A Nevis LLC is the strongest LLC a US person can own, and it costs less than most people's annual accounting bill. That sounds like marketing copy, so let's earn it. This guide walks through the statute clause by clause, follows a hypothetical creditor as they run into each wall, prices the whole thing in a table, and then tells you the part the incorporation mills leave out: for serious money, the LLC alone is usually the wrong stopping point.
We'll also be clear about taxes up front, because half the industry isn't. A Nevis LLC saves a US owner exactly zero dollars in tax. It is a pure asset protection tool. If someone is selling it to you as anything else, close the tab.
What is a Nevis LLC?
A Nevis LLC is a limited liability company formed under the Nevis Limited Liability Company Ordinance of 1995, amended most recently in 2015. Nevis is the smaller island of the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis, an independent Commonwealth country in the eastern Caribbean, and it has spent three decades deliberately building the most debtor-friendly entity statutes in the world. The LLC Ordinance was modeled on early US LLC acts, so the vocabulary is familiar: members own it, a manager runs it, an operating agreement governs it.
The difference is what happens when someone sues you. US LLC statutes were written to balance the interests of business owners and their creditors. The Nevis Ordinance was written, quite openly, to make a member's creditor give up. Everything below flows from that design choice.
A few structural facts before we get to the protection:
The LLC is a Nevis legal person. It can hold brokerage accounts, bank accounts, bitcoin, real estate holding interests, and shares in other companies. It can sue and be sued in its own name.
Members and managers can be non-residents. Nearly all clients we see are US persons who never set foot on the island.
There is no Nevis tax on income earned outside Nevis, no public register of members or managers, and no requirement to file financial statements. The government knows who the registered agent is. That's about it.
None of that privacy is secrecy from the IRS. You will report this entity to the US government in full, and we'll cover exactly how below.
The charging order: the only door, and it's mostly painted on
Here's the core of the statute. Under the Nevis LLC Ordinance, a charging order is the sole and exclusive remedy available to a creditor of a member. Not one remedy among several. The only one.
A charging order is a lien on distributions. If the LLC pays money out to the debtor-member, the creditor intercepts it. That's the entire right. The Nevis version then strips the remedy down further:
It conveys no ownership. The creditor never becomes a member and never acquires the member's interest.
It conveys no voting or management rights. The creditor cannot vote, cannot inspect the way a member can, cannot replace the manager, and cannot touch the operating agreement.
It cannot force a distribution. The manager decides if and when the LLC distributes anything. If the manager (typically you, or a trustee) declines to distribute, the charging order sits there earning nothing.
It cannot be foreclosed. Several US states let a creditor foreclose on the charged interest and take it outright. Nevis prohibits this.
It expires after three years and cannot be renewed. This is the clause that surprises even lawyers. In most US states a charging order can be maintained more or less indefinitely. In Nevis, the creditor's one remedy has a shelf life, and when it lapses, they are back to nothing.
So the creditor's best-case outcome, after everything goes right for them, is a three-year lien on distributions that will never be made. We have opinions about a lot of offshore products, and plenty of them are oversold. This one is not. The charging order limitation is the real thing.
A worked example: one judgment, six walls
Statutes are abstract, so walk through it. Say you formed a Nevis LLC in 2024 and moved a $1.5 million brokerage account into it. In 2026 a business partner wins a $2 million judgment against you personally in a Texas court. Their lawyer, working on contingency, starts collections and finds the LLC. Here's what happens next, wall by wall.
Wall one: the Texas judgment is worthless in Nevis. Nevis courts do not recognize or enforce foreign judgments against Nevis LLCs or their members' interests. The judgment that took two years and $300,000 in fees to win is, in Charlestown, a piece of paper.
Wall two: they have to re-litigate in Nevis. To get anything, the creditor must bring a fresh claim in the High Court in Nevis, with local counsel. Nevis attorneys don't work on contingency; they bill up front. The contingency lawyer who ran the Texas case now has to explain to the client why the next phase requires cash out of pocket in a foreign country.
Wall three: the bond. Before the Nevis court will hear a claim against the LLC interest, the creditor must post a bond, in practice around USD 100,000, to secure the defendant's costs if the claim fails. The 2015 amendments raised this from $25,000, which tells you Nevis noticed which feature was working. In our experience talking to practitioners, this is where most creditors' appetite dies. Wiring six figures to a Caribbean court registry as a ticket to a lawsuit you'll probably lose is a hard memo to write.
