US Company Registration from India (2026): Cost, Steps, and the RBI Rules Most Guides Skip

Yes, an Indian citizen can register a company in the USA, and the registration process is quicker than most people expect. A limited liability company filed in Wyoming or Delaware is usually approved within 24 to 48 hours. No US visa, no green card and no social security number are required to own it. The documents required come to a passport scan, an address proof and a signed registered agent agreement. The Employer Identification Number issued by the Internal Revenue Service follows in three to five business days on an expedited route, and a US business bank account opens five to ten business days after that.

That American half is well documented; every page competing for this search covers the same five steps. What almost none of them cover is the Indian half of the transaction: the point where your Wyoming LLC becomes an Overseas Direct Investment under FEMA, where a form you have never heard of has to reach the RBI through your bank, and where a missing line in your income tax return carries a ₹10 lakh penalty for each year it stays missing.

This guide covers both, including what the whole thing costs, what your ongoing compliance and tax obligations look like on each side, and how to choose a business structure that will not need unwinding later. The Indian obligations get the room, since that is where things go wrong, usually about eighteen months in, when an assessing officer finally asks about a return you filed and forgot.

What US company registration actually costs from India

The state fee is the small number. Wyoming charges roughly $100 to file Articles of Organization; Delaware sits in a similar range for an LLC. Everything above that is service pricing, and it varies by a factor of four depending on who you ask. Indian incorporation providers advertise packages from ₹39,999 to ₹89,999. Ebizfiling publishes exactly that range on its US registration page. Our own all-inclusive price is $499, roughly ₹44,000 at current rates, which puts it at the bottom of that band while including the EIN and the banking introduction that cheaper packages tend to bill separately.

The line most cost comparisons leave out is the TCS. Send money abroad under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme for anything classed as investment, and your bank collects 20% tax at source on the amount above a ₹10 lakh aggregate for the financial year, under Section 206C(1G) of the Income-tax Act. You do get it back: it lands in your Form 26AS, offsets your liability for the year, and anything left over is refunded when you file. The catch is timing. Remit ₹20 lakh and your bank holds ₹2 lakh of it that afternoon, which you will next see several months later.

The American side: five steps, 24 to 48 hours

None of this requires you to be in the United States, hold a visa, or have an SSN. It is administrative, and it is quick.

1. Choose the structure. LLC for almost everyone; C-Corp only if US venture capital is the plan. More on that below.
2. Choose the state. Wyoming by default for a non-resident running a digital or services business. See our state-by-state breakdown for why Delaware's reputation does not apply to a one-person LLC.
3. Appoint a registered agent. A physical in-state address to receive legal service. You cannot use your address in Bengaluru or Mumbai for this.
4. File the Articles of Organization. Typically approved within 24 to 48 hours.
5. Apply for the EIN. Form SS-4, with "Foreign" on the SSN line. The IRS's own mail and fax queues run long, so our EIN-without-SSN guide covers the expedited route.

That is the entire American procedure. Most guides stop roughly here.

What documents you actually need

Less than people expect, and none of it notarised or apostilled for a standard formation. No US visa, no US address of your own, no Indian company documents, and no physical paperwork posted anywhere. The state does not verify your identity at filing; your registered agent and, later, your bank do.

• Passport. A clear scan of the photo page. This is the identity document for both the formation and the bank onboarding.
• Proof of address. Your Indian address, evidenced by a utility bill, bank statement or Aadhaar. It goes on the banking application rather than the state filing.
• Two or three company name options. Names are first-come in each state; having alternates avoids a second filing round.
• A signed registered agent agreement. Provided by the agent, signed electronically.
• Form SS-4 for the EIN. Prepared for you in most packages, with "Foreign" entered on line 7b where an SSN or ITIN would otherwise go.

The Articles of Organization are produced by the filing, not supplied by you. The operating agreement is drafted afterwards. What Indian founders most often get wrong here is over-preparing the American paperwork and under-preparing the Indian bank conversation, which is the part that genuinely needs documents.

What you file, and what comes back

The vocabulary trips people up, because the two entity types use different formation documents for the same act. A limited liability company files Articles of Organization. A corporation files Articles of Incorporation. Both establish a legal entity separate from its business owners, and that separation is the whole point of the exercise: the liability protection that keeps a business dispute from reaching your personal assets in India.

