The Florida September Cliff: 31,213 LLCs Dissolved in One Month — A 2025 Sunbiz Data Report
We ingest the Florida Department of State's full public entity feed every day and keep a snapshot of every LLC, corporation, and limited partnership in the registry. This report is what that data says about how Florida companies actually die — when, how fast, and how predictably. Spoiler: it is almost entirely on one Friday in September.
Key findings
- 31,213 FL LLCs dissolved in September 2025
- ~30× the average month's dissolution count
- +8.5% YoY growth (28,756 in Sep 2024)
- 50.7% of active LLCs are late on the 2026 annual report
- 72.2% of 2015-cohort LLCs already inactive
- 35.7% of 2024-cohort LLCs already inactive
The Cliff: Florida LLC Dissolutions by Month, 2025
If you plotted every Florida LLC that went inactive in 2025 against the calendar, you would see eleven months of low-frequency noise — voluntary dissolutions, mergers, the occasional cleanup — and then a single, almost vertical wall in September. Here is the actual shape:
Source: Florida DOS public feed, FLAL filing type, status_code = "I", last_transaction_date in 2025. Snapshot date: 2026-05-29.
The September count is not a typo. 31,213 Florida LLCs were marked administratively dissolved in a single month, against a baseline of roughly 500–1,500 dissolutions in a typical month. That is not market churn. That is one administrative action taken by one office on roughly one day, against a year's worth of accumulated non-filers.
It Happens Every Year — and It Is Growing
The September spike is not a 2025 anomaly. The same pattern appears in the 2024 data we hold, and the size of the batch grew year over year. The cliff is a structural feature of Florida's compliance regime, not a one-off enforcement event:
| Year | FL LLCs dissolved in September | Annual total (FL LLCs) | September share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 28,756 | 39,728 | 72.4% |
| 2025 | 31,213 | 41,600 | 75.0% |
Three-quarters of every year's LLC dissolutions in Florida happen in a single month. The year-over-year growth — roughly 9% more entities dissolved in September 2025 than 2024 — tracks the underlying growth of the active registry, which suggests the underlying non-filing rate is stable, not getting worse. It is, however, large enough that the absolute number keeps climbing.
The Cliff Is Not Just an LLC Phenomenon
Profit corporations and nonprofit corporations show the same September concentration, in proportion to their share of the registry. The administrative dissolution machinery treats every for-profit entity type identically — and the data reflects it:
| Entity type | Sep 2025 dissolutions | Avg other months | September multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida LLC (FLAL) | 31,213 | ~948 | 33× |
| Profit corporation (DOMP) | 6,734 | ~234 | 29× |
| Nonprofit corporation (DOMNP) | 1,120 | ~31 | 36× |
Nonprofits show the steepest cliff (36×) despite being exempt from the $400 late penalty — a useful corrective to the assumption that the penalty is what drives the September count. The penalty determines what you pay; the dissolution machinery runs on the calendar regardless.
How Long Does a Florida LLC Actually Last?
The September cliff is annual flow. The cumulative picture is grimmer. We took every Florida LLC filed in each year from 2015 to 2024 and asked: what fraction is still active today? The decay is monotonic and steep:
| File year | LLCs filed | Inactive today | % inactive |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 21,488 | 15,520 | 72.2% |
| 2016 | 23,349 | 16,201 | 69.4% |
| 2017 | 26,374 | 17,960 | 68.1% |
| 2018 | 29,643 | 19,211 | 64.8% |
| 2019 | 31,097 | 19,231 | 61.8% |
| 2020 | 39,914 | 24,721 | 61.9% |
| 2021 | 53,307 | 31,673 | 59.4% |
| 2022 | 53,374 | 28,685 | 53.7% |
| 2023 | 56,365 | 26,833 | 47.6% |
| 2024 | 52,735 | 18,803 | 35.7% |
More than a third of the LLCs filed in 2024 were already inactive within eighteen months. The five-year inactive rate (2020 cohort) sits at 61.9% — well past the point where a clear majority of the original cohort is dead. By year ten (the 2015 cohort) seven of every ten LLCs are gone. Many of these are voluntary closures, of course, but the dominant cause — visible in the September concentration — is administrative dissolution for a missed annual report, not failed businesses.
Where Florida's LLCs Live — and Die
Miami dominates the volume side: 71,115 LLCs claim a Miami principal address, nearly double the next city. But dissolution rates vary meaningfully by location. The cities with the worst compliance hygiene are not always the largest:
| City | Total LLCs ever filed | Currently active | % inactive |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miami | 71,115 | 37,383 | 47.4% |
| Orlando | 36,064 | 17,236 | 52.2% |
| Tampa | 26,959 | 13,119 | 51.3% |
| Jacksonville | 21,837 | 10,234 | 53.1% |
| St. Petersburg | 16,322 | 11,376 | 30.3% |
| Boca Raton | 11,721 | 5,240 | 55.3% |
| Naples | 10,913 | 5,526 | 49.4% |
| Fort Lauderdale | 10,630 | 5,326 | 49.9% |
| Tallahassee | 6,843 | 2,797 | 59.1% |
| Hialeah | 7,344 | 4,451 | 39.4% |
St. Petersburg's 30.3% inactive rate is the cleanest of any major Florida market — and Hialeah at 39.4% is striking given how often "shell entity" assumptions get applied to that market in commentary. Tallahassee's 59.1% inactive rate is the worst on this list and partially reflects how often the state capital is used as the registered office for entities that never had real operations there.
