In February 2026 the Wyoming Senate voted to require registered agents to know the owners of every company in the state. The bill never reached the governor's desk, but it will be back in 2027, and that concerns everyone who registers an LLC here for the sake of a closed register.
The register is closed, but not to everyone
The Wyoming Secretary of State does not ask for the names of an LLC's members or managers and does not publish them. A public search of the register shows the company name, its status, the date of formation and the registered agent. Under state law the agent only has to hold the company's contact details; the agent is not required to know who stands behind it. Secretary of State Chuck Gray has called that bar a low one.
That is enough to keep an owner's name away from a competitor or a former partner. For everything else the closed register means nothing. The IRS receives the name of the responsible party when it issues an EIN. The bank and the payment provider run KYC checks when the account is opened, and without those checks the company cannot receive or send a single dollar.
The federal beneficial ownership report for companies formed in the United States has indeed been withdrawn by FinCEN: since 21 March 2025 only foreign companies registered in a state have to file it, and the final rule of 14 August 2026 confirmed that. What was cancelled was a report into a database that nobody ever got to see.
The legislature takes aim at the agents
In 2025 the Secretary of State registered 830,000 companies. A large share of them are listed at a single address in Sheridan: an office building of under four hundred square metres serves as the legal address of hundreds of thousands of LLCs. Senator Barry Crago, who represents that county, called Sheridan the epicentre of filings and introduced SF82: agents would have to keep the names and addresses of every company's owners, except companies with more than a hundred members or a real office in the state. The Senate passed it on 18 February 2026, 23 votes to 8. Gray opposed the bill and put the likely loss at 35 to 40 percent of new filings. On 3 March the House committee buried it.
It was the second attempt; the first came in 2024. The relevant legislative committee is studying the work of registered agents during the interim and will return with its findings for the 2027 general session. In parallel, SF56, signed on 28 February 2025, is already in force: the Secretary of State can dissolve a company that gave its agent false information.
What Wyoming is really worth choosing for
The case for the state lies elsewhere and will outlast any bill about agents. Wyoming was the first state in the US to create the LLC, in 1977, and its statute remains one of the best thought out. A member's creditor can obtain only a charging order, that is a right to distributions from the company, not to its assets and not to its management, and that rule covers single-member LLCs as well. In most states a sole member has no such protection.
The state levies no income tax on companies or individuals and requires no presence: no office, no employees, no visit. Formation is done online and completed on the day of filing. Upkeep comes down to one annual report by the first day of the anniversary month and the agent's fee, and neither amount depends on the company's turnover outside the state. For a business that sells worldwide and has nothing in America beyond a legal entity and an account, this is exactly the set that is needed: predictable, fast and without obligations to the state.