimum charter capital for a limited liability company, so there is no mandatory founder payment at all. Foreign investors are entitled to equal treatment and 100% foreign ownership is permitted.

On raw formation economics that is unbeatable: €0 of fee plus €0 of capital. Businesses register with the Kosovo Business Registration Agency, which runs an electronic database built for fast, free registration, and the investment agency will help foreign investors through the procedure.

Why Kosovo does not automatically win

First, Kosovo actively promotes the transparency of company information — basic information about registered companies is freely accessible online. That is the opposite of what makes New Mexico attractive.

Second, free registration does not remove annual tax and accounting administration.

Third, the English-language official material on the current post-incorporation fee schedule is thinner than what Lithuania, Latvia or the US states publish. We would confirm the agency's current tariff immediately before incorporating rather than treat "€0 forever" as guaranteed.

Étude assessment

• Registration cost — ★★★★★
• Certainty about recurring cost — ★★★☆☆
• Accessibility for a foreign founder — ★★★★☆
• Ownership privacy — ★★☆☆☆
• Administrative predictability — ★★★☆☆

Rwanda: free, online, and done in about six hours

Rwanda is the other jurisdiction where the headline survives contact with the official registry. The Office of the Registrar General, part of the Rwanda Development Board, states that business registration is 100% online and free of charge, that 100% non-local shareholding is allowed, and that a private company limited by shares has no minimum initial share capital. Where the information supplied is complete, registration can be finished within roughly six working hours.

Unlike an LLC or a Lithuanian MB, this is an actual private company limited by shares — a form every counterparty understands. The applicant supplies the company name, contact details, passport or identity information, proposed activities, shareholder and director information, and the registered office.

Where the zero stops being zero

The company must have a local physical registered address in Rwanda. Somebody sitting in Luxembourg with no connection to the country still has to solve that, and if the answer is a commercial provider then the effective cost leaves zero immediately. Rwandan companies also carry ongoing obligations, including annual returns and financial information, for which the Registrar General publishes post-registration templates.

Rwanda wins the incorporation-fee contest. It does not win the contest for the company you can ignore for ten years.

Étude assessment

• Registration cost — ★★★★★
• Online registration — ★★★★★
• Conventional share structure — ★★★★★
• Local infrastructure requirement — ★★☆☆☆
• Ease for a Luxembourg-based micro-founder — ★★☆☆☆

Mississippi: the overlooked American alternative

New Mexico is not the only US state that can approach zero recurring cost. Mississippi charges $50 to form a domestic LLC and requires an annual report by 15 April — but the domestic LLC annual report carries no filing fee. Foreign LLCs registered in the state pay $250 for the same report, which is a useful reminder that "the state charges nothing" is usually a sentence with a subject.

Mississippi companies must also maintain a registered agent, and the Secretary of State accepts an individual, corporation or LLC as agent provided it has a physical address in the state. As in New Mexico, the gap between a theoretical $0 and a real foreign-owner cost is whether that agent is free.

We still prefer New Mexico, for two unglamorous reasons: Mississippi imposes an annual reporting event even though the report is free, and New Mexico has the deeper ecosystem of providers used to foreign-owned, low-footprint LLCs. On the federal side nothing changes — a foreign-owned single-member disregarded LLC faces the same Form 5472 exposure in either state.

Étude assessment

• Registration cost — ★★★★★
• Annual state cash cost — ★★★★★
• Annual administration — ★★★★☆
• Foreign-owner simplicity — ★★★☆☆

Kentucky: cheaper to create, worse to own

Kentucky beats New Mexico on the entry price. The state charges $40 for the Articles of Organization and $15 for the annual report, which is due by 30 June. Over five years that is $40 plus four reports, or about $100 of state fees in total — extremely cheap by any standard.

It loses on the thing this comparison keeps returning to. The annual report requires the company to supply or confirm the names and addresses of its members or managers, and the Secretary of State makes that information available through its business records. Kentucky is the right answer if the difference between $40 and $50 matters more to you than whether your name is searchable. For most foreign founders, it does not.

Wyoming: still a good jurisdiction, no longer the cheap one

Wyoming is marketed internationally as the default low-cost American LLC. It is a genuinely good jurisdiction. It simply does not win this comparison: formation costs $100, and every year the company files an annual report with a licence tax equal to the greater of $60 or 0.02% of assets located in Wyoming.

Set against New Mexico's $0 annual state LLC cost, that is at least $60 a year of pure difference, plus registered-agent fees on both sides. Over the life of a tiny entity Wyoming costs hundreds of dollars more without necessarily giving a small foreign founder anything that compensates.

Delaware: eliminated on annual cost

Delaware's corporate law and judicial ecosystem are among the most important in the world. For a tiny personal company, that is not what you are buying.

