North Carolina Publishes $200 and $5. Inc Authority Publishes Nothing.

Nothing here is impartial. North Carolina Registered Agent.co wrote the page, sells registered agent service for $99 a year, and would rather you bought it from us. The rule we are holding ourselves to on a page about undisclosed pricing is simple: no invented numbers. Where Inc Authority has published nothing, this page says nothing.

Year One Costs Nothing, and That Is Genuine

Take one of their formation packages and twelve months of registered agent coverage come with it, free. The usual strings on an offer like this would be a setup charge, a term shorter than the headline, or a fee for walking away early, and not one of those appears in the terms. A company in its first year gets something the state requires it to have, at zero cost, during the stretch when money is tightest. Credit where it is due.

Year Two Has No Published Figure

The renewal price is not printed. Our July 2026 review covered the package material, the pricing pages, and the answers section, and there is no second-year number in any of them. In this industry, a rate that is withheld from the site generally appears at the order screen or on a call.

We are not going to fill that blank with a guess. The whole argument would collapse if we did, and the problem is structural anyway. This state wants an agent named on the record for every day your entity stays registered, so the renewal is not a feature you might decline. It is the standing cost of a company that already exists, and you are being asked to sign up for it before anyone will tell you what it is.

Compare That to How the State Behaves

North Carolina publishes everything, down to the dollar, on the form itself:

What you are doing	What the state charges
Forming the LLC (Articles of Organization, Form L-01, § 57D-2-20)	$125
Filing the annual report by April 15	$200 base, $202 ACH or $203 card online
Changing your registered agent (Form BE-06)	$5

Every one of those figures is on a public form or a public page before you commit to anything. You can budget a North Carolina company for five years without phoning a single person. That is the standard a vendor's renewal price should be able to meet, and it is not an unreasonable one.

Both of Our Years, in Advance

$99 for the first, $99 for the fifth. Nobody has to be called to obtain either one. The service that number covers: whatever gets served on us here is scanned that business day and appears in your portal behind an email alert, our street address takes the public record instead of yours, and reminders arrive before the April 15 deadline. Checkout carries one product.

Lowest price in the state, though? No. BetterLegal advertises $90 a year, and a page complaining about missing numbers cannot start massaging its own. Ninety-nine dollars is a low figure by the standards of this market, it does not change at renewal, and that second half is the part this page is really about. The full field is laid out on our comparison page.

Getting Off the Free Plan Before It Is Priced

The mechanics are short. Form BE-06 moves the registered agent, the registered office, or both. It costs $5 and goes to the Business Registration Division. One version of the form serves every entity type this state registers, so nothing about the procedure depends on how your company is organized.

The sequencing point deserves a sentence of its own, because free service invites careless exits. Owners assume that walking away from something they never paid for ends the relationship, and it does not. Inc Authority is your agent on the public record until the filing is processed, and the form itself requires a successor to be named before it can be submitted. Appoint, file, confirm, then close the account. There is no gap that way, and North Carolina expects no gap.

Any week inside the free year works. Moving early means the unpublished renewal never becomes a decision you have to make under time pressure.

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