tax-rules

Status: draft / proposal. Not published, not part of the dataset yet.

Per-jurisdiction record of the recurring state-level taxes an LLC owes for existing: franchise and privilege taxes under whatever name the state gives them, and the posture of the state's personal income tax toward a default (pass-through) LLC. One JSON file per jurisdiction in states/<slug>.json.

This namespace is additive: it adds no key to states.json, entitysearch-state-data, name-rules, dba-rules or processing-time, and nothing already published changes because of it. A consumer that ignores this directory sees exactly the dataset it saw before.

Why this namespace exists separately

The root dataset answers "what does the state charge to file". This namespace answers a different question: what does the state charge the LLC for existing, year after year, once the filing fees are paid. That fact is scattered, mislabeled, and routinely conflated with the annual report fee — by states and by the sites that copy each other's tables.

The label is not the substance. The same economic fact is called a franchise tax (TX), an annual tax (DE), a business privilege tax (AL), an annual report license tax (WY), or a commercial activity tax (OH). A record here is keyed to the substance — a recurring state-level levy on the LLC's existence or privilege of doing business, as distinct from tax on income passed through to members — and carries the state's own label verbatim in taxName, so a consumer can render what the state actually calls it.

Scope boundaries

Default (pass-through) LLC taxation only. An LLC that has elected corporate treatment is out of scope; the record describes the default entity.
No rate brackets. stateIncomeTax carries the top marginal rate and whether a pass-through entity tax election exists, as orientation, not as tax advice. Bracket tables are deliberately excluded: their maintenance cost is out of all proportion to their value here.
No local taxes. City and county levies (e.g. municipal business taxes) are out of scope.
No federal tax. Nothing here describes the IRS.
The annual report fee stays where it is. Root states.json annual_report_fee remains authoritative for what is paid with or as the annual report. Where a state's franchise-type tax is that payment, the record says so (collectedWithAnnualReport: true) rather than restating the figure as a second authoritative value — a total-cost consumer must not count it twice. One fact, one field.
This namespace is authoritative for franchise-tax structure (whether it applies, its basis, its minimum, who collects it, when it is due). Any other mention of franchise or privilege taxes elsewhere in the dataset is prose, not a value to be read.

Sourcing

Held to the standard in the root README.md §Methodology, with one clarification it already implies: for this namespace the official publisher is usually the state's tax authority — a Franchise Tax Board, a Comptroller, a Department of Revenue — not the Secretary of State. A Secretary of State page describing another agency's tax is a pointer, not a source. No blogs, no formation-service pages, no commercial aggregators — including as corroboration.

Every admissible value is bound to a verbatim passage quoted from the cited page (evidence), and applies: false is admissible only with evidence from a page that would have said so if a tax existed. null means not yet researched, and is always preferred to a plausible guess.

Field dictionary

Identity

Field	Type	Notes
`stateName`, `stateAbbr`, `stateSlug`	string	Same conventions as the other namespaces

`franchiseTax`

Field	Type	Notes
`applies`	boolean \| null	`false` is a researched finding and requires `appliesEvidence`; `null` means not yet researched
`appliesEvidence`	evidence \| null	Required when `applies` is `false`: a passage showing the state's own statement of what recurring entity taxes exist
`taxName`	string \| null	The state's own label, verbatim
`basis`	enum \| null	`flat` · `net-worth` · `revenue` · `hybrid`
`minimumAnnualUsd`	number \| null	The floor an existing LLC pays in an ordinary year; `null` where no minimum is published
`firstYearExemption`	boolean \| null	Statutory first-year waivers; expiry dates and conditions go to `notes`
`filedWith`	string \| null	The collecting agency's name, verbatim — most franchise taxes are not the Secretary of State's business
`collectedWithAnnualReport`	boolean \| null	`true` where this tax is the payment root `states.json` already carries in `annual_report_fee` — the anti-double-counting flag. Read it as "already counted there", not as "collected alongside a report": Delaware LLCs file no annual report at all and the flag is still `true`
`dueDate`	string \| null	The state's own statement, verbatim; not normalised
`evidence`	evidence[] \| null	One passage per value, each naming what it grounds in `supports`. The figure, the due date and the first-year waiver are routinely three passages on two pages

`stateIncomeTax`

Field	Type	Notes
`passThroughApplies`	boolean \| null	Whether members owe state personal income tax on pass-through income
`topRatePercent`	number \| null	Top marginal rate, orientation only
`hasPTETElection`	boolean \| null	Whether a pass-through entity tax election exists
`evidence`	evidence[] \| null	One passage per value. The rate, the pass-through posture and the election are almost never on the same page

Record plumbing

Field	Type	Notes
`notes`	string	Anything the fields cannot carry without lying
`needsReview`	string \| null	What is missing and what would settle it
`sources`	array	`citation`, `title`, `url`, `type` (`statute` · `agency-page` · `fee-schedule` · `official-pdf` · null), `lastAccessed`
`lastVerified`	date	The date the cited pages were retrieved and every quoted passage mechanically confirmed to occur in them

An evidence object is a contiguous verbatim passage, the URL it occurs on, and an optional supports naming the value it grounds. Quotes are never assembled across ellipses, never taken from search snippets, and never tidied. Evidence is a list, not a single object, because one passage per record could only ground one of a record's values: the figure, the due date and the first-year waiver come from three places, and a record carrying several passages is only honest if each one says what it is evidence for.

The pilot

The namespace opens with five jurisdictions chosen to stress the schema, not to cover ground: California (flat minimum collected by a tax board, plus a revenue-scaled companion fee), Texas (margin-based, with a no-tax-due threshold), Delaware (a flat annual tax that is the annual obligation itself), Tennessee (a two-component franchise-and-excise regime), and Wyoming (an annual-report license fee scaled on in-state assets, which tests where the boundary falls). Every structural expectation named here was a hypothesis until the record's own sources confirmed it, and the schema was expected to change during the pilot; that is what a pilot is for.

The five are collected. Two things the sources settled, both visible in the records: Wyoming's license fee is a franchise-type levy under the substance test rather than a filing fee, and Tennessee's franchise-and-excise regime splits — the net-worth franchise tax is recorded, the income-based excise is not, and each record's notes says why. The schema changed once, and not where the paper expected: evidence is a list, because a single record's figure, due date and first-year waiver are different passages on different pages.

This is not legal or tax advice, and nothing here is a filing instruction. Tax figures move with legislative sessions; read lastVerified before trusting any of them.