What comes back from the state is a stamped copy of the filing, sometimes with a certificate of formation attached. Keep it. Every subsequent step wants it: the EIN application, the bank's identity verification, the payment processor's onboarding, and your AD bank when you report the investment in India. Add the operating agreement, drafted after the filing, which sets out who owns what and how decisions get made. No state requires a single-member LLC to have one. Every bank asks for it anyway, which settles the question.

Licenses, permits and sales tax

Registering the company and being licensed to trade are separate things. Formation is a state act; licenses and permits attach to your business activity and can sit at federal, state, county or city level. Most software, consulting and digital businesses run by non-residents need none of them. Anything touching regulated activity, from financial services to health, alcohol, firearms or transport, does. Those requirements follow the activity rather than the entity type, and the regulations sit with whichever authority licenses that trade.

Sales tax is the one that surprises e-commerce sellers. It has nothing to do with where your company is registered and everything to do with where your customers are: cross a state's economic nexus threshold and you owe registration and collection in that state, whether you have ever set foot in it or not. Marketplace platforms collect on their own transactions, but your direct sales remain yours to handle. Our guide to sales tax nexus for non-resident sellers covers the current state thresholds.

How long the whole thing takes

Guides quote anywhere from seven to twenty-one days. Both are true, because they measure different things. The state filing is fast; the EIN is the variable, and the bank account is the one that decides when you can actually trade.

Ten to fifteen business days from application to a funded US business account is the realistic figure for a straightforward file. The bank step is where Indian founders see the most variance, and it turns on document quality rather than nationality: a confirmed EIN, an operating agreement that matches the filing, and documentation showing a US address that stays consistent across every form. Our guide to US business banking for non-residents covers what Mercury, Relay and Wise each look for.

The Indian side: your LLC is an overseas direct investment

This is where people come unstuck. The reasoning usually runs: no money left India, so nothing has happened, so there is nothing to tell anyone. Founders who capitalised the LLC straight out of Stripe revenue, or who never put a rupee in at all, are the most confident about this and the most exposed. The rules are drafted around acquisition and control. Remittance barely features. A controlled LLC with zero paid-in capital is an ODI, with the whole reporting chain attached: routing through an Authorised Dealer bank, a Unique Identification Number for the foreign entity, and an Annual Performance Report every year you hold it.

One more feature worth knowing before you structure anything: once an investment is classified as ODI, it stays ODI. Dropping below the thresholds later, or losing control of the entity, does not reclassify it. You are in that regime for the life of the holding.

The ₹10 lakh line: Schedule FA

Separate from FEMA, and enforced by a different department, sits the disclosure obligation. Schedule FA of ITR-2 and ITR-3 requires every resident taxpayer to report foreign assets held at any point in the relevant period. An LLC interest is a foreign asset. So is the US bank account it opens, and so is your position as an authorised signatory on it.

If you are reading this and realising you have an LLC sitting undisclosed in an earlier return, there is a window, and it is short. The Finance Act, 2026 notified the Foreign Assets of Small Taxpayers Disclosure Scheme, FAST-DS, effective 16 August 2026, with declarations due by 31 December 2026 and fair market value computed as at 31 March 2026. For disclosure defaults on assets up to ₹5 crore, the amount payable can be a fixed ₹1 lakh fee rather than the ₹10 lakh per year the Black Money Act would otherwise impose, with immunity from its consequences (KPMG flash alert). If any of that describes your situation, put it to a chartered accountant this month rather than next. The deadline does not move.

Getting the money out: LRS and the 20% TCS

Two practical notes. First, the limit is cumulative across every channel and every purpose: the tuition transfer and the equity subscription draw on the same $250,000. Second, once you have used it for the year, it is used; proceeds returning to India do not restore headroom. Formation capital for an LLC is a small fraction of that ceiling, so for most founders the constraint is theoretical. It stops being theoretical the moment you fund working capital from personal funds.

Will you be taxed twice?

Usually not, and it is worth knowing why instead of taking it on faith. India and the United States have a double taxation avoidance agreement. Article 5 defines a permanent establishment as a fixed place of business in the source country; Article 7 then allows that country to tax business profits only to the extent they are attributable to such an establishment. With no permanent establishment in the USA, business profits are taxed in your country of residence (Treasury technical explanation of the India-US convention).

