Anonymous LLC States: How Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, and New Mexico Compare

Every limited liability company has owners, but some US states offer anonymity to encourage businesses to register in that state. In other words, an “anonymous LLC” is not a type of business, but rather shorthand for a particular fact about a state’s filing system: that the owners are not required to appear in any document that the public, or compliance teams running KYB, can pull from the state.

Four states have shaped their filings to produce this outcome: Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Each takes a slightly different approach. The differences matter, because a KYB verification that depends on the Secretary of State filing for ownership information will produce different gaps depending on which state the entity was formed in.

What “Anonymous” Means at the State Level

An LLC has two kinds of named individuals in its governance: members (the owners) and, optionally, managers (those delegated to operate the entity). State filings differ in what they require to be publicly disclosed:

Some states require the formation document to list members or managers.
Some states require a recurring annual report that lists members or managers.
Some states require neither.

The states discussed in this article fall into the third category for most or all of their filings. The result is that the entity’s state file shows what the LLC is called and where to serve it with legal process, and not who owns it.

This is separate from the federal disclosure requirement under the Corporate Transparency Act. State and federal layers are independent.

Delaware

Delaware is the most populous corporate jurisdiction in the United States and the default choice for sophisticated formation work. Its LLC Act (6 Del. C. § 18-201) requires only three things on the Certificate of Formation:

The name of the LLC.
The address of the registered office in Delaware.
The name and address of the registered agent at that office.

No member or manager is named. No principal place of business outside Delaware is named. No purpose statement is required.

Annual reporting. Unlike Delaware corporations, Delaware LLCs do not file an annual report. They pay an annual franchise tax of $300, due June 1, which is transmitted through the registered agent. The franchise tax does not require disclosure of members or managers.

The Wilmington address. Because Delaware LLCs need only a registered agent, mass-domicile addresses are common. 1209 N. Orange Street in Wilmington, the Corporation Trust Center operated by CT Corporation (a Wolters Kluwer subsidiary), is the registered office for an extraordinary number of Delaware entities. Commercial registered-agent services of this kind are mainstream business infrastructure used by large public companies, mid-market firms, and small operators alike; use of one carries no inference about the underlying entity. The address has become a recognizable signal in compliance work. It is not a red flag in itself; it is a reminder that a Delaware address tells you almost nothing about where a business is located.

What Delaware’s public file shows. The entity name. The agent and registered office. The franchise tax payment status. Any amendments or filings the entity has elected to make publicly. Nothing about ownership.

Nevada

Nevada is structured differently. Its LLC statute (NRS Chapter 86) requires ongoing disclosure of officers, but the disclosure is structured in a way that often produces little useful information.

Formation. The Articles of Organization require the entity name, registered agent, dissolution date (if any), management structure (member-managed or manager-managed), and the name and address of at least one manager or managing member.

Annual List. Nevada LLCs must file an Annual List of Managers or Members each year, due by the end of the entity’s anniversary month. The required disclosure depends on the management structure:

Manager-managed LLCs must list managers. Members do not appear.
Member-managed LLCs must list members.

Most anonymous Nevada LLCs are structured as manager-managed. The manager listed can be a nominee: a service provider whose name appears in the public record in exchange for a fee, but who has no economic interest in the entity. The use of nominee managers and officers is legal in Nevada and openly marketed by formation services.

Costs. The Annual List filing fee is $150. Nevada also requires a State Business License at $200 per year. Total recurring state cost is approximately $350 per year.

What Nevada’s public file shows. The entity name. The agent. A list of managers, who may be nominees, with no requirement that the listing reflect actual ownership or control. The state does not verify the relationship between the listed name and the entity’s economics.

Wyoming

Wyoming has the longest LLC history in the United States: its Limited Liability Company Act of 1977 was the first in the country, predating Delaware’s by nearly two decades. The state has steadily marketed itself as a privacy jurisdiction.

Formation. The Articles of Organization (W.S. § 17-29-201) require name, registered agent and registered office, and an organizer. Members and managers are not listed.

Annual Report. Wyoming requires an annual report from each LLC. The report requires:

The name of the LLC.
The principal office address.
The name and address of the registered agent.
Total assets located in Wyoming (used to calculate the annual fee).

