$249 for an Agent, in a State Whose Cheapest Annual Report Is $300

Disclosure ahead of the argument: TN Registered Agent.org runs this site, we compete for the same Tennessee registered agent work LegalZoom sells, and our price is $99 a year. The LegalZoom figures are theirs, copied off their published pages during a July 2026 check and not adjusted.

The Reason People Still Pick LegalZoom

Familiarity, and familiarity counts for something real. For two decades LegalZoom has been the default name in consumer legal filing. Its support lines are staffed, its catalog covers most of what a small company ever needs to file, and an owner who dislikes making vendor decisions can put everything under one login and be finished thinking about it. That is a coherent reason to buy, and it is not a reason we can match.

We do one job. Tennessee address, papers received, papers to you the same day, ninety-nine dollars.

$249, and It Bills Itself Again Next Year

LegalZoom's registered agent service is $249 annually. Our July 2026 review turned up no introductory rate hiding under it, which makes this genuinely simpler than most pricing in the category: one figure, year one and every year after. It also auto-renews, so the second charge happens without anyone asking you a question.

That is worth crediting and worth watching at the same time. A price that repeats without prompting is convenient right up until the year you stop needing it.

A Number Sitting Right Beside Tennessee's Statutory Floor

Put $249 next to the other bill a Tennessee LLC receives each year and the size of it becomes clearer.

Tennessee prices the LLC annual report at $50 per member, and it sets a minimum of $300 that covers everybody with six members or fewer. Most small companies in this state therefore write $300 to the Secretary of State once a year, no matter how the business performed. That $300 is the smallest annual report this state will accept from an LLC. It has no discount tier and no negotiation.

So a $249 agent bill is not far off a second one of those. For a two-person consultancy, the yearly cost of merely existing in Tennessee roughly doubles depending on which agent it hired. One of those two numbers is statutory. The other is a choice, and the difference between $249 and $99 is $150 a year that never touches a state account.

Honest limit on our own row: BetterLegal posts $90 per year, so the smallest published number in this market belongs to them. Ours is one of the low ones, and it is the same low one at every renewal.

Two Calendars That Never Meet

There is a scheduling wrinkle in Tennessee worth knowing before you set up autopay anywhere.

Your annual report comes due four months after your fiscal year closes, on the opening day of that month. Most LLCs run a calendar year, which lands them on April 1, and the filing window swings open back in January. Your accountant effectively sets that date. Not the state, and not the day you formed.

An auto-renewing agent subscription runs on something else entirely: the anniversary of a shopping cart. Those two dates have no relationship, and the gap between them is where people get caught. The report deadline is the one with consequences attached, and the warnings about it arrive by mail at whatever address your record names as the agent.

Your Exit From LegalZoom, in Five Steps

Changing agents here is a single form, and the whole procedure fits in five steps.

1. Line up the incoming agent before you file anything. The public record continues naming LegalZoom until the state processes your change, so the new agent needs to be appointed and ready first. Do it in the other order and you have written a gap into your own record, during which a summons could arrive somewhere nobody is watching. There is no reason to accept that risk to save a few days.
2. Pull form SS-4534. Tennessee uses one change-of-agent filing for LLCs, corporations, and the other registered entity types alike. It asks for your entity name as the state spells it, your control number from the Secretary of State, and whoever is taking over, together with their Tennessee street address.
3. Check the address rule before you write it in. Tennessee requires a physical street address inside the state, given down to the county, and it will not take a post office box in that field under any circumstances.
4. Send it in with $20. The filing goes to the Division of Business and Charitable Organizations. If your annual report happens to be due at the same time, you can make the agent change on the report instead, and the state adds the identical $20 to that filing rather than charging you twice.
5. Watch the record update, then cancel. Once your entity listing shows the new agent, LegalZoom's role is over and the subscription can be closed. Confirmation is the trigger for that call, not the postmark.

LegalZoom does not sign this form and cannot slow it down. Full detail sits on our Tennessee change of agent page.

The Trade, Stated Plainly

You can keep paying $249 for a name you recognize, and there is nothing dishonest about that transaction. The statute in this state asks the same short list of things from every agent regardless of what they charge: a real Tennessee address, somebody there during working hours, documents passed along without delay. We do that for $99, scan on arrival, and hold the same rate at renewal ten years out.

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