Delaware's alternative-entity tax page states that all domestic and foreign LLCs, LPs and general partnerships formed or registered in Delaware pay an annual tax of $400, due on or before 1 June, even though they file no ordinary annual report. That figure is new: House Bill 400 raised the alternative-entity tax from $300, and the higher amount is what the Division of Corporations now publishes.

The comparison is stark. Ten years of New Mexico state LLC renewal fees come to $0. Ten years of Delaware annual tax at the current rate come to $4,000, before a single registered-agent invoice. There is little reason to pay that simply because the name is famous — and if you do form in Delaware, check the amount in the state's own payment system on the day, because this is a fee that has just moved.

The Netherlands: €0.01 of capital, €500 to €1,500 of notary

The Dutch BV is the clearest illustration of why minimum capital is a bad proxy for the cost of incorporation. A BV can be created with €0.01 of starting capital. It cannot be created without a Dutch civil-law notary, and Dutch government guidance puts notarial fees at roughly €500 to €1,500, on top of the KVK Business Register registration fee.

The process is correspondingly formal: the founders settle the name and structure, supply shareholder, director and ultimate-beneficial-owner information to the notary, who drafts and executes the deed of incorporation and the articles, creates the shareholder register, registers the company and its directors with KVK, and records the UBO information. At least €0.01 is contributed, and the company then keeps proper records and files annual financial statements.

The Netherlands remains attractive if your priorities run: conventional EU share company, strong commercial recognition, a relatively private ordinary shareholder register, low required capital — and cost fifth. If cost comes first, Lithuania and Latvia are dramatically cheaper.

Luxembourg's SARL-S: cheap capital, public shareholders

For a Luxembourg resident the obvious baseline is the SARL-S. Its share capital must be at least €1 and no more than €12,000, and it can be incorporated by private deed without a notary, which is why it is the cheapest domestic route into a limited-liability company.

The restrictions matter, though:

• shareholders must be natural persons — a company cannot own a SARL-S, and a person may hold shares in only one at a time;
• the business needs the appropriate Luxembourg permit for its activity, with the establishment authorisation issued by the Ministry of the Economy;
• the filing with the Trade and Companies Register discloses the shareholders, their addresses and the number of shares they hold;
• annual accounts are approved and filed with the RCS, normally within seven months of the financial year end, and the public can consult them.

Anyone owning 90% of a SARL-S should expect that fact to be discoverable through the Luxembourg registration system. For someone actually operating from Luxembourg, that transparency may still be a price worth paying, because a €17 Lithuanian company whose administration, tax residence and banking all sit across a border is not obviously simpler to run.

Cheap foreign incorporation does not automatically mean cheap real-world operation.

North Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Armenia

Four more jurisdictions came up repeatedly in the research and none of them displaced the finalists.

North Macedonia operates a simplified limited liability company, commonly abbreviated PDOO, whose attraction is a founding-capital requirement of roughly €1 against the €5,000 of an ordinary DOO. Registration runs through the Central Registry's one-stop shop. We could not verify the complete 2026 registration tariff from English-language official material with the confidence we could for Lithuania's €17.13 or Latvia's €20, and North Macedonian entities must keep accounts and file annual accounts with the Central Registry electronically, which requires a digital-signature setup or an authorised accountant. Worth watching; not yet a replacement.

Montenegro keeps a DOO structured around roughly €1 of capital with government fees in the region of €22, registered with the Central Registry of Business Entities and requiring notarised founding documents. It is genuinely cheap. It is harder to price with confidence from outside than the two Baltic options, and older online comparisons quoting historic fees should be checked against the current tariff rather than trusted.

Albania has a large limited-liability-company regime and an increasingly centralised online registration system at the National Business Center, covering initial registration, statutory changes and beneficial-owner filings, with foreign-owned companies common. It is not a privacy jurisdiction: beneficial-ownership registration is built into the framework and the country has moved deliberately towards greater corporate transparency.

Armenia has an excellent electronic legal-entity register and cheap digital company services — but several of the streamlined online routes are restricted to companies whose shareholders and executive head are Armenian citizens, and every Armenian legal entity must submit or confirm its beneficial-owner declaration by 20 February each year, with a first declaration due within 40 days of registration. A fine domestic system; not a general-purpose remote company for a founder in Luxembourg.

What actually decides whether a company costs €0 a year

Across every jurisdiction we looked at, the same pattern holds: the government fee is the smallest part of the problem. Four things decide the real number.

1. The registered address

A company may need a real address in its jurisdiction. If you own one or can legitimately use one for free, the cost is €0. If you need a commercial provider, that single line can exceed the entire government fee for the life of the company. Rwanda is the clearest case: the local physical address is not optional.