Live: 101,963 Active LLCs Are Already Late Right Now
The most useful number in this entire report is the one that is still changing. As of the most recent ingest (May 28, 2026), the public feed showed 201,138 active Florida LLCs that were filed before 2025 — meaning they were all required to file a 2026 annual report by May 1.
Of those, 101,963 had not yet filed for 2026. That is 50.7% of the eligible active population, four weeks past the deadline, every one of them already accruing the $400 statutory late penalty.
If the historical pattern holds, the vast majority will quietly file before mid-September and pay the penalty. A material minority — the 31,000-ish LLCs that show up in the September cliff every year — will not. They will be administratively dissolved on the third Friday of September, lose the right to their own names, and begin the slower, more expensive reinstatement process detailed in our missed-deadline guide.
This is why Entity Ally exists. Every entity under monitoring gets escalating reminders before May 1 and an immediate alert if its Sunbiz status drifts toward dissolution. The 101,963 number is also why we can publish this report at all: we already have the daily feed, indexed and diffable, for every entity in the state. See how Florida LLC monitoring works.
Methodology and Scope
Every number in this report comes from a single source: the Florida Department of State's official public data feed at sftp.floridados.gov. We ingest the quarterly full snapshot (cordata.zip) and apply the daily change files (YYYYMMDDc.txt) every morning. The snapshot used for this report was current as of May 29, 2026.
- Universe: 1,382,263 entity records across all filing types. "Florida LLC" counts use the FLAL filing type; "profit corporation" uses DOMP; "nonprofit" uses DOMNP. Foreign LLCs and corporations registered to do business in Florida are excluded from the LLC numbers.
- Dissolution date proxy: the public feed does not expose a dedicated "dissolved on" date. We use the entity's
last_transaction_dateas a proxy: for entities currently in INACTIVE status, this is the date of the action that produced the inactive status in the vast majority of cases. Voluntary dissolutions, mergers, and reinstatement reversals can introduce small amounts of noise. - "Currently late" definition: Florida LLC, status_code = "A" (active), file_date strictly before 2025-01-01 (so the entity existed for the entire 2025 calendar year and is due to file a 2026 annual report), and either NULL or pre-2026 in the
last_annual_report_yearcolumn. - What we do not claim: we do not attempt to break down voluntary vs. administrative dissolutions. The September concentration is strong indirect evidence of administrative dissolution, but the underlying status_code does not distinguish them.
What This Means If You Own a Florida Entity
- The risk is structural, not random. Florida dissolves entities on a calendar, not on merit. If your annual report is unfiled by the third Friday of September, you are joining a 30,000-LLC batch — not standing out as a special case worthy of a heads-up.
- The risk window is exactly four months. May 1 through mid-September. Five months out of twelve are quiet on the dissolution side; a window opens; it closes; the rest of the year is noise.
- Survival rates decay fast and predictably. If you operate multiple LLCs, plan for a real attrition rate. A portfolio of ten Florida LLCs five years old has, on average, four already dead.
- "I filed before" is not protective. The cliff is built from entities whose owners have filed annual reports successfully in past years. One missed cycle is enough. There is no good-standing buffer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are so many Florida LLCs dissolved in September each year?
Florida administratively dissolves any LLC or corporation that hasn't filed its annual report by the third Friday of September. The state batches these dissolutions on or around that date, which is why almost every dissolution recorded in September is the result of a missed May 1 deadline — not voluntary closure.
How many Florida LLCs were administratively dissolved in 2025?
Based on first-party data from the Florida Department of State public feed, 41,600 Florida LLCs (FLAL filing type) had their status flipped to INACTIVE during 2025, with 31,213 of those concentrated in September alone — the administrative-dissolution batch for entities that missed the May 1 annual report deadline.
Is the September dissolution cliff a one-time event or a recurring pattern?
It is recurring. In September 2024 the Florida DOS dissolved 28,756 LLCs in a single month; in September 2025 the number climbed to 31,213 — a 9% year-over-year increase. The same month-9 spike appears in profit corporations (DOMP) and nonprofits (DOMNP) at roughly the same proportion. It is a structural feature of Florida's compliance calendar.
Where does this data come from?
Entity Ally ingests the Florida Department of State's official public data feed at sftp.floridados.gov on a daily basis and stores a snapshot of every entity. The numbers in this report were computed against that snapshot in late May 2026. Methodology and scope are detailed in the methodology section below.
How many Florida LLCs are currently late on the 2026 annual report?
As of late May 2026 — roughly four weeks past the May 1 deadline — 101,963 active Florida LLCs (those filed before 2025 and therefore due to file an annual report this year) had not yet filed their 2026 report. That is 50.7% of the eligible population, every one of them now exposed to the $400 late penalty.
What share of newly-formed Florida LLCs survive their first decade?
Less than a third. Of the 21,488 Florida LLCs filed in 2015, 72.2% were already inactive by mid-2026. The 2020 cohort (39,914 filings) was 61.9% inactive — meaning more entities had failed than survived within five years. Florida's compliance gauntlet is unusually unforgiving compared to other U.S. states.
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