Start a business in Georgia

Georgia has no state business licence. What it has is the occupation tax certificate, issued by every city or county where your business has a location, and it is not really a licence — it is a tax, collected through a licence. That distinction matters, because a licence is a fee and a tax is a percentage, and this one is a percentage of a number you did not choose.

Everything else here is comparatively mild. Formation is $110 on eCorp, the annual registration is $60 each 1 April, and five years of state fees comes to $350 — the details are on the LLC hub. Sales tax registration is free. No Georgia city, county or school district levies an income tax. The occupation tax is the one line on a Georgia budget that behaves unlike anything a founder has seen before.

Most Georgia jurisdictions run the same three-part sum, and the middle part is the strange one.

The profitability ratio is a percentage the state assigns to your industry — an estimate of what a business in your line of work typically keeps out of every dollar it takes. Your gross receipts get multiplied by it, and the city taxes that figure. It is a proxy for profit rather than your profit, so a low-margin business is taxed on money it genuinely never kept, and a bad year does not reduce the bill unless revenue fell with it.

Then the city asks to see a copy of your federal return, to check the gross receipts figure you declared. That is the moment most founders realise the certificate is a tax return with a different name on it.

Rates and per-employee charges are set jurisdiction by jurisdiction and there is no statewide table, so the only reliable number is the one on your own city's schedule. Some smaller counties skip the gross-receipts calculation altogether and charge per head instead — Cherokee County, for example, charges $30 per owner and per full-time employee and $15 per part-timer, which for a four-person firm is about $120 and takes ten minutes.

O.C.G.A. 48-13-9(c) lets certain licensed practitioners opt out of the gross-receipts calculation entirely and pay a flat $400 per practitioner instead. It covers the professions the statute lists — the usual practising professions licensed by state boards — and it is an election, meaning you have to make it, in writing, usually at the point of application or renewal.

Whether it saves you money is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is not subtle. If your gross-receipts calculation comes out above $400 per practitioner, the election is cheaper. If you are a two-partner firm, it is $800 and you compare against your combined bill. A practice billing well into six figures is usually far better off electing; a practitioner in their first year, billing very little, usually is not, because $400 may be more than the gross-receipts route would have charged.

The reason it is worth checking rather than assuming: the election is per practitioner, so it is insensitive to revenue. That is exactly why it gets more valuable the bigger you get, and exactly why nobody at the counter volunteers it.

Georgia's state rate is 4% and local rates add up to 4.9% on top, with 8% the most common combined rate — roughly sixty jurisdictions sit exactly there. Atlanta is the highest in the state at 8.9% in both its Fulton and DeKalb portions, because MARTA, the Atlanta MARTA add-on, the education tax and the Atlanta TSPLOST all stack on the same sale.

Services are generally outside the tax. Tangible goods are in it, and so are some digital products. That is a genuine difference from two of Georgia's neighbours: North Carolina taxes repair, maintenance and installation labour, and Kentucky brought website design, hosting, marketing, SaaS and photography into its sales tax in 2023. A Georgia design studio or consultancy collects nothing on its invoices; the same studio a state north or a state away does.

If you do sell goods, registration is free on the Georgia Tax Center, and the rate is set by the delivery jurisdiction, so an Atlanta shop shipping to a customer in a rural county charges that county's rate rather than 8.9%. Pricing tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive is a decision worth making deliberately when your rate changes by destination.

Georgia's individual income tax became a flat 4.99% on 11 May 2026, cut mid-year from 5.19%. Your LLC's profit passes through to that rate and stops there, because no Georgia city, county or school district levies an income tax of any kind.

That sounds unremarkable until you look at the border. In Alabama, around two dozen municipalities withhold an occupational tax of 0.5%–2% from the gross wages of anyone who works in the city, remitted to the city rather than the state. In Kentucky, cities, counties and school boards tax both payroll and the business's net profits, with no central filing system — Lexington-Fayette charges 2.25% on both. Maryland counties add 2.25%–3.30% to the state rate on the same return. Georgia does none of it: one rate, one return, one recipient.

The occupation tax is the price of that simplicity, and on most numbers it is the cheaper arrangement. It is worth being precise about which is which, though, because they are taxed on entirely different things — the occupation tax is levied on revenue and is owed in a loss-making year; a local income tax would not be.

Workers' compensation becomes compulsory in Georgia at three or more workers, and regular part-time workers count toward the three. Two full-timers and a Saturday assistant is three.

One thing the research could not confirm and you should not assume: how the State Board treats corporate officers and LLC members in that count. Some states include owners in the headcount and some exclude them, and it changes the answer for a two-founder business with one hire. Ask the Board before concluding you are under the line.