How WyoBiz works
Wyoming wrote the first US LLC statute in 1977 — and the registry that statute created, now run as WyoBiz by the Secretary of State's Business Division, still ships the same bargain: it tells you a company exists, never who owns it. A free lookup at wyobiz.wyo.gov returns the entity name, filing ID, entity type, formation date, the registered agent with a physical Wyoming address, and the principal office address. Wyoming publishes more on the free record than most states do. What it leaves out is members and managers — the LLC Articles of Organization name only an organizer, a registered agent, and the entity's own addresses. The annual report follows the same rule: assets and principal office, no owners.
The status field is shaped differently from a state like Delaware. Wyoming carries a top-level Status that is effectively binary — Active or Inactive — and pushes the reason into a separate Sub Status field. An administratively dissolved LLC reads Inactive with a sub status of Administratively Dissolved; a revoked one reads Inactive / Revoked. If your code keys only on the top-level value, treat Inactive as the catch-all and read the sub status when you need to know why.
Entity types span the usual Wyoming forms — Profit Corporation, Nonprofit Corporation, LLC, Limited Partnership, Registered LLP, Statutory Trust, Statutory Foundation. LLC names must carry one of the W.S. 17-29-108 designators: LLC, L.L.C., Limited Liability Company, LC, and a few longer variants. The search is free — and so is a Certificate of Good Standing, which Wyoming issues online at no cost where most states charge for the equivalent.
What Wyoming specifically charges and requires
Formation
Forming a Wyoming LLC costs $100 for the Articles of Organization. A Profit Corporation's Articles of Incorporation are also $100; a Nonprofit is $50; a Statutory Foundation is $250. A Series LLC adds $10 per series on top of the $100 base.
| Filing | Fee |
|---|---|
| LLC Articles of Organization | $100 |
| Profit Corp Articles of Incorporation | $100 |
| Nonprofit Corp Articles | $50 |
| Series LLC, per series | +$10 |
| Foreign Certificate of Authority | $150 |
There is no expedited tier. Wyoming statutes don't allow paid expediting — filings process in the order received, up to 15 business days for paper. If you're modeling formation timelines, Wyoming is the state where money can't buy a faster turnaround.
Annual obligations
Every LLC, corporation, LP, and RLLP files an annual report and pays a license tax of $60, or $0.0002 per dollar of assets located and employed in Wyoming, whichever is greater. Most small entities pay the $60 floor. The report is due the first day of the entity's anniversary month and can be filed up to 120 days early; paying online adds a 2.4% card fee (minimum $1). Miss the deadline and you have 60 days before the entity is administratively dissolved.
Registered agent
Every Wyoming entity must keep a registered agent with a physical Wyoming address — a PO box alone won't do. Lose the agent and reinstating costs $350 for an LLC, $250 for a profit corporation, well above the $100 reinstatement-for-tax fee. The agent's name and address sit on the free public record; the company's owners never do.
Common ways developers use Wyoming verification
Verify-before-act in AI agents
An AI agent doing vendor research or outreach gets a Wyoming LLC name from a spreadsheet cell. Before it sends an email or creates an invoice, it calls verify_business({ entity_name, jurisdiction: "us-wy" }) over the BizVerify MCP server. If the record is Inactive, the agent escalates to a human instead of acting on a dissolved shell. The same call works from Claude Code, Cursor, or LangChain.
Marketplace seller onboarding
Wyoming is a common pick for solo operators and holding companies — formation is cheap and owners stay off the public filing. A marketplace verifying a new seller's stated LLC can confirm it exists and is Active before enabling payouts, without expecting the registry to surface a beneficial owner it never collected. Wire the check into n8n or Zapier.
Cap-table and SPV reconciliation
Investor-tooling and SPV admins hold Wyoming LLCs as deal vehicles. A quick check flags any that have slipped to Inactive — usually a missed $60 annual report rather than a real wind-down — so a portfolio sync catches the lapse before a capital call goes out. Worth running on every reconciliation pass.
Counterparty checks on Wyoming holding LLCs
Wyoming is where founders park personal holdcos, IP-holding shells, and asset-protection LLCs — the operating company is usually somewhere else. When a Wyoming LLC is named as the counterparty on an invoice, a SAFE, or an assignment agreement, a quick check confirms that legal entity is real and Active before you sign or pay. See the KYB pipeline guide for wiring it into a review flow.
Frequently asked questions
How current is Wyoming entity data?
Status changes on the WyoBiz record show up within seconds — there's no nightly snapshot sitting between the source and your response. The trade-off: our p95 latency tracks the registry's own response time, so a slow morning at WyoBiz becomes a slow morning for you.
Can I get the owners or members of a Wyoming LLC?
No — and not because BizVerify withholds it. Wyoming's LLC Articles of Organization never collect member or manager names, and the annual report doesn't either. The public record names a registered agent and addresses, full stop. Beneficial ownership for Wyoming entities lives with FinCEN, not the state registry. If you need ownership data, no state-registry source can provide it — Wyoming or otherwise.
What's the difference between Inactive and Inactive - Administratively Dissolved?
Inactive is Wyoming's top-level status for any entity that isn't Active. The Sub Status field explains why: Administratively Dissolved — most often a missed annual report, which triggers dissolution 60 days past the due date — or Revoked. Treat anything that isn't Active as not-in-good-standing, and read the sub status when you need the reason.
Do dissolved or inactive Wyoming entities still appear in search?
Yes. WyoBiz returns inactive entities alongside active ones, and BizVerify mirrors that. A lookup can return an Inactive LLC that was administratively dissolved years ago. That's usually what you want — confirming someone handed you a real-but-dead entity is as useful as confirming a clean one.
Do you handle foreign entities registered in Wyoming?
Yes. Entities formed in another state but registered to transact business in Wyoming hold a Certificate of Authority and appear in WyoBiz with the same status vocabulary as domestic entities. The entity_type field in our response reflects the registered form.
Can I verify thousands of Wyoming entities at once?
Yes — call /v1/verify in parallel. There's no separate bulk endpoint; concurrency is rate-limited per API key, not per jurisdiction. For large backfills, contact us and we'll raise your concurrency ceiling.
Do I get charged for a Wyoming entity that doesn't exist?
A confirmed "no match" still counts as a quick check (1 credit, ~$0.08 on public pricing) — the verification happened, we proved the entity isn't on the Wyoming register. Hard errors from the registry side (timeouts, 5xx) don't consume credits.