In practice, a single-member LLC run by a founder sitting in Pune, with no US office, no US staff and no dependent agent concluding contracts in the USA, generally has no permanent establishment there. Article 5(6) adds a point that matters for founders who already run a Pvt Ltd: a parent-subsidiary relationship does not by itself make either company a permanent establishment of the other, so an Indian company owning a US entity does not automatically acquire a taxable US presence.

What this does not do is remove the filing. The income remains taxable in India and belongs in your Indian return, and the LLC still files Form 5472 in the USA whether or not tax is owed. And you have to claim treaty relief; nobody applies it on your behalf. Whether your particular arrangement creates a permanent establishment is a question of fact, which makes it your chartered accountant's call on your actual setup rather than something a guide can settle.

LLC, C-Corp, or a Pvt Ltd?

Take the LLC unless you are raising US venture capital. A single-member LLC owned by a non-resident is treated as a disregarded entity by the IRS: no entity-level tax, and where there is no US-source income and no US trade or business, often no US federal income tax at all. That does not mean no filing. A foreign-owned LLC files Form 5472 with a pro forma 1120 annually even when dormant, and the penalty for missing it starts at $25,000.

The C-Corp earns its extra tax layer in one scenario: US investors who want preferred stock. If that is not your next eighteen months, it is a worse structure with more compliance. Our LLC versus C-Corp comparison works through both in detail.

The S-Corporation, which appears on plenty of Indian incorporation pages as a third option, is not one. Section 1361(b)(1)(C) of the Internal Revenue Code disqualifies any corporation with a non-resident alien shareholder from making the S election, and Treasury Regulation 1.1361-1 restates it. A single share held by a non-resident terminates the election as of the day it was acquired. Unless you hold a green card or meet the substantial presence test, the S-Corp is simply unavailable to you. The statute says so.

The Pvt Ltd question gets framed wrong more often than not. A Private Limited company is the right entity for operating in India, employing people there and invoicing Indian customers. A US LLC does a different job: it buys access. Founders reach for one when Stripe will not onboard their Indian entity for the market they are selling into, when a US client wants a US counterparty on the contract, or when the platform they depend on treats a US business account as the practical entry condition. Where both needs are real, most founders keep the Pvt Ltd and add the LLC alongside it. Which brings you straight back to the ODI reporting above.

Which state

Wyoming, for the default case. The annual report runs around $60, members are not named on the public record, and the courts are unremarkable in the way you want them to be. Delaware charges roughly $300 a year in franchise tax and earns it only if you are issuing stock to venture investors through a C-Corporation, which is a different decision from the one above. New Mexico has no annual report at all and suits founders optimising purely for recurring cost.

The state choice has no bearing on your Indian obligations. Wyoming, Delaware or New Mexico, the ODI reporting and the Schedule FA disclosure are identical.

What you keep doing every year

Registering a company is a day's work. Keeping it compliant is an annual habit, and it runs on both sides of the ocean at once. Most of the founders who come to us after a bad experience elsewhere were not badly incorporated. They were incorporated and then left alone.

Federal tax filing is the item that catches foreign owners hardest, because it applies when nothing happened. A dormant foreign-owned LLC with no revenue, no customers and no bank movement still owes its Form 5472 and pro forma 1120, and the penalty for skipping it opens at $25,000. Accounting and bookkeeping are not legally required at federal level for a disregarded entity, but you cannot file your taxes without them, and payroll only enters the picture if you hire in the United States, which brings state registration and withholding with it.

On the Indian side, the Annual Performance Report and the Schedule FA disclosure repeat for as long as you hold the interest. Neither is difficult once the first one is done. Both are easy to forget in a year when the company did nothing, which is precisely when the penalty still applies.

A realistic sequence

Speak to a chartered accountant who has handled ODI filings before you form anything — not after. The reporting runs through your AD bank, and banks differ considerably in how comfortable they are with individual ODI. Knowing which bank will process yours, before the entity exists, saves weeks. Then form the LLC, obtain the EIN, open the US account, and close the loop on the Indian side: the Form FC through your bank, the UIN, and Schedule FA in the return for the year you acquired the interest. The Annual Performance Report follows every year after.

None of this is hard. It is just invisible from where most entrepreneurs are standing when they start, which is the American end of an international structure with two sets of rules attached.

US Company Registration from India: FAQ