Search for incorporation costs and you find two kinds of answers: suspiciously round marketing numbers, and forum threads from 2019. Neither helps you budget. A more useful approach is to understand the cost lines themselves, because your total depends on choices you control. Here are the lines with current figures, then how they add up per legal form.
The one-time fees, line by line
- Fixed registration duty: €75. Paid to the AED when the incorporation deed is registered. Small, predictable, unavoidable.
- RCS registration: €10 to €106 depending on legal form. For a Sàrl-S, budget around €50 and confirm the current LBR tariff when you file.
- Company name availability certificate: €4.75 to €10. Optional, but the cheapest insurance you will ever buy against re-papering an incorporation.
- Business permit stamp duty: €50. Applies when your activity needs a permit, which most commercial, craft and many service activities do.
- LuxTrust certificate: €115 for 3 years. You need it to sign filings on MyGuichet; video identification normally activates it within about 48 hours.
- Notary fees: typically €1,000 to €1,500. Only for forms incorporated by notarial deed, so a standard Sàrl or SA. Complex structures can run to roughly €3,000. The Sàrl-S skips this line entirely, which is most of the reason it exists.
- Non-resident extras: roughly €200. Founders living outside Luxembourg, or resident under 10 years, need a notarised non-bankruptcy declaration (issued within the last 6 months) plus criminal-record extracts from every country lived in over the last 10 years. The extracts themselves are cheap; retrieval and certified translation are what cost time and money.
What that adds up to
A lean Sàrl-S lands around €300 to €400 in fees before capital: duty, RCS, permit, LuxTrust, plus incidentals. A standard notarial Sàrl starts around €1,300 to €1,800 once the notary line joins the list. Cross-border and non-resident founders should add the declaration and translation extras. These are fee totals, not budgets; the two lines below are where real money moves.
Share capital deserves a clarification, because it gets miscounted as a cost. Capital is not spent on incorporation; it becomes the company's working money. A Sàrl-S can start from 1€, though a company with a euro in the bank cannot pay for anything, so plan capital around your first months of expenses rather than around the legal minimum. A standard Sàrl requires €12,000, which likewise stays yours to spend through the company.
A registered office is not a fee but a running cost, and the widest variable in the whole budget. Domiciliation packages commonly run €100 to €400 a month; a coworking contract or a commercial lease each sit in a different bracket again. What the address must satisfy is covered in our registered office guide; the cost follows the option you pick, so decide based on your activity, not on price alone.
The lines people forget
The business permit file. The €50 stamp is not the expensive part; the preparation can be, if documents need notarisation, translation or retrieval from abroad. Non-resident founders should read the qualification guide before budgeting zero here.
Banking. Account opening is normally free, but compare monthly fees, and remember payment institutions and traditional banks price differently.
Ongoing compliance. The cheapest incorporation still owes bookkeeping, VAT filings and annual accounts within 7 months of year-end. For a small company with simple activity, accounting support commonly lands between €1,000 and €1,650 a year, and up from there with volume. Whatever provider you choose, this is the real cost of owning a company, and it dwarfs the one-time setup lines over a few years. Any budget that stops at the incorporation date is half a budget.
Where not to save
Two savings reliably cost more than they return. Skipping professional review of the permit file, because a rejected or delayed application burns weeks. And choosing an address setup that does not match your activity, because fixing establishment problems later means re-papering everything that referenced the address.
A sane way to budget
- Pick the legal form first; it sets the notary line.
- Pick the address type that matches your activity; it sets the biggest recurring line.
- Add the fixed small items (€75 duty, RCS fee, €50 permit stamp, LuxTrust).
- Fund capital for three to six months of real expenses.
- Price the ongoing accounting before you start, not after.
Figures above reflect published tariffs and market ranges as of July 2026; tariffs change, so confirm current amounts when you file. If you want the numbers for your specific case rather than ranges, we prepare exact cost breakdowns as part of the formation process, with no surprises hiding in month three.