Wall four: the fraud standard. Suppose the creditor argues you funded the LLC to defeat their claim. In Texas they'd prove fraudulent transfer on a preponderance of the evidence, 51%. In Nevis they must prove it beyond reasonable doubt, the criminal standard, applied to your state of mind years earlier, in a courtroom 2,000 miles from the evidence. If you funded the LLC before the dispute existed, this claim is close to unwinnable.
Wall five: the remedy ceiling. Say the creditor spends the money, posts the bond, wins anyway. The court can award a charging order and nothing else. No seizure, no foreclosure, no forced sale, no management rights. You, as manager, simply stop making distributions. The LLC keeps trading its portfolio. The charging order collects dust.
Wall six: the clock runs out. Three years after issuance, the charging order expires. It cannot be renewed. The creditor has now spent several hundred thousand dollars to hold a lien that produced nothing and then evaporated.
Rational creditors run this math before they start, which is why the walls almost never get tested one by one. What actually happens is a settlement negotiation, early, at a steep discount. The structure's real product is leverage.
One honest caveat, and it's the one that matters most: every wall above assumes you funded the LLC before the claim arose. Move assets in after a dispute exists and you've converted a planning tool into evidence. No offshore structure protects you from creditors you already have, and anyone who implies otherwise is selling you a lawsuit. We wrote more about timing in our guide to setting up an offshore trust, and the logic is identical for LLCs.
Single-member protection: where Nevis beats every US state
If you're the only member of your LLC, this section is the reason to read the whole article.
US charging order protection exists to protect the other members of an LLC from having a stranger forced into their business. Courts have followed that logic to its conclusion: when there are no other members, there's nobody to protect, so why limit the creditor? In In re Albright, a 2003 Colorado bankruptcy case, the court handed a single-member LLC's entire membership interest, management rights included, to the bankruptcy trustee, who then took the assets. Florida's Supreme Court reached a similar result outside bankruptcy in Olmstead v. FTC in 2010. Single-member LLCs in most US states are, as a practical matter, transparent to a determined creditor.
Wyoming is the state people bring up, so let's address it directly. Wyoming's statute does say the charging order is the exclusive remedy even for single-member LLCs, and on paper that's strong. Two problems. First, federal bankruptcy courts aren't bound by the spirit of a state asset protection statute; the Albright reasoning, that a bankruptcy trustee steps into all of a sole member's rights, doesn't respect Wyoming's intentions, and forcing a debtor into involuntary bankruptcy is a standard creditor play. Second, Wyoming's own Supreme Court pierced a single-member LLC's veil in Greenhunter Energy v. Western Ecosystems Technology in 2014, showing that the state's courts will look through the entity when the facts annoy them. And underneath both problems sits the structural one: a Wyoming LLC lives inside US jurisdiction. The judge who issued the judgment against you can issue orders about your Wyoming LLC.
The Nevis Ordinance grants single-member LLCs identical protection to multi-member LLCs. Same exclusive charging order, same three-year expiry, same everything, written into the statute so there's no gap for a court to reason through. And a Nevis court is the only court whose orders touch the entity. For the solo owner, that combination doesn't exist anywhere in the United States at any price.
How to form a Nevis LLC, and what it really costs
Formation is administratively easy. Doing it well is a legal drafting exercise, not a filing exercise, and that's where the price range comes from.
The process runs roughly like this:
Engage counsel or a facilitator and pick a registered agent. Every Nevis LLC needs a licensed registered agent on the island. Expect KYC: certified passport copy, proof of address, a professional reference, and source-of-funds documentation. Clean files clear in a week or two.
Draft the operating agreement. This is the product. The distribution provisions, manager powers, and transfer restrictions are what a creditor's lawyer will read first, and boilerplate from a $700 incorporation mill will have holes in exactly those places.
File articles of organization. The registered agent files with the Nevis Registrar. Formation itself takes a few days.
Open accounts and fund. The LLC opens brokerage, bank, or exchange accounts in its own name, and you retitle assets into it. Account opening is the slow step, typically 3 to 6 weeks for offshore institutions.
Here's the money, itemized. These are 2026 market figures across providers we've reviewed, ours included:
Item
First year
Annual after
Nevis government registration / renewal
$250–$500
$250–$500
Registered agent and registered office
$600–$1,200
$600–$1,200
Legal drafting (operating agreement, structuring)
$2,000–$3,500
as needed
Courier, apostilles, certified copies
$200–$400
minimal
US tax prep add-on (see below)
$500–$1,500
$500–$1,500
Typical all-in, standalone LLC
$3,000–$5,000 plus fees
$1,200–$2,000
Two pricing notes. First, if the LLC is being added underneath an existing offshore trust, the marginal cost is about $5,000 at setup and $1,000 to $2,000 a year, because the trustee and counsel are already engaged. Second, you will find $1,000 formation packages online. What you're buying there is a filing and a template. The filing is the cheap part everywhere; the template is where the protection lives. We charge a flat fee of [CitizenX flat fee — insert], published on our site, and it covers drafting through partner counsel rather than a form with your name pasted in.
