Four Charges a Year, Counted Together

Since this page turns on arithmetic, the arithmetic behind the page belongs at the top. MD Registered Agent.org earns $99 a year from every reader it persuades. The Swyft Filings billing figures are taken from that company's published terms, and the annualized total is plain multiplication anybody can redo.

Credit Where It Is Due

Swyft Filings states its billing cadence rather than burying it, and $149 per quarter is written where a buyer can read it before ordering. Nothing on this page suggests the company performs the underlying job badly. We hold no evidence in either direction, and inventing some would be worse than useless.

The Cadence Is the Problem

$149 four times is $596 across a year. That is the largest annual outlay among the services we price, and our July 2026 review found no distinct first-year discount attached to soften it.

Quarterly billing has a predictable effect on perception. The yearly figure never appears on any single screen. A number that reads as moderate at checkout reads very differently once the multiplication is done, and the multiplication has been left to the customer.

Roughly five hundred dollars a year of daylight. For scale, that exceeds what Maryland itself charges for the annual report, and it is close to six times the cost of forming the LLC in the first place.

What Maryland Charges to Exist

Since the comparison came up: a Maryland LLC begins with Articles of Organization submitted to SDAT, a step section 4A-202 opens to any person, at a $100 filing fee. Expedited handling is an optional $50 on top of that, and genuine same-day rush runs $325 online or $425 on paper. Every one of those figures appears on a published state fee schedule, and none of them recurs. The agent line does recur, which is exactly why its cadence deserves the scrutiny.

The Duty Behind Either Price

Worth remembering what is actually being bought on both sides of that table. Maryland requires a resident agent with a physical address in the state, available during regular business hours, with no post office boxes and no virtual offices accepted. That specification does not scale with the fee. A $596 arrangement and a $99 arrangement are answering the same statutory sentence, and the public record does not note which one you chose.

One Charge, Once a Year

$99 buys twelve months of Maryland agent service, and the renewal is also $99. The invoice arrives once. Inside it: our Maryland street address carrying the public listing instead of your own, service of process scanned the same business day it reaches our office, email notification attached to that, portal access whenever you want it, and a reminder before the April 15 report deadline.

Cheapest in the state is a title we decline to claim, because BetterLegal publishes $90 a year. The defensible statement is that $99 lands among the lower published Maryland rates and that it is one annual number instead of four that need adding up.

Switch From Swyft Filings in Maryland: The Short Version

$25, one resolution, SDAT's Charter Division. The paperwork is a Resolution to Change Principal Office or Resident Agent, which the state issues without a number, so its title does the identifying. Our change of agent instructions walk the whole filing, including the online route.

The one thing worth saying outside that link: appoint the new agent before you file, because the resolution has to name somebody, and hold off on cancelling anything at Swyft until the SDAT record shows the change. Cancel out of sequence and you have created the exact problem the agent requirement exists to prevent.

The quarterly rhythm cuts one way in your favor here, incidentally. Whenever you file, you are at most a few weeks from a billing date you can decline to renew, which is a smaller sunk cost than an annual plan would have left behind.

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Nine Maryland services with published rates are compared in our price tally.