Every April North Carolina Sends a Bill. LegalZoom Sends a Bigger One.

We have money riding on this comparison. North Carolina Registered Agent.co runs the page, sells agent service at $99 a year, and is asking for the business currently going to LegalZoom. Weigh the commentary with that in view. The LegalZoom price is not commentary; it came off that company's own published material in July 2026 and is quoted here unchanged.

Why People Choose LegalZoom Anyway

Recognition has value and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. LegalZoom has been operating for decades, it is not going to disappear without notice, its support operation is large, and plenty of owners already have trademarks or estate documents living in that account. Adding the registered agent appointment to a vendor you already use is a real form of simplification. Fewer logins, fewer renewal dates, one company to call. If that is what you are optimizing for, the choice is defensible.

The Number, and How It Renews

$249 a year. Flat, with nothing resembling an opening discount when we looked in July 2026, and set to renew automatically until somebody cancels it. All of that is disclosed. The issue is not concealment, it is proportion.

Put the North Carolina calendar next to it. Every April 15 this state charges your LLC $200 for the annual report under N.C.G.S. § 57D-2-24, one of the highest recurring report fees in the country, and it is owed whether or not the business earned a cent. Paper filing is $200 exactly; online it becomes $202 by ACH or $203 by card once the payment processor adds its charge. Our annual report page covers how to file it.

So the spring mail brings two large recurring charges. One of them is the state's and cannot be argued with. The other one is a vendor choice, and it is the larger of the two.

$150 a year separates the second row from the third, for a job North Carolina describes without reference to either company.

What $99 Actually Buys

• A physical North Carolina street address on your filings, standing where your home address would otherwise stand
• Anything a process server hands over is scanned that day and uploaded, with an email telling you it arrived
• Deadline reminders keyed to April 15
• A portal you can pull documents out of at any hour
• $15 per item if you want routine, non-legal mail scanned as well, which is the only optional charge in the account

The rate is $99 and the renewal is $99. There is no premium tier waiting behind it.

One thing we will not tell you is that nobody is cheaper. BetterLegal publishes $90 a year, below our figure, and this page loses its point if it starts rounding inconvenient numbers. The smaller claim is the true one: $99 ranks low among the flat yearly rates quoted for this state, and the figure holds after you enroll.

Leaving LegalZoom, in One Paragraph

North Carolina handles the change on Form BE-06, a $5 statement of change filed in Raleigh that can move the agent, the registered office, or both at once; our change of agent guide walks it line by line.

The sequencing point is worth more than the mechanics. Cancelling a LegalZoom subscription stops a charge and does nothing whatsoever to your public record, where LegalZoom stays listed as your agent and keeps receiving your legal mail. Appoint the new agent, file the form, wait for the record to update, and cancel last. Do it in that order and there is no window where the company is unrepresented. Do it backwards and you have paid nobody to receive a summons that is still being delivered somewhere.

Start early enough that the auto-renewal does not post while you are waiting on the filing.

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