The Same Statutory Job for $150 Less a Year

You are reading a competitor's page. MD Registered Agent.org sells Maryland registered agent service for $99 a year and would very much like your renewal, so treat the opinions here as advocacy. The LegalZoom figure below is not an opinion. It is the rate that company publishes, and it is easy enough to confirm.

The Brand Is a Real Asset

LegalZoom is the name most people reach for when they think about business paperwork at all, and that recognition was earned across two decades of advertising and volume. Buying from a company you have already heard of quiets a specific worry: that the vendor holding your legal notices might quietly disappear. For plenty of owners that reassurance is worth paying for, and nobody here is going to argue them out of it.

$249 a Year, Auto-Renewing, With No Introductory Rate

The registered agent line at LegalZoom is $249 annually and renews on its own. Our July 2026 pricing review turned up no first-year discount to soften it, which at least means the number on the order screen is the number you keep paying. That much steadiness is more than several rivals manage.

It is, at the same time, the largest flat annual figure among the services we price. What the money buys, legally speaking, matches what every other agent in Maryland provides: a street address inside the state, a person present during business hours, and prompt handoff of whatever a process server delivers. Maryland writes one standard and applies it to all of them.

Four hundred and fifty dollars across three years. Priced in local currency, that is one and a half Maryland annual reports.

What This State Already Takes From You

The comparison is not decoration. Maryland collects $300 from an LLC every year for its combined Annual Report and Personal Property Return, an obligation running through Md. Code Tax-Property section 11-101, due April 15, with a free 60-day extension to June 15 available online for anyone who asks. Very few states charge that much simply for the privilege of staying in good standing, and no vendor can shrink it by a dollar.

The agent line, by contrast, is a cost you set yourself. Choosing the $249 version of a commodity service means the recurring Maryland bills you cannot avoid have been joined by a third one you could have.

Where the $99 Goes

Nothing at our checkout is tiered. One product, one price, and the renewal invoice carries the identical $99 as the first one. Included: same-business-day imaging of anything a process server hands us at our Maryland office, an email the moment it lands, portal access from any browser, our address printed on the public resident agent line rather than yours, and a reminder before the April deadline arrives.

The claim we will not make is cheapest in the state. BetterLegal advertises $90 a year and that is genuinely lower than ours. The narrower and defensible version is that $99 sits at the low end of published Maryland pricing and never climbs.

What SDAT Charges to Put Us in LegalZoom's Place

Twenty-five dollars, once. Maryland keeps its business records at SDAT rather than a secretary of state, and the Charter Division there processes the Resolution to Change Principal Office or Resident Agent, a document the agency releases without any form number. The same $25 applies whether your entity was formed here or registered in from elsewhere. Submit it online through Maryland Business Express, where card payments carry a 3 percent surcharge, or mail the paper version.

Sequence matters more than speed. The resolution names your incoming agent, so sign up with the replacement before the form goes anywhere, and leave the LegalZoom subscription running until your SDAT listing displays the new name. Done that way, the agent line on your record is continuously occupied. Cancel first and you have manufactured a gap in the one function that exists to catch a lawsuit before a default judgment does. Our change of agent walkthrough has the remaining mechanics.

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Questions before you move? The contact page reaches us directly.