Starting a business in Wyoming: your NAICS code decides

Elsewhere the rule is a number. California and Idaho say one employee. Virginia says three. Alabama says five. Wyoming does not count people at all — the Workers' Compensation Division at the Department of Workforce Services classifies businesses by NAICS code, and the codes it calls extrahazardous carry a duty to insure from the moment work begins, with no small-employer grace and no waiting period.

Outside those codes there is no duty whatsoever. A one-person consultancy, a shop, a design studio, a forty-person software firm: nothing required. Two businesses of identical size can sit on opposite sides of that line, and nothing about their size tells you which.

Get the answer from the Division rather than from a general list, because codes are assigned to the business rather than chosen from a menu and it is your assigned code that decides. The employer account itself opens at WYUI.wyo.gov, and one account carries unemployment insurance and, where the code requires it, the workers' compensation premium filings too.

Wyoming is monopolistic. Where cover is compulsory it comes from the state's Workers' Compensation Division and from nowhere else — state law does not permit a private insurer to write it. Only three other states work this way, and two of them, Washington and North Dakota, are neighbours.

The consequence lands squarely on national payroll providers. Bundled “pay-as-you-go workers' comp” is a private carrier product, and a private carrier may not cover the extrahazardous side of Wyoming. Whatever your provider sells you in Colorado or Utah does not stretch across the line; you open the state account yourself. Get that confirmed in writing before your first Wyoming hire rather than after an injury.

Being outside the compulsory codes does not settle the question, it hands it to you. Employers may elect coverage voluntarily, and the case for doing so is the same everywhere: workers' compensation trades the worker's right to sue for prompt no-fault benefits. Skip it and a workplace injury becomes an ordinary liability claim against the business, sized by a court rather than by a benefits schedule.

Here is the Wyoming-specific twist, and it runs the other way from the monopoly. Only exempt employers — those outside the compulsory codes — may buy workers' compensation from a private insurer on the open market. So an exempt employer has both doors open: elect into the state fund, or buy privately. A non-exempt one has a single door, and it is the state.

With no employees at all the question does not arise, because an owner working alone is not employing anybody. It goes live the first time someone else does work for you, which is a good reason to have settled it in advance of that day rather than on it.

The state rate is 4%. Two county-level pennies sit on top of it, and the unusual thing about them is not their size but how they arrive and how they leave.

Both pennies are decided at the ballot box, and the specific purpose tax switches itself off when the thing it funded has been paid for. So the rate you must charge in a county can move because of a local vote or the completion of a road, rather than on a legislative calendar you could watch from a distance. That is a reason to read the Excise Tax Division's rate table each quarter instead of hard-coding a rate into your invoicing once.

Registration for the sales and use tax licence goes to the Department of Revenue's Excise Tax Division through the Wyoming Internet Filing System. The licence fee could not be confirmed from the state's own pages at this check, so confirm it before you budget it. Collection is at state level, so unlike Alaska there is no separate municipal registration underneath.

Wyoming levies no income tax of any kind — not on individuals, not on corporations, and no city or county levies one. There is no state income tax return on your business profit and no general state business licence; the Secretary of State says so plainly and points businesses at their city clerk for anything trade-specific, which for most service businesses is nothing.

The one annual state charge is the licence tax, filed as the annual report on the first day of your anniversary month. $60 is the headline, and it is a minimum: the tax is $0.0002 per dollar of assets located in Wyoming. A business whose assets are a laptop pays the floor and goes on paying the floor; a business with $500,000 of Wyoming assets pays $100. Most readers of this page will never see a number other than $60.

Filing on WyoBiz is processed immediately on submission, which almost no state matches — most publish a turnaround measured in days. The same document posted is worked in the order received and can take up to fifteen business days, so there is no argument for paper here.