Annual obligations
Nevis keeps ongoing compliance light. Each year you'll pay the government renewal and the registered agent, and confirm your KYC file is current. There's no Nevis tax return for income earned outside Nevis, no audited financials, no annual general meeting requirement, and no public filing of members or managers.
The real annual work is on the US side, which brings us to the section that matters more than any other.
US tax treatment: no savings, full disclosure
Read this part twice if you skim everything else.
A single-member Nevis LLC owned by a US person is, by default, disregarded for US tax purposes. A multi-member one is a partnership by default. Either way the income flows straight onto your US return, taxed exactly as if the LLC didn't exist. There is no deferral and no rate arbitrage. Nevis charging zero tax is irrelevant to you because the US taxes citizens on worldwide income. We keep repeating this because the internet is full of pages that muddy it.
What the LLC does change is your reporting:
FBAR (FinCEN Form 114) covers the LLC's foreign financial accounts once aggregate balances pass $10,000. Form 8938 applies above its thresholds. Depending on elections and how the entity is classified, your CPA may also need to consider Form 8832, Form 5471, or Form 8858; the right answer depends on facts we can't know from here, so ask a CPA who handles foreign entities routinely rather than taking a blog's word for it, including ours.
If the LLC sits under a foreign trust, the trust adds Forms 3520 and 3520-A every year. Penalties for missing these start at $10,000 per form per year and scale with the amounts involved. The IRS assesses them automatically for late filings; this isn't a theoretical risk, it's a form letter.
Our view: the reporting is the price of admission and it's a fair price. A fully disclosed Nevis LLC is boring and very hard to attack. A hidden one is a felony waiting for an exchange of information request. Nevis participates in CRS, and US institutions file FATCA reports. The era when offshore meant invisible ended over a decade ago, and good riddance, because the structures work fine in daylight.
Standalone LLC or LLC under a trust?
This is the decision most articles dodge, because the honest answer complicates the sales pitch.
A standalone Nevis LLC has one soft spot, and it's you. You own the membership interest, and you live in the United States. A US judge can't reach the Nevis entity, but the judge can reach you, and can order you, under threat of contempt, to exercise the rights you hold: distribute the assets, assign the interest, bring the money home. You would be legally able to comply, which means refusing looks like defiance rather than impossibility. Courts have jailed people in exactly this posture. For moderate sums and moderate risk, the standalone LLC's walls are still formidable, and plenty of clients reasonably stop there. But you should know where the seam is.
The trust layer closes that seam. In the standard structure, an offshore trust owns 100% of the Nevis LLC. You serve as the LLC's manager and run everything day to day: same signature authority, same trading, same custody of hardware wallets if you hold bitcoin. Nothing about your routine changes. But you no longer own the membership interest, the trustee does, on the other side of a jurisdiction that ignores US orders. If a court orders you to hand over assets, the trust deed's duress provisions activate: the trustee removes you as manager and declines instructions given under compulsion. Now compliance is genuinely impossible rather than merely unattractive, and impossibility is a defense to contempt.
Rough guide from our client work: under about $500,000 in exposed liquid assets, the trust's cost isn't worth it and a standalone LLC or good domestic planning fits better. Above $1 million, the trust layer is usually worth its keep. Between those lines it depends on how ugly your risk actually is. The full two-layer design gets its own article in our Cook Islands trust plus Nevis LLC guide, and the trust side specifically is covered in the Nevis trust guide and its cost breakdown.
Nevis LLC vs Cook Islands LLC
The Cook Islands, the other heavyweight asset protection jurisdiction, has its own LLC act, and it's a strong statute with similar charging order exclusivity. So which entity?
For the LLC layer, we usually say Nevis, for three practical reasons. Formation and maintenance run meaningfully cheaper. The time zone is Eastern Caribbean, one hour off New York, versus the Cook Islands sitting across the international date line, which matters more than you'd think when you're coordinating account openings. And the Nevis statute's three-year non-renewable charging order expiry is unusually explicit.
The Cook Islands earns its reputation at the trust layer, where its case law, including FTC v. Affordable Media, runs deeper than anywhere else. That's why the most common serious structure splits jurisdictions: a Cook Islands trust owning a Nevis LLC. A creditor who wants everything now has to litigate in two countries on opposite sides of the planet. If you're weighing the two islands for the trust itself, we wrote a full Nevis vs Cook Islands comparison.
