Georgia LLC Reinstatement 2026: $260 + $85 Per Missed Year

What a Missed April 1 Costs, Month by Month

Most Georgia compliance pages describe non-filing consequences in the abstract — "administrative dissolution may result." That framing hides the two things an owner actually needs: how long you have, and what each stage costs. Georgia's statute is unusually forgiving on timing, and knowing the schedule is worth $260 in cash. Here is the same $60 obligation traced from the deadline forward.

Read that table as a decision, not a history lesson. The whole stretch from April to roughly August 2026 costs the same $85. There is no advantage to any particular week inside it, and no penalty that grows day by day — Georgia's $25 is one-time per registration, not a monthly accrual like Delaware's 1.5% or the per-month structures in some other states. Then a single line is crossed and the identical lapse costs $345. That $260 step is the entire game.

The reason owners cross it is almost never indifference. It is that the Notice of Intent to Administratively Dissolve goes to the registered office address on file. If your registered agent resigned, moved, or quietly stopped forwarding mail, the warning shot lands somewhere you will never see it, and the first news of the dissolution arrives from a lender pulling your file. Do not treat the notice as your reminder system. The Secretary of State's own How to File Annual Registration guide is the authority on the deadline itself: registrations are due by April 1 of each year they are due, may be filed as early as January 1, and may be filed in advance for up to three calendar years at once.

The Forms & Fees to Fix It

Everything runs through the Corporations Division's online portal at ecorp.sos.ga.gov, or on paper by mail or hand delivery. One point of confusion worth clearing up before the numbers: Georgia does not surcharge either channel. The $10 service charge you see in every figure below rides on the filing itself, not on how you submit it — which is why the Secretary of State's published fee table lists an identical amount in its "Online Filing" and "Paper Filing" columns for annual registrations, amended annual registrations and late penalties alike. Filing on paper does not cost you more money. It costs you time, and that difference is real: see the processing section below.

1. The reinstatement application — $260

This is the filing that revives the entity, and the Secretary of State states the price plainly: the fee to file a reinstatement application is $260.00 ($250 filing fee + $10 service charge). It is flat regardless of how long you were dissolved and identical online or on paper. Georgia's How to Guide: Reinstate an Entity is also specific about who may sign it — the application may be executed by the registered agent of the entity, or by a member or manager of the LLC, in each case as set forth in the most recent annual registration filed with the Secretary of State (O.C.G.A. § 14-11-603(b)(4)(C)).

That detail catches LLCs whose membership changed during the lapse — but it is not a dead end, and this is the part almost no competing page tells you. If the application is not signed by one of those authorized persons, Georgia allows it to proceed when accompanied by a notarized statement from someone who was a member or manager at the time of the administrative dissolution — or an heir, successor or assign of such a person — attesting to that status and stating that they have knowledge of and assent to the application. The Secretary of State warns that omitting the statement when it is required "will result in the delay or forfeiture of your filing," and since Georgia fees are non-refundable, forfeiture means the $260 is gone.

2. Every delinquent annual registration — $60 each, plus $25

This is the part that stacks, and the part most owners underestimate. Each missed annual registration must be filed and paid: $60 ($50 filing fee plus the $10 service charge), plus the $25 late penalty on each. Georgia does not fold back registrations into the reinstatement application the way Florida does — Florida's reinstatement is filed in lieu of the past-due reports under Fla. Stat. § 605.0715, and Colorado replaces missed periodic reports entirely with a single flat $100 Statement Curing Delinquency. In Georgia, each year is its own filing and its own charge.

3. If a lapsed agent caused it — Amended Annual Registration, $30

Reinstatement cures the registration default, but it will not fix a missing registered agent, and going 60 days without one is an independent ground for dissolution. Every Georgia LLC must maintain an agent with a physical Georgia street address — no P.O. boxes — under O.C.G.A. § 14-11-209. The agent may be a Georgia resident, a domestic corporation or LLC, or a foreign entity holding a Georgia certificate of authority, which means an owner living in Georgia can serve for free. Changing the agent outside the annual window is an Amended Annual Registration (Form CD 920) at $30 ($20 fee plus the $10 service charge); during the January 1 to April 1 window you can update the agent inside the regular $60 annual registration at no extra cost.

4. Optional: buy speed

Georgia prices expedited service as an add-on to the filing fee, in three tiers: +$120 for two-business-day review, +$275 for same-day, and +$1,200 for one-hour. Two practical limits attach. Same-day requests must reach the Division by noon on a business day — anything arriving later is reviewed by noon the next business day, so a 3 p.m. same-day request buys you tomorrow. And the one-hour tier is available only on mail or in-person submissions, reviewed between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. on business days. Pay for speed if a loan closing, a lease, or a license renewal is genuinely waiting on your status; skip it otherwise, because relation-back means the reinstatement is backdated to the dissolution either way.

