Nevis trust cost: what you'll actually pay in 2026
Nevis trust cost: what you'll actually pay in 2026
A Nevis trust costs $15,000 to $22,000 in year one and $5,000 to $6,000 a year after. Full line-item breakdown, hidden costs, and what drives quotes up.
A Nevis trust costs $15,000 to $22,000 all-in for the first year, then $5,000 to $6,000 a year to maintain. Trust only, without an LLC, sits at the bottom of that range; the standard trust-plus-LLC structure sits at the top. Add $1,500 to $3,000 a year for US tax preparation.
That's the answer. The rest of this article is the line items behind it, because the offshore industry treats pricing like a state secret and we find that ridiculous.
Why can't you find Nevis trust prices anywhere?
Try it. Search the top ten results for "nevis trust" and count how many publish a number. Most funnel you into a "free consultation," which is a sales call where the fee gets calibrated to your net worth. One prospective client told us he received quotes of $18,000 and $45,000 for functionally identical structures in the same week, from firms drawing on the same small pool of licensed Nevis trustees.
The information asymmetry is the business model. There are maybe a dozen trustees on the island anyone serious uses, their fee schedules are stable, and government charges are set by statute. The costs are knowable. So here they are.
Stack the essentials and you land at $15,000 to $22,000 in year one. Now each line, and why it costs what it costs.
Drafting and structuring: $10,000 to $15,000
The largest line, and the one where quality varies most. US asset protection attorneys typically charge around $15,000 for a standalone trust and around $20,000 for trust plus LLC, drafting included. This buys the deed itself: duress provisions, a flee clause, distribution mechanics, trustee succession. A deed is not a form. When a judge is questioning whether your duress clause creates genuine impossibility, the drafting is the entire ballgame, and this is the worst place in the structure to save money.
CitizenX runs drafting through partner counsel rather than employing attorneys in-house, and our flat fee (below) covers it.
The trustee: about $6,000 in year one, then $3,500 to $5,000
Every Nevis international exempt trust must have a licensed Nevis trustee. First-year fees run around $6,000, which pays for onboarding due diligence and acceptance of the trusteeship; renewals drop to $3,500 to $5,000. Some trustees bill extra for duress events, trust migrations, or heavy distribution activity, so read the fee schedule before signing, not after.
Resist the urge to shop this line down. The trustee is the person who must refuse a US court's demands on your behalf someday. You want one with professional indemnity insurance and an actual compliance department, and those cost money.
Government fees: $500 to $1,000, then $300 to $500 a year
Registration under the Nevis International Exempt Trust Ordinance costs $500 to $1,000 initially, with annual renewals of $300 to $500. The registry is private, so the fee buys legal existence without public disclosure of settlor or beneficiaries. This is the one line item nobody can mark up much, though bundled quotes sometimes try.
The Nevis LLC: roughly $5,000 to add, $1,000 a year
Most clients add a Nevis LLC under the trust, and for good reason: you manage the LLC and keep signature authority over accounts day to day, while the trustee steps in only under duress. We explain the mechanics in the Nevis trust guide. Formation adds about $5,000 and roughly $1,000 a year in registered agent and renewal fees.
Is it worth $5,000? If you'll actively manage brokerage accounts or bitcoin custody, yes, without much debate. If the trust will passively hold a single account you rarely touch, a well-drafted trust alone can do the job and saves you the money.
Trust only vs trust plus LLC
Trust only
Trust + Nevis LLC
First-year total
$15,000–$17,000
$20,000–$22,000
Ongoing annual
~$5,000
~$6,000
Day-to-day control
Trustee holds assets
You manage the LLC
Best for
Passive holdings
Active accounts, bitcoin
A worked example: what five years actually costs
Ranges are abstract, so here's a composite drawn from real client profiles. A California founder with $1.5 million to protect: $1.1 million in a brokerage account and $400,000 in bitcoin. Standard structure, trust plus LLC, collaborative custody for the coins.
Year one:
Structuring, drafting, and LLC formation, bundled: $14,500
Trustee onboarding and first-year fee: $6,000
Government registration, trust and LLC together: $1,000
Collaborative custody setup for the bitcoin: $600
CPA for the first Forms 3520 and 3520-A cycle: $2,000
That's $24,100 in year one, about 1.6% of the assets being protected. Steep-sounding until you price the alternative; the discovery phase alone of a contested US commercial lawsuit routinely burns through more.