Who a Nevis LLC actually fits
Good candidates look like this: US persons with liquid, portable assets (brokerage accounts, cash, bitcoin) and forward-looking liability exposure. Physicians and surgeons. Founders heading toward an exit. Real estate operators holding equity outside the properties themselves. Bitcoin holders are a special case worth naming, because self-custodied coins retitled to an LLC (with keys and multisig arrangements documented in the operating agreement) get entity protection without surrendering custody practices, and because large onshore bitcoin wealth attracts exactly the kind of opportunistic litigation this structure deters.
Poor candidates: anyone with an existing claim, judgment, or a dispute they can see coming. Anyone hoping to cut their tax bill. Anyone who can't stomach annual reporting. And anyone whose main asset is the US house they live in, since an offshore entity holding domestic real estate leaves the asset itself inside US jurisdiction anyway.
How CitizenX does it
CitizenX is a Swiss-based facilitator, not a law firm. Partner counsel drafts the operating agreement, a licensed Nevis registered agent handles the filings, and if a trust sits above the LLC, a licensed Nevis or Cook Islands trustee administers it. Our job is running the process end to end and publishing the price before you talk to anyone, which the offshore industry treats as a radical act.
One thing we can do that trust companies can't: our core business is citizenship by investment, and we handle St. Kitts and Nevis citizenship directly. Nevis is half of that federation. A client who wants both a second passport and a Nevis structure goes through KYC and source-of-funds verification once, and the same due diligence file serves both applications. That saves roughly two months of duplicated document work, and we don't know of another provider positioned to offer it.
Timeline for a standalone LLC: about 2 to 4 weeks to a formed entity, plus 3 to 6 weeks for offshore account opening. With a trust above it, plan on 4 to 8 weeks total, and read the formation walkthrough so you know which steps actually take the time.
Frequently asked questions
Is a Nevis LLC legal for US citizens?
Yes, completely. US persons can own foreign entities without restriction. What US law requires is disclosure: FBAR for the LLC's accounts over $10,000 aggregate, Form 8938 above its thresholds, and possibly entity filings like Form 8832, 5471, or 8858 depending on classification. Ask a CPA who does international work. Owning it is legal; hiding it is not.
How much does a Nevis LLC cost?
$3,000 to $5,000 in legal and structuring costs for the first year, plus government and agent fees, then $1,200 to $2,000 a year after. Added under an existing offshore trust, figure roughly $5,000 at setup and $1,000 to $2,000 a year. Sub-$1,000 online packages exist but buy you a filing and a template, not a drafted structure.
Does a Nevis LLC reduce US taxes?
No. It is tax-neutral: disregarded or pass-through for US purposes, with all income landing on your US return as before. Its value is asset protection and nothing else. Treat any claim otherwise as a red flag about the person making it.
What is the charging order protection in Nevis?
A creditor of a member gets one remedy, a charging order, which is a lien on distributions only. It carries no ownership, voting, or management rights, cannot force a distribution, cannot be foreclosed, and expires after three years with no renewal. If the manager never distributes, the creditor collects nothing.
Are single-member Nevis LLCs protected?
Yes, identically to multi-member ones, by explicit statute. This is the biggest gap between Nevis and US states, where courts (In re Albright, Olmstead v. FTC) have stripped charging order protection from single-member LLCs, and where even Wyoming's strong statute has been undercut in bankruptcy and veil-piercing contexts.
Can a creditor with a US judgment take my Nevis LLC?
Not with the judgment itself, which Nevis courts won't recognize. They'd need to sue afresh in Nevis, post a bond of roughly $100,000, and prove any fraudulent transfer beyond reasonable doubt. Winning all that still yields only a charging order. What a US court can do is pressure you personally over rights you hold directly, which is the argument for adding a trust layer above the LLC.
Should I get a standalone Nevis LLC or put it under a trust?
Depends on the stakes. Below roughly $500,000 exposed, the standalone LLC or domestic planning is usually the sensible buy. Above $1 million, the trust layer earns its cost by making a duress response possible: the trustee can remove you as manager, so a US court can't coerce what you can't do. Between the two, it turns on your actual risk.
How long does formation take?
The entity itself forms in days once KYC clears. Realistic end to end: 2 to 4 weeks for a standalone LLC, plus 3 to 6 weeks for offshore account opening, and 4 to 8 weeks total if a trust is being formed above it.
This article is general information, not legal or tax advice. CitizenX is a facilitator working with licensed registered agents, trustees, and independent partner counsel; we are not a law firm and do not provide legal or tax opinions. Speak with qualified counsel and a US tax professional before forming any foreign entity.