The Reinstatement Stack: 4 Worked Examples

The Georgia formula is simple enough to run in your head: $260 + ($85 × the number of delinquent registrations). Here is what that produces in four realistic situations.

Example 1 — the Atlanta consultant who caught it in June. A single-member LLC misses April 1, 2026, then spots the lapse while doing mid-year bookkeeping. Grounds for dissolution have arisen but no dissolution has taken effect. She files the 2026 registration and pays the penalty: $60 + $25 = $85. No reinstatement fee, no dissolution on the record, nothing for a lender to find later. This is the outcome the rest of the examples are measured against.

Example 2 — the contractor who found out from his bank. The same missed 2026 registration, but the Notice of Intent went to a registered agent who had moved. Dissolution took effect around August 2026, and he learns about it in November when a lender pulls a status check on a line-of-credit renewal. He reinstates with one delinquent registration: $260 + $85 = $345. The four-month delay cost him $260 in cash and a stalled credit facility — which is usually the larger number.

Example 3 — the dormant e-commerce LLC revived after three years. The owner paused the business in 2026 and restarts in 2029, with the 2026, 2027 and 2028 registrations all unfiled. The stack is $260 + 3 × $85 = $515, and the 2029 registration is due on top if the April 1 window has already passed. Re-forming would cost $110 — but the LLC holds an EIN, a payment-processor account tied to that EIN, and a marketplace seller account keyed to the entity name. Reinstating is the cheaper path once re-papering all three is priced in.

Example 4 — the five-year cliff. This is the only example where the arithmetic stops mattering. An LLC dissolved in August 2026 can still be revived in early 2031 for $685. A few months later it cannot be revived at any price: the window under O.C.G.A. § 14-11-603(b)(4) closes, and on the same date the name reservation under § 14-11-603(b)(6) expires, so another business may reserve or file under your company name. Everywhere else on this page, waiting is a cash problem. Here it is a one-way door — you lose the entity, the relation-back, and the name together, and $110 in new Articles of Organization only gets you the first of the three back.

Step-by-Step: Filing the Reinstatement Application

1. Pull your entity record and read the effective dissolution date. Search your LLC on the Secretary of State's business search. You need three facts off that record: the status, the effective date of dissolution (your five-year clock and your name-reservation clock both run from it), and the registered agent currently on file. Do not estimate the date from the April 1 you missed — they are months apart.
2. Count your delinquent registrations. Multiply by $85 and add $260. That is your budget. If the current year's January-to-April window has already passed, that registration is delinquent too — count it.
3. Fix the registered agent before you file, if that is the problem. The agent must be a Georgia resident or a business authorized in Georgia, at a physical Georgia street address. If your agent resigned or moved, line up the replacement now — waiting on a person to agree is almost always slower than the state's queue. An owner who lives in Georgia can serve at no cost.
4. Log in at ecorp.sos.ga.gov and open the reinstatement application. Confirm the signer is the registered agent or a member or manager as set forth in the most recent annual registration. If the person with signing authority today is not on that filing, prepare the notarized statement described above and submit it with the application rather than discovering the requirement at the rejection stage.
5. File the delinquent annual registrations and the reinstatement together. Georgia will not reinstate an LLC whose registration default is still outstanding, so both halves need to land. Pay the $260 plus the per-year amounts in the same session. Note that the Division cannot accept a single payment covering multiple filings — expect each to be tendered separately.
6. Add expedited service only if something is waiting. Two-business-day review is +$120, same-day +$275 (submit before noon), one-hour +$1,200 on paper submissions only. Relation-back means a regular-speed filing is backdated to the dissolution anyway.
7. Confirm the status flipped, then order proof. Re-check the business search after processing and, if a lender, landlord or licensing board is holding a file open, order a certificate of existence after the reinstatement posts, not before.
8. Prevent the repeat. Georgia lets an entity file its annual registrations in advance for a period up to and including three calendar years. If a missed notice is what put you here, buying three years of certainty in one sitting is the cheapest insurance on this page.

How Long Reinstatement Takes

The Corporations Division posts its turnaround, and it is one of the few states that quotes reinstatements specifically. As of August 3, 2026, its How to Guide: Reinstate an Entity states that reinstatements submitted online are generally processed within 7 to 10 business days, while reinstatement applications submitted in paper format by mail or hand delivery are generally processed in 15 business days from receipt by the Division. That is the real cost of the paper channel in Georgia: not money — the fee is $260 either way — but roughly a week of extra calendar time. Expedited service compresses either route to two business days for +$120 or same day for +$275.