It does not require disclosure of members or managers.

Costs. The annual report minimum is $60. Wyoming has no state income tax and no franchise tax.

Charging order protection. Wyoming’s LLC statute makes a “charging order” the exclusive remedy for a creditor seeking to collect against a member’s interest. A creditor cannot force liquidation of the LLC or seize the member’s interest directly; the creditor receives only distributions if and when they are made. This is the asset protection feature Wyoming markets most heavily, and it is one reason Wyoming LLCs appear frequently as upstream holders in multi-tier ownership structures.

What Wyoming’s public file shows. The entity name. The agent. The principal office address. Total Wyoming-situated assets. Nothing about ownership.

New Mexico

New Mexico is the most extreme of the four. The state requires no ongoing disclosure of any kind after formation.

Formation. The Articles of Organization (NMSA 1978 § 53-19-8) require name, registered agent, and the duration of the entity. Members and managers are not required to be listed. The organizer must sign, and an organizer can be a third party who has no economic interest in the entity.

No annual report. New Mexico is one of the only U.S. states that does not require LLCs to file an annual report or pay an annual fee. Once the formation document is filed, the only ongoing requirement is to maintain a current registered agent.

Costs. A one-time formation fee of approximately $50. No recurring state fees.

What New Mexico’s public file shows. The entity name. The agent at formation. The organizer at formation. Nothing else, and no updates over time unless the entity chooses to file an amendment.

The absence of an annual filing means the public record can become stale almost immediately. A New Mexico LLC may change managers, change members, change actual operations, and none of it appears in the state file.

Comparing the Four

	Delaware	Nevada	Wyoming	New Mexico
Members/managers in formation document	No	At least one manager or managing member	No	No
Periodic report	None (franchise tax only)	Annual List of Managers	Annual report (no members/managers)	None
Members/managers ever required publicly	No	Managers only; nominees common	No	No
State cost per year	$300	~$350	$60+	$0 after formation
Charging order as sole remedy	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
State income tax	None	None	None	Yes

The pattern is consistent: in each state, a determined LLC owner can keep their identity off the public state file. The variations are in how the result is achieved. Delaware does not ask. Nevada accepts nominees. Wyoming limits what the annual report asks. New Mexico requires no recurring filing at all.

Other States Worth Knowing

The four states above are the most common destinations for anonymous formation, but they are not the only options.

South Dakota has built a reputation as a trust privacy jurisdiction more than an LLC jurisdiction. Its LLC formation requirements include disclosure of an organizer but not members. South Dakota’s annual report does require disclosure of at least one member or manager, which reduces but does not eliminate its appeal for anonymous formation.

Ohio does not require disclosure of members or managers on the Articles of Organization and does not impose a recurring report on LLCs. The state has been described as offering Wyoming-style privacy at a lower profile.

Montana has comparable formation requirements to Wyoming and is popular for LLCs that own vehicles, where the LLC structure can be used to avoid state sales tax in the owner’s home state.

These states reflect the broader truth: the United States does not have a unified system of business identity disclosure. Each state’s filing requirements are an artifact of state law, and no two states ask exactly the same questions.

The Federal Layer: The Corporate Transparency Act

The Corporate Transparency Act was enacted in 2021 with the goal of imposing federal disclosure on entities whose state filings did not require it. Reporting companies were to file Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) with FinCEN: the names, dates of birth, addresses, and identifying numbers of ultimate beneficial owners.

The original scope covered approximately 32 million existing entities plus all new formations, with reporting taking effect January 1, 2024.

Implementation has been contested. A series of court rulings in 2024 and early 2025 paused, narrowed, and re-paused enforcement. In March 2025, FinCEN issued an Interim Final Rule that limits BOI reporting to foreign entities registered to do business in the United States. Domestic entities, including LLCs formed in the four states described above, are not required to file BOI under the IFR. The Eleventh Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the CTA in December 2025. As of this article’s last review, the IFR remains in effect, and whether the original domestic scope will be restored is unresolved.

What this means in practice. The federal layer that was supposed to fill the gaps in state-level disclosure has been narrowed. For domestic LLCs formed in Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, or New Mexico, no federal disclosure of beneficial ownership is currently required.

