How many LLCs are there in the US?

At least 46.2 million LLCs are on record across all 50 US Secretary of State registries as of July 2026. That is 52.8% of the 87.5 million business-entity records on file, more than corporations, nonprofits, partnerships, and every other entity type combined. About 22.0 million of those LLCs currently hold an active status. No single agency publishes this number, which is why the figures you find online disagree so wildly.

Why is there no agreed-on number for how many LLCs exist?

Because the three sources people reach for each count something different, and none of them counts LLCs directly.

The first is the IRS. Its Statistics of Income program reports about 3.3 million partnership returns filed by LLCs (tax year 2022). That is not a total. A single-member LLC is a "disregarded entity" that reports on the owner's Schedule C, invisible as an LLC in the tax data. An LLC that elects corporate or S-corporation taxation lands in the corporate statistics instead. So the IRS number captures one tax election, not the population of LLCs.

The second is the Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics, the source behind most "new business" headlines. It counts business applications, which are requests for an Employer Identification Number filed on IRS Form SS-4. An EIN application is an intent to start something. It is not a registration, it is not specific to LLCs, and many applications never become a filed entity.

The third source is the state registries themselves. When an LLC legally forms, it files articles of organization with a Secretary of State, and that office records it. This is the only source that answers "how many LLCs exist," because existence is exactly what a registry records. The catch is that there are 50 of them, each with its own schema and search tool, and no federal index sits on top. Counting LLCs nationally means pulling all 50 and normalizing them into one entity type. That is the number below.

What do the state registries actually show?

Counted across all 50 registries, 46,203,042 records carry an LLC legal form. The full entity mix as of July 2026:

At 46.2 million, LLCs outnumber the 41.3 million records of every other entity type combined. Of the LLC records, 22.0 million are active, 8.7 million are dissolved, 5.9 million are inactive, and 2.0 million are suspended; the remaining 7.4 million carry no classified status.

Read the 46.2 million as a floor. Not every state's registry publishes a parseable entity type, so entities in those states are not counted as LLCs even though many are. The true national LLC total is higher than 46.2 million, not lower.

When did the LLC overtake the corporation?

Around 2005, and it has widened the gap every year since. The LLC is a young structure. Wyoming passed the first LLC statute in 1977, and the form only became usable nationwide after a 1988 IRS ruling let LLCs be taxed as partnerships. In 2000, state registries recorded 333,000 new LLCs against 690,000 new corporations. The lines crossed mid-decade, and by 2025 states registered 3.5 million new LLCs against 521,000 corporations.

Two things stand out. LLC formations jumped from 2.1 million in 2019 to 3.4 million in 2021, the same pandemic-era surge the Census Bureau recorded in business applications, which rose from 3.5 million to 5.4 million over the same span. And while LLC formations grew more than tenfold from 2000 to 2025, corporation formations never broke out of the 515,000 to 730,000 band they have occupied for 25 years. The growth in US business formation is almost entirely growth in LLCs.

How is this counted, and where does it fall short?

Every figure here comes from one query: group the normalized companies table by legal_form and by formation year. The dataset behind it aggregates business-entity records from all 50 Secretary of State registries into a single schema, refreshed monthly; the count above reflects the July 2026 snapshot. A formation date is present on 92.6% of records, so the yearly series covers all but a small tail of entities whose registry never published a date.

Two notes on method. The count covers records carrying an LLC classification across all 50 state registries as of July 2026; registries that expose no entity type are not in it, which is why 46.2 million is a floor. And a count of registrations includes entities that have since dissolved, which is why the active subset (22.0 million) is stated separately from the all-time total. Delaware, for its part, reports 1.65 million active LLCs of its own as of 2025, a reminder that the real numbers live in the registries, not in the estimates built on top of them.

The same shape shows up state by state. Florida alone accounts for 6.5 million LLC records, and the California and New York registries are LLC-heavy for the same reason: since the mid-2000s, the LLC has been the default way to register a business in the United States.

Counting them yourself

A number like 46.2 million is not something you fetch one entity at a time. It is an aggregate over the whole corpus, the kind of question a per-lookup search cannot answer. GovFiles delivers the normalized 50-state dataset as bulk Parquet and a REST API, so the count is a single GROUP BY:

-- LLC records across all 50 registries, in the bulk dataset
SELECT legal_form, count(*) AS records
FROM companies
GROUP BY legal_form
ORDER BY records DESC;

When you already know an entity, the API returns it by jurisdiction code and registry number:

curl -s 'https://api.govfiles.dev/v2/companies/us_de/7218394' \
  -H "X-API-Key: $KEY"

The response carries the normalized legal_form and status, the verbatim legal_form_raw from the registry, formed_on, and the registered agent under parties.

Frequently asked

How many LLCs are there in the US? At least 46.2 million records carry an LLC legal form across all 50 US Secretary of State registries as of July 2026, of which about 22.0 million currently hold an active status. This is a floor: not every state's registry data carries a parseable entity type, so the true total is higher. LLCs are 52.8% of the 87.5 million entity records on file, more than every other entity type combined.

Why do some sources say there are 21.6 million LLCs? The widely repeated 21.6 million figure traces to SEO statistics pages, not to a primary source. Neither the IRS nor the Census Bureau publishes a total count of LLCs. The IRS only counts LLCs that elect partnership taxation, about 3.3 million returns, which excludes single-member LLCs filed on a Schedule C and LLCs taxed as corporations. Counting actual registrations at the state registries gives a much larger number.

Are there more LLCs or corporations in the US? LLCs, by a wide margin. As of July 2026 the registries hold 46.2 million LLC records against 30.1 million corporations. In annual new formations the LLC overtook the corporation around 2005, and in 2025 states registered 3.5 million new LLCs against 521,000 new corporations, a ratio of almost seven to one.

How many new LLCs are formed each year? US state registries recorded about 3.5 million new LLC formations in 2025, up from 333,000 in 2000. New LLC formations surged during 2020 and 2021 and have stayed above 3.2 million a year since. Corporation formations, by contrast, have held flat between roughly 515,000 and 730,000 a year for the past two decades.