Years two through five, each year:
Trustee renewal: $4,000
Government renewals: $400
LLC registered agent: $1,000
Bitcoin custody at 0.35% of $400,000: $1,400
CPA: $2,000
Call it $8,800 a year. The five-year total lands near $59,300, which averages out to roughly 0.8% of the protected pool annually. Whether that's expensive depends entirely on your litigation exposure. For a surgeon, a developer with personal guarantees, or anyone whose net worth shows up in search results, we'd argue it's cheap. For someone with no realistic adversaries, it may be money better left invested. Run your own version of this table honestly before you commit.
When the money is actually due
Nobody pays the full first-year figure on day one, or at least nobody should. A sensible payment sequence tracks the formation milestones: a deposit or engagement fee at the start, the trustee's invoice once due diligence clears and they accept the trusteeship, government fees at registration, and the CPA the following spring when the first filings come due. Be wary of any provider who wants the entire amount wired before the trustee's compliance team has looked at your file. If your source-of-funds documentation doesn't clear, you've paid in full for a structure that will never exist. We run it the other way, which is covered below.
What drives quotes up
If you're quoted well above $22,000, one of these is usually the reason. Some are legitimate. One is not.
Complex assets cost more. Business interests spread across several jurisdictions add real drafting and coordination hours, and so does bitcoin that needs a multisig custody design. A $30,000 quote for a structure holding three operating companies and a validator business can be honest work.
Multiple layers cost more. Some plans layer a Nevis trust over LLCs in two or three jurisdictions. Occasionally justified, frequently overengineered. Ask what specific creditor scenario the extra layer defeats that the standard structure doesn't. Silence or hand-waving is your answer.
Expedited work costs more. Compressing the normal 4-to-8-week timeline means rush fees from trustee and counsel. Fair enough, though if you're rushing because a lawsuit is brewing, stop: funding a trust with a claim on the horizon is a fraudulent transfer problem no amount of fees fixes.
Net-worth pricing costs more and is nonsense. Some firms scale fees to your wealth, charging a $20 million client double for the same documents. There is no version of that which isn't just extracting surplus from clients who don't know the market rate. It's the main reason we publish our fee.
Nevis vs Cook Islands: the cost comparison
The Cook Islands is the other serious jurisdiction, and it charges a premium. Nevis runs roughly 30 to 40% cheaper on both setup and maintenance.
Nevis
Cook Islands
Setup, all-in
$15,000–$22,000
$15,000–$35,000
Annual maintenance
$5,000–$6,000
$5,000–$10,000
10-year total (midpoints)
~$73,000
~$100,000
Is the Cook Islands premium ever worth paying? Sometimes. It has three decades of litigation history, including trusts that survived attacks by US federal agencies, and if your realistic adversary is the government or a nine-figure plaintiff, that record matters. For ordinary litigation risk, Nevis gives you comparable statutory protection plus its distinctive weapon, the roughly $100,000 bond a creditor must post with the Nevis court just to file suit against trust property, at two thirds the lifetime price. The full feature comparison is in our Cook Islands trust guide.
Run the 10-year math before deciding. A $4,000 annual difference is $40,000 over a decade, real money even at this asset level.
The hidden costs nobody quotes
Setup quotes cover setup. Owning the structure involves recurring costs that surprise people in year two.
US tax preparation, $1,500 to $3,000 every year. A Nevis trust settled by a US person is a grantor trust, tax neutral but heavily reported: Form 3520, Form 3520-A, FBAR, and often Form 8938. Penalties for missed forms start at $10,000 per form per year. You need a CPA who has actually filed a 3520-A before, and that costs more than a 1040 preparer. Budget it from day one, because this line item is not optional and skipping it is far more expensive than paying it.
A professional protector, $1,500 to $2,500 a year if you appoint one. The protector can veto trustee decisions or replace the trustee. A trusted individual can serve without charge; a professional protector bills annually. Optional, and honestly, plenty of well-built structures do without one.
Offshore account opening, $0 to $2,000. Some banks and brokerages charge onboarding fees for entity accounts, and compliance review of a trust-owned LLC takes real staff time somewhere. Facilitators sometimes bill separately for introductions too, so ask whether account opening support is included in any quote you get.
Bitcoin custody, variable. Collaborative custody arrangements for trust-held bitcoin typically run 0.3 to 0.5% of assets annually with the established providers, on top of trust costs. Details in our guide to offshore trusts for bitcoin.