Even if the original CTA scope were restored, the FinCEN BOI database is not publicly accessible. Access is limited to federal law enforcement, certain regulators, and, in narrow circumstances with the entity’s consent, financial institutions performing customer due diligence. KYB conducted on the open record cannot rely on BOI.

What This Means for KYB

The practical implication is that the state filing, in these four states, will not tell a verification system who owns an LLC. Some compliance approaches that work in other jurisdictions degrade here:

Comparing the formation document to the operating reality. In Delaware, Wyoming, and New Mexico, there is no operating reality recorded at the state level. The formation document discloses the agent and the name.
Treating the annual report as a freshness check. Wyoming’s annual report does not disclose ownership; New Mexico has no annual report at all; Delaware has no annual report for LLCs.
Relying on disclosed managers as a proxy for owners. Nevada permits this in name but does not require any economic relationship between the listed manager and the entity.

Effective verification of an LLC in one of these states requires reaching outside the state filing system. Useful sources include:

Licenses and permits. A liquor license, a contractor’s license, a money services business registration, a vehicle dealer permit; each is an assertion by a different government that the business is operating and is conducting a specific activity. Cross-referencing these sources often reveals operators that the state filing does not.
Court records. Litigation, judgments, and bankruptcy filings frequently name the individuals operating behind an LLC.
Payment activity. Transaction data and merchant processing records demonstrate that an entity is doing business, even when the public file is silent on who runs it.
Registered agent topology. Mass formation agents and high-volume registered agent addresses are signals about the formation context, even when they do not identify the owner.
Entity resolution across jurisdictions. The same operating business often appears in records outside its state of formation. An LLC formed in New Mexico but conducting business in Texas may show up in Texas licensing, tax, and court records that disclose substantially more.

State formation records, in these four states, are necessary but not sufficient. They confirm that an entity exists. They do not establish who owns it, what it does, or where.

The Agentic Extension

An AI agent tasked with verifying an LLC by querying the state filing will, in these four states, return a record that names the entity, an agent, and little else. If the agent treats the absence of an ownership disclosure as the absence of ownership, the verification is silently incomplete. If the agent treats the registered agent address as the operating address, the verification is silently wrong.

An agent verifying anonymous-state LLCs needs:

Awareness of jurisdictional gaps. The agent should know that a Delaware LLC formation document is not expected to contain ownership data, and should not treat the omission as a data error.
Resolution across record types. The state file is a starting point. Licenses, court records, transaction signals, and address evidence are required to assemble a verified identity.
A defined freshness model. Because most of these states have no annual report, or no required disclosure of changes, the recency of the state filing tells you little about whether the entity is currently operating. The freshness signal has to come from elsewhere.

These are the same requirements a human analyst applies when verifying an LLC in these jurisdictions. The difference is that an agent encountering thousands of these entities at the speed of automation cannot improvise around data gaps the way a human can. The data layer has to be assembled in advance, with the four-state pattern in mind.

Key Takeaways

Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, and New Mexico permit LLC formation without public disclosure of ownership. The mechanisms differ; the result is the same.
Delaware requires no annual report. Wyoming requires one but does not disclose ownership. New Mexico requires nothing after formation. Nevada requires an Annual List, but nominees are permitted.
Federal disclosure under the Corporate Transparency Act was intended to address the gap. The Interim Final Rule of March 2025 limits CTA reporting to foreign entities, removing most domestic LLCs from the disclosure requirement.
The FinCEN BOI database is not publicly accessible. Even under the original scope, the database would not be available to KYB conducted on the open record.
Verifying an LLC formed in one of these states requires reaching outside the state filing system. License trails, court records, transaction activity, and cross-jurisdictional entity resolution are the relevant sources.
An agent verifying these entities needs an explicit model of which records the state file is expected to contain, which it is not, and where the missing data is to be found.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. State filing requirements change, and federal rules under the Corporate Transparency Act are unsettled at the time of this article’s last review. Consult qualified legal counsel for guidance on specific situations.

Corporate Transparency Act: Federal beneficial ownership reporting.
UBO Verification: Tracing ownership to natural persons.
Shell Company Detection: Signals beyond the state filing.
Why AI Agents Hallucinate About Businesses: What unverified inputs do to automated verification.