Build in a cushion for seasonality. The Division warns of lengthier turnarounds from late December through January, and again at the end of each quarter — late March, late June and late September. The late-December-through-March stretch is exactly when the January-to-April registration crush lands, which is also when many reinstatements get filed. Check the posted turnaround before you promise a date to a lender.

In practice, though, the state's queue is rarely the bottleneck. Three things move the real end-to-end timeline more:

• Lining up a registered agent. If a lapsed agent is why you were dissolved, you cannot file until someone with a physical Georgia street address agrees to serve. Finding and confirming that person routinely takes longer than the Secretary of State's review.
• Signature authority. The application must be executed by the registered agent or by a member or manager as set forth in the most recent annual registration (O.C.G.A. § 14-11-603(b)(4)(C)), or else accompanied by the notarized statement. LLCs whose ownership changed during the lapse often discover this at the rejection stage — which restarts the clock and, because Georgia fees are non-refundable, forfeits the money already tendered.
• Counting the years wrong. An underpaid delinquent balance sends the filing back. Confirm the count on your eCorp record rather than reconstructing it from memory.

The Five-Year Name Reservation Most Guides Miss

Here is where Georgia quietly outperforms most states, and it is the detail almost no competing page mentions. The name of an administratively dissolved LLC, the Secretary of State's reinstatement guide states, "is reserved for a period of 5 years after the date of dissolution or until the entity is reinstated, whichever is sooner" — the rule sits at O.C.G.A. § 14-11-603(b)(6) for LLCs, with parallels at §§ 14-2-1422(b) and 14-3-1422(b) for corporations. Your brand deadline and your money deadline are the same date.

That alignment is rarer than it sounds. Arizona gives dissolved LLCs a generous six years to reinstate but directs the Corporation Commission to release the company's name to anyone else after just six months (A.R.S. § 29-3709(B)) — so an Arizona owner can be perfectly inside the filing window and still find the name gone, forcing an amendment and a rebrand. Illinois protects the name for three years from the notice of dissolution (805 ILCS 180/35-37) and then releases it. Georgia does not split the clocks. If you are inside the five-year window, you are reinstating under your own name.

Note the flip side, because it is the part that stings: the protection ends with the window. Georgia says so directly — if the entity does not reinstate within the five-year period, then another entity may reserve or file under the name. So the name is not something you can park indefinitely and reclaim later; it is released on the same day your reinstatement right expires.

The practical consequence: for the first five years, a delay in Georgia is a cash problem, not a branding catastrophe. Every additional year costs $85 and nothing else erodes. That is genuinely good news — but it is not a reason to sit on it, because the things that do erode while you are dissolved are the things that cost real money. Financing stalls, because banks and SBA lenders pull a certificate of existence before closing a loan or renewing a line of credit, and a dissolved LLC cannot produce a clean one. Deals and licenses get flagged, because a buyer's attorney or a licensing board runs the same status check and treats an inactive entity as leverage. And your liability shield, while ultimately restored by relation-back, is a defense you have to raise rather than a fact you can simply point at.

LLC vs. Corporation: What Actually Differs

You will find filing-service pages claiming Georgia corporations face a March 1 deadline while LLCs get April 1, and treating that split as an operational risk worth buying software to manage. It does not match the Secretary of State's own guidance. Every Georgia entity type files its annual registration by April 1, with the window opening January 1. Corporations, LLCs, limited partnerships and registered foreign entities all share the date.

Where entity type genuinely matters is the first registration after formation, and this is the difference that actually catches new owners:

• Corporations file their initial annual registration within 90 days of the date of incorporation, then between January 1 and April 1 every year afterward.
• LLCs — along with limited partnerships and foreign corporations — file the first annual registration between January 1 and April 1 of the year following the initial filing, then annually on the same schedule.

So an LLC formed in October 2026 owes nothing until the January-to-April 2027 window, while a corporation incorporated the same afternoon is already 90 days from its first deadline. If you formed late in the year and have been anxiously waiting for a registration notice, that is likely why nothing arrived.

Where the fee schedule does distinguish entity types is the amount. The annual registration is $60 for an LLC, profit corporation, professional corporation, benefit corporation, LP or LLLP; $40 for a nonprofit corporation; and $35 for a foreign LLP. The $25 late penalty and the $30 amended annual registration are the same across all of them.

Two further points worth keeping straight. First, the annual registration is not a certificate of existence — the registration is the filing you owe the state each year, while the certificate is the document you order to prove good standing to a third party. Reinstating fixes the first and only then makes the second obtainable. Second, none of this touches your tax filings: Georgia's flat 4.99% income tax rate for 2026 and your federal return run on entirely separate tracks from the Corporations Division, and reinstating an entity does not resolve any tax delinquency. For the full picture of what a Georgia LLC owes and when, see our breakdown of Georgia LLC costs for 2026, or the Georgia LLC compliance hub for every filing in one place.