How Much Does Philippine Company Registration Cost? Four Buckets, Four Payees, and Why No One Quotes a Flat Price

How much does it cost to register a company in the Philippines? Split the lump sum into four buckets first

Short answer: there is no universal figure, and the only honest answer is that the money splits into four buckets — statutory government fees, third-party professional services, the agency service fee, and the pre-opening costs that actually let you trade. Anyone who compresses those four into one number has quietly dropped a variable, and you will meet that variable later.

• Bucket 1 — government and statutory fees. The payee is a government office, the amount follows a published schedule, and there is an official receipt issued in your company name. Nobody discounts this bucket.
• Bucket 2 — third-party professional services. Corporate secretary and treasurer arrangements, the registered address, notarisation and consular authentication of documents executed abroad, and translation. These are market prices, and this is the one bucket that is genuinely comparable between providers.
• Bucket 3 — agency service fee. What you pay somebody to draft the documents, file them, queue at the window and chase deficiencies. It should be priced per deliverable stage, never as one opaque figure.
• Bucket 4 — pre-opening costs. Corporate bank account, company seal, books of accounts, and the printing authority for official receipts and invoices. Skip these and the company exists on paper but cannot legally bill anyone.

Three variables explain why a universal price cannot exist, and all three sit on your side rather than the provider's. Entity form comes first: a domestic stock corporation, a One Person Corporation, a branch of a foreign company and a representative office do not travel the same registration path at all, and the document volume differs sharply. Putting them in one price range is wrong before the arithmetic even starts. Foreign versus domestic equity comes second: foreign shareholding triggers additional capital and source-of-funds evidence, and it forces a sector eligibility check that rewrites everything downstream. Industry comes third: if your line of business needs a regulator's clearance first, that leg is governed by the regulator's own rules, not by whoever is quoting you.

So when a quote arrives without those three facts established, there are only two possibilities. Either it covers one bucket only — usually the service fee, with government fees still coming out of your own pocket — or it will return later as a "supplementary documents" or "expedite" charge. One question exposes this: which of the four buckets does this number include, and which deliverable does it stop at? For the end-to-end sequence see 成立菲律宾公司全攻略; for how long each leg runs see 菲律宾公司注册要多久. Actual amounts follow each authority's current published schedule.

Entity form, foreign equity and industry decide the price before anyone quotes you. Get a four-bucket breakdown built around your actual case →

Which fees does the government actually collect, and what are they calculated on?

Short answer: statutory fees sit on four separate lines — SEC entity registration, BIR tax registration, the Barangay and city hall permit chain, and employer registration with the three social agencies. What they share is that they follow published rules, produce an official receipt, and cannot be discounted by anybody.

• The SEC line. Fees at the entity registration stage are commonly tied to the capital figure you declare, which means the number you write on the form feeds back into what you pay. There are also name reservation and filing-type charges for the articles and accompanying forms. The specific items and computation follow the SEC's current published fee schedule.
• The BIR line. Tax registration itself, charges connected to the books of accounts and the authority to print receipts, and documentary stamp tax on taxable instruments such as your lease. Stamp tax is computed on the amount stated in the document, so how much rent you commit to, and for how many years, moves this line directly.
• The local government line. This is the most variable of the four. Local business taxes and permit charges are legislated by each city or municipality under its own revenue code, and the computation base commonly references the previous year's gross receipts, floor area and industry classification. The same company registered in a different city produces an entirely different number here.
• The social agencies line. Employer registration itself and the ongoing employer share computed on payroll are two different things. The first is a one-off registration action; the second is a recurring monthly cost that begins when you hire. Do not fold the second into "registration cost" or you will badly underestimate your first-year cash requirement.

The most useful working rule for this bucket: if the government collected it, there is a government-issued official receipt in your company's name. If a provider offers to make this part cheaper, there are only three explanations — an item has been left out of the quote, the fee has been folded into the service line with a margin on top, or the filing did not go through a proper window. The third is the dangerous one, because the saving is repaid later by doing the whole thing again. Which office handles each line, and how territory is determined, is covered in 菲律宾公司注册在哪办; filing at the wrong office generates transfer or refiling costs directly. What we cover across the whole setup chain, and where each stage is delivered, is set out in our company setup service.

What the third-party professional bucket actually buys: secretary, address, authentication and translation

Short answer: this is the one bucket you can genuinely shop around on, because it is priced by the market rather than by statute — but before comparing, ask whether each item is billed per year or per instance, and what year two costs. Four items usually sit here.

• Corporate secretary, treasurer and similar statutory roles. Certain officer positions in a Philippine corporation carry residency or nationality-linked requirements, so foreign shareholders commonly fill them through an outsourced arrangement. These are typically billed annually and they recur every year — they are not a one-off registration item. Always ask for the year-two renewal price; cheap packages frequently quote year one only.
• The registered address. A physical lease, a serviced office and a shared or virtual address sit at very different price points, but price is not what decides usability. What decides it is whether the address clears the city hall and fire inspection stage, and whether the landlord will issue the consent documents you need. The boundaries of a virtual address are set out in 菲律宾注册地址与虚拟办公室 — confirm usability first, negotiate price second. Reversing that order is how people pay twice.
• Notarisation and authentication of documents executed abroad. When shareholders or directors sign outside the Philippines, passports, board resolutions and powers of attorney generally need notarisation in the country of signing, followed by consular legalisation or an apostille, in the form the receiving authority requires. This money is spent in your own country, not in the Philippines, so it almost never appears on a Philippine provider's quote — yet it is a real cost, and getting the format wrong means doing it over. Ask explicitly which form of authentication they need.
• Translation. Non-English documents usually need an English translation, and some receiving offices want a translator's declaration or notarisation. Page count drives the cost.

The common mistake is assuming these belong inside the agency fee. They do not — they are independent third-party services. An agency can arrange them for you, but arranging means a layer in between. If you want to remove that layer, contract the providers directly; if you want convenience, let the agency bundle them, but require the quote to list each item separately and state whether it is a pass-through advance or a bundled price. Check what documents you personally must supply first in 成立菲律宾公司需要什么条件 — until you know that, you cannot size this bucket at all.

Authentication done in the wrong form has to be redone from scratch — the most commonly missed cost of all. Confirm which authenticated documents your case needs →

How do you separate the agency fee from government fees, and why is the cheap quote cheap?

Short answer: there is exactly one test — is there a government-issued official receipt in your company's name? If yes, it is a statutory fee and the agency merely advanced it. If the only paper is the agency's own invoice, it is a service fee. Put that test into the contract and require the quote to carry two separate lines: one for advanced government fees (settled against official receipts, with any balance returned), and one for the service fee. A quote that merges them into a single figure makes it permanently impossible to tell whether a margin was added, or to reconcile when the engagement ends.

The service fee should be priced by stage, because company registration is not one task but a chain of separately deliverable ones: name reservation and drafting of the incorporation documents; SEC filing through to the certificate; BIR tax registration, books of accounts and the authority to print; the Barangay and city hall permit chain; and employer