2. The registered agent

US states normally require a registered agent with a physical address in the state. A founder with a qualifying friend, employee or office there might pay nothing. A Luxembourg resident with no US presence will use a commercial service. This is why New Mexico's $50 once, $0 a year should be read as the statutory floor, not as a promise that any foreign founder will literally spend nothing.

3. Accounting

European limited companies generally demand more formal accounting than a US state registry does. Latvia's reduced-capital SIA, Lithuania's MB, Luxembourg's SARL-S and a Dutch BV are all accounting entities even in a year when turnover is €0. The work can often be done personally; the obligation does not go away.

4. Tax returns

This is where the cheapest company can become the most expensive. A foreign-owned US disregarded LLC costs $50 to create and carries a $25,000 starting penalty for mishandling Form 5472. There are not many consumer transactions where the ratio between the purchase price and the penalty for getting the paperwork wrong is five hundred to one.

The question that outweighs every fee: where is the company actually run?

One fact can outweigh every number in this article. A foreign incorporation certificate does not necessarily make a company foreign for Luxembourg tax purposes.

Luxembourg treats a collective entity as resident if either its statutory seat or its central administration is in the Grand Duchy. Central administration is a question of fact, assessed on substance rather than form: where the direction of the entity's affairs is concentrated, where the central accounting and archives are kept, where shareholder and board meetings are actually held.

Consider the structure this article might tempt someone into:

1. you live in Luxembourg;
2. you register a €17.13 Lithuanian MB;
3. every decision is taken in Luxembourg;
4. all the work is carried out in Luxembourg;
5. the company has essentially no substantive activity in Lithuania.

The certificate says Lithuania. That does not settle the Luxembourg residence question, and the same problem arises identically with a New Mexico LLC, a Latvian SIA, a Kosovar LLC, a Rwandan Ltd or a Dutch BV. These structures are not a method for stepping outside Luxembourg tax obligations by paying a cheap foreign registry fee, and treating them that way is how a €17 company becomes an expensive one.

The right optimisation question is not "where can I register a company for €0?" but this:

Which legal form gives me the lowest total cost once company law, tax residence, accounting, address requirements, banking and administration are all counted?

Étude's ranking

For a Luxembourg or EU resident who wants a small limited-liability entity, this is how the ten finalists rank today.

• 1. New Mexico LLC — best overall. Choose it when public-registry privacy and near-zero state maintenance matter more than having an EU company. Main risk: US federal tax-information compliance.
• 2. Lithuania MB — best EU value. €17.13 and no minimum capital. Main risk: it is not a conventional share company, and EU accounting duties continue.
• 3. Latvia reduced-capital SIA — best cheap EU share-company structure. €20 and a far more conventional form. Main drawback: shareholder information is highly transparent.
• 4. Mississippi LLC — best New Mexico alternative. Almost identical economics; one extra annual event.
• 5. Kosovo LLC — cheapest on paper. €0 and no charter capital. Main drawback: less predictable foreign-founder administration and a weak privacy case.
• 6. Rwanda private Ltd — best free conventional share company. Free, online, foreign shareholders permitted. Main drawback: a mandatory local address and real geographic friction.
• 7. Kentucky LLC. $40 and $15 a year. Main drawback: members and managers land in the state's records.
• 8. Luxembourg SARL-S. Excellent if you genuinely operate a small Luxembourg business. Main drawback: shareholders and their holdings are disclosed.
• 9. Netherlands BV. Excellent conventional EU company. Main drawback: the compulsory notary turns €0.01 of capital into a €500 to €1,500 exercise before anything else.
• 10. Wyoming and Delaware. Respectable jurisdictions, neither of which wins a cost competition: $60 a year minimum in Wyoming, $400 a year in Delaware.

Bottom line

The company that costs almost nothing to create is not a myth. At the pure registry level we verified €0 in Kosovo, €0 in Rwanda, €17.13 in Lithuania, €20 plus capital in Latvia, $40 in Kentucky, and $50 in both New Mexico and Mississippi.

Only New Mexico combines that entry price with a genuinely light recurring state burden and strong ordinary public-registry privacy. Inside the European Union, Lithuania's MB is the most interesting discovery of the exercise, and Latvia's reduced-capital SIA is the better answer for anyone who needs a conventional capital company.

So the final decision should not be made by asking where a company can be registered for €0. It should be made by asking which company can be kept compliant, bankable and tax-correct for the lowest total cost over the next five or ten years. That is a much harder question, and a much more useful one.

Our guides to corporate tax in Luxembourg, the tax and social-security position of the self-employed and VAT rates and registration thresholds cover what happens after the company exists.

This article compares company-registration and maintenance rules for informational purposes and is not individual legal or tax advice. Fees, filing rules and beneficial-ownership regimes change, and any cross-border structure should be checked against the founder's actual tax residence and place of effective management before incorporation.