Starting a business in North Texas

The state

Where the company itself comes from

A limited liability company or a for-profit corporation begins with a certificate of formation filed with the Texas Secretary of State. The fee is $300, and one line of the fee schedule covers both Form 205, which forms a limited liability company, and Form 201, which forms a for-profit corporation. Choosing between those two structures therefore costs nothing at the filing window. A nonprofit corporation is $25. Filings can be made online through the SOSDirect system, and expedited handling is priced separately on the same schedule.

What that office holds is the entity record and nothing else. It opens no tax account, licenses no occupation and says nothing about premises. No page consulted for this section publishes a processing time for a formation filing, and none describes the filing as an approval or a review, so this publication describes it as neither.

The county

Where the trading name is recorded

A business trading under anything other than its legal name files an assumed name certificate, and which office receives it changed on September 1, 2019. The Tarrant County Clerk cites HB 3609 of the 86th Legislature and states that incorporated entities, including corporations, limited partnerships and limited liability companies, now file with the Texas Secretary of State rather than at the county. Unincorporated filers still record with the county clerk where the business is conducted, and guidance still sending an incorporated filer to a county counter is out of date.

There is no metroplex figure for what that costs. The Dallas County Clerk publishes $23.00 plus fifty cents for each owner after the first, and adds $2.00 where a deputy takes the acknowledgment instead of a notary. The Tarrant County Clerk publishes $20 for one owner, fifty cents for each additional owner, and a 3 percent charge on card payment. No other county clerk schedule in the region was read for this page, so neither figure should be carried across a county line. At the state office the certificate is Form 503 and the fee is $25.

The state again

Where the tax accounts live

Tax registration returns to the state and not to the same office. Both accounts a new company is likely to need sit with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts.

A sales and use tax permit is for a business engaged in business in Texas that sells or leases tangible personal property here or sells taxable services here. Applications go through the Comptroller's eSystems portal, and the permit page tells applicants to allow two to three weeks to receive it. The permit is widely described as free. Neither the permit page nor the sales tax landing page states a fee or the absence of one, so this publication states none either. The state rate is 6.25 percent and local jurisdictions can add up to 2 percent, for a maximum combined rate of 8.25 percent.

Franchise tax is the account that catches people out, because the duty to pay and the duty to file come apart. For 2026 and 2027 the no tax due threshold is $2,650,000, having been $2,470,000 for 2024 and 2025. A company below the threshold owes nothing and files anyway, either a Public Information Report or an Ownership Information Report, by May 15. Which entity types fall inside the tax is not enumerated on the Comptroller's own frequently asked questions page, which cites Tax Code Section 171.001 and defers elsewhere, so nothing here says any structure sits outside it.

The city

Where somebody decides the doors can open

None of the above settles whether a particular unit at a particular address may be occupied and used for a particular purpose. That question is municipal, and there is no metroplex-wide business permit, no shared fee schedule and no common certificate of occupancy rule. Dallas, Fort Worth and Arlington each run their own permitting and publish their own requirements on their own municipal website.

This publication states no city permit fee, no occupancy fee and no city processing time. Every municipal site needed for this subject blocked automated retrieval when the research behind these pages was done, so nothing was read and nothing is asserted. That would be the honest answer even without the blocking, because requirements inside one city move with the land use, the zoning district and whether the space is being altered, and a rule invented to cover the whole metroplex would be wrong more often than right.

And one federal record

The number every other office asks for

An employer identification number comes from the Internal Revenue Service and costs nothing, which the agency states on its own page while warning readers off sites that charge for one. Its online application issues one number per responsible party per day, so anyone forming several companies at once is doing it across several days. That page covers how to obtain a number rather than which businesses must hold one, and the second question is left with the agency. The number reappears the moment a company pays wages, which brings a further set of obligations and three more offices.