The State's Bill Is $0. The Agent's Bill Is $249.

A competitor assembled this page. Montana Registered Agent.co charges $99 a year for the appointment being discussed, and nothing at the bottom of this page pretends to be impartial. The LegalZoom figure is not ours to shape: it is the rate LegalZoom advertised during our July 2026 verification, reproduced exactly.

What the Premium Actually Buys

Name recognition, and a great deal of it. LegalZoom is the entity-services company that ordinary people have heard of, built on decades of advertising and an enormous volume of completed filings. For a buyer who wants the safest-sounding answer rather than the most researched one, that reputation has value, and no competitor in this market can offer a substitute for it.

The Rate, and What It Does Not Change

$249 per year. Flat, renewing on its own, and our review turned up no discount for a first year. It is the highest fixed annual price among the services we track, and it is also, to be fair, one of the more honest pricing structures on offer: nothing expires, nothing converts, no tier moves it.

Montana's requirements do not scale with what you paid. The state asks for an agent at an in-state street address, on hand through the working day, taking delivery of lawsuits and official correspondence. That obligation reads identically at $249 and at $99.

The Comparison Montana Makes Available

Corporations doing business here file an annual report under Mont. Code Ann. § 35-14-1621, on a window running January 1 to April 15. Limited liability companies file on the same calendar. The standard fee is $20 in both cases, and it has been set aside on every filing made inside the window for 2024, 2025, 2026, and 2027, which makes an April 15 submission a $0 event today. Miss the date and the report costs $35 instead: the $20 plus a $15 late charge.

So a Montana entity that files inside its window this year pays the state nothing for the privilege of existing. The agent invoice is then the only recurring compliance cost on the books, which is exactly why its size deserves an afternoon of attention rather than a shrug.

Fifteen hundred dollars is the ten-year spread on a filing obligation the state currently performs for free. It accumulates $150 at a time, in amounts too modest to prompt anyone to reopen the question, which is the mechanism by which auto-renewal earns its keep.

The $99 Column, in Detail

• A Montana street address on every public filing, standing where your own would otherwise appear
• Anything served on us imaged and forwarded within the same business day, with an email alert attached
• A secure portal holding every document we have handled for the entity
• Notice before the April 15 report deadline, since that filing is what keeps the company on the register
• Non-legal mail scanned at $15 per item, flat, stated here in advance
• $99 again next year, and no upgrade path anyone will pitch you

One title we do not claim is lowest. BetterLegal's $90 is in print and it undercuts us. Ours is $99, among the lowest published in Montana, and identical on every renewal invoice.

LegalZoom Off, Us On: The Short Version

One unnumbered Statement of Change, which resets the agent, the registered office, or both at once, filed inside the Secretary of State's business portal, received by the Business Services Division, at no charge. Hire first, file second, cancel third, and finish the whole sequence ahead of the auto-renewal date, because that charge runs on its own clock regardless of what Montana's record now says. Followed in that sequence, the agent field on your entity never empties. The step-by-step is on our change of agent page.

Order Here

Every provider we price appears in the Montana price schedule, and questions go to the contact page.