Amendments, a few hundred to a few thousand per event. Deeds get amended: beneficiaries change, assets get added or restructured. Trustees and counsel bill for each event. Not huge, but a decade of ownership will include a few.
The $5,000 Nevis trust, and why it's worth about that
Search long enough and you'll find offshore incorporation mills offering Nevis trust packages for $3,000 to $7,000. We'll tell you exactly what you're buying: a template deed with your name inserted and, often, a trustee arrangement that exists mostly on paper. Structuring advice is not part of the deal.
The problem shows up years later, at the worst possible moment. A judgment creditor's attorney reads the deed and finds boilerplate duress language that doesn't create genuine impossibility, or discovers the settlor kept powers a US judge reads as control. The impossibility defense collapses, and the judge treats the offshore structure as the sham it was. In the reported cases where offshore trusts have failed their settlors, bad facts and bad drafting did the damage, and cut-rate formation reliably produces both. You'd be better off keeping the $5,000 than spending it on a structure that fails on contact with a courtroom.
A real trust involves counsel who interrogates your asset picture and a trustee whose compliance department pushes back on your paperwork. The documents come out fitted to your situation because someone actually looked at it. That process has a floor, and the floor is around $15,000. Below it, something on the list above is missing.
What CitizenX charges
Our fee is [CitizenX flat fee — insert], flat and published, for the standard Nevis trust plus LLC structure. It covers structuring and drafting through partner counsel, trustee selection and onboarding with a licensed Nevis trustee, LLC formation, government registration, and coordination of offshore account opening. Government fees and ongoing trustee renewals are passed through at cost, and we show you those schedules before you engage. US tax prep stays with your CPA, though we'll introduce you to firms that handle foreign trust filings routinely.
We run KYC before we take the full fee, so nobody pays for a structure they won't clear. And because CitizenX also operates St. Kitts and Nevis citizenship by investment, clients who want a second passport alongside their trust can do both in the same jurisdiction with one KYC file, which cuts months of duplicated due diligence and some real cost out of doing the two separately. Nobody else offers that combination.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a Nevis trust cost per year after setup?
$5,000 to $6,000 for the structure itself: trustee renewal of $3,500 to $5,000, government renewal of $300 to $500, and about $1,000 for the LLC if you have one. Add $1,500 to $3,000 for US tax preparation, which brings the realistic total to $6,500 to $9,000.
Why do Nevis trust quotes vary so much between firms?
Because most firms don't publish prices, so each quote is negotiated from scratch, and some price against your net worth rather than the work. Underlying costs are fairly uniform: trustee fees and government charges barely move between providers, and drafting hours are predictable for a standard structure. Get any quote itemized; the padding tends to hide in vague "structuring" or "consulting" lines.
Is a Nevis trust cheaper than a Cook Islands trust?
Yes, by roughly 30 to 40%. Nevis runs $15,000 to $22,000 to set up against $15,000 to $35,000 for the Cook Islands, and $5,000 to $6,000 a year against $5,000 to $10,000. Over ten years the gap is typically $25,000 or more.
What does the Nevis government charge to register a trust?
$500 to $1,000 for initial registration under the International Exempt Trust Ordinance, then $300 to $500 a year to renew. The register is private, so registration does not expose the settlor or beneficiaries publicly.
How much does adding a Nevis LLC cost?
About $5,000 at formation and roughly $1,000 a year after. Most clients consider it money well spent, since the LLC is what lets you keep day-to-day signature authority over accounts while the trust owns the structure above you.
Are cheap online Nevis trust packages safe to use?
We wouldn't touch them. A $5,000 package buys template documents without the structuring, drafting quality, or trustee substance that make the protection hold up. Structures like that tend to fail exactly when tested, which means the money was wasted twice: once on the package, once on the judgment.
How much does a US CPA charge for foreign trust tax forms?
$1,500 to $3,000 a year for Forms 3520 and 3520-A plus FBAR and Form 8938 where required. Pay it without grumbling: penalties for a missed form start at $10,000 per form per year, so the preparation fee is cheap insurance.
This article is general information, not legal or tax advice. CitizenX is a facilitator working with licensed Nevis trustees and independent partner counsel; we are not a law firm. Confirm current fees and your reporting obligations with qualified counsel and a US tax professional.
