State Fee vs. Vendor-Quoted Fee

Verification exercise. Method: official state fee schedule vs. vendor-published "state fee" figures, both snapshotted at observation time. Worked example: Delaware LLC formation, observed 2026-07-08. Not legal advice; not a pricing survey.

Disclosure: Private Pierce's founder operates business-formation services that compete with vendors discussed in this research. Every figure below is dated, snapshotted, and traceable to its source. See /about/disclosure/.

Short answer

A state filing fee is a number the state publishes. It should be the easiest fact on any formation vendor's page — yet labeled "state fee" figures on vendor pages do not always match the official schedule. In the worked example below, the official Delaware LLC formation fee is $110.00; a major vendor's Delaware page stated $140 the same day; and three different figures were observable across the vendor's own surfaces in a single day of checking. The practical takeaway is not an accusation — it is a verification habit: the state's schedule is one click away, and this site's fee matrices keep the official number, source, and snapshot per state.

The worked example: Delaware LLC formation

• $110.00 — the official fee. Delaware Division of Corporations fee schedule ("Limited Liability Companies / Formation — domestic"), schedule revised August 2024, current at fetch on 2026-07-08 via corp.delaware.gov/fee/. Matches this site's formation-fee matrix Delaware cell (value re-verified against the primary line, snapshot-backed).
• $140 — the vendor page. Bizee's Delaware LLC page stated the Delaware state filing fee as $140 in eleven mentions across the page — including the verbatim sentence "The state filing fee for a Delaware LLC is $140" — fetched and snapshotted 2026-07-08. That is $30 above the official schedule for the labeled state fee.
• Three figures, three surfaces, one day. A checkout observation the same day (2026-07-08 research archive) recorded a different vendor content page stating $115, and a cart line item labeled "state fee" at $143 (the cart figure is session-derived and labeled as such). Three surfaces of the same vendor, three different numbers — none of them the official $110.

Possible innocent explanations exist — bundled processing options, stale copy, CMS error — and this page does not adjudicate among them. The observation is narrower and fully verifiable: the labeled state fee on the vendor's surfaces did not match the state's published fee — and the vendor's own surfaces did not match each other on the same day.

How to verify any state's fee yourself

• Go to the state's schedule, not a vendor page. Every state publishes filing fees — a fee schedule PDF, a statute section, or the filing form itself (some states print the fee on the form).
• Match the exact line. Most fee errors in this site's own research traced to the wrong line: foreign instead of domestic, corporation instead of LLC, an adjacent filing type at a similar price. Bind the domestic-LLC line.
• Date what you saw. Fees change by statute; vendor pages change silently. A figure without an as-of date is not evidence.
• Or use the matrices here — each of this site's fee matrices carries the official source URL, an on-disk snapshot hash of the source document, and a per-cell verification status, with unresolved cells left as typed unknowns rather than filled in.

What this page does NOT prove

• Does not prove any vendor overcharges customers or intends to — the verified claim is a labeled-figure mismatch on specific dates, with snapshots.
• Does not prove what any customer actually pays at checkout — carts include legitimate optional services; the cart figure cited above is session-derived and labeled as such.
• Does not survey all vendors or all states; Delaware is a worked example chosen because both sides were freshly observable.
• Does not prove today's figures — all values carry 2026-07-08 as-of dates; the official schedule cited was last revised August 2024 and both sources may have changed since observation.

Sources

Official: Delaware Division of Corporations fee schedule via corp.delaware.gov/fee/ (PDF snapshot retained, 2026-07-08). Vendor: bizee.com/delaware-llc (HTML snapshot retained, 2026-07-08). Same-day checkout observation: 2026-07-08 research archive (cart figure session-derived). Per-state official fee sources: the formation-fee matrix and its sources.json. Full source taxonomy at /about/source-registry/.

See also: LLC Formation Fees by State · Who Actually Operates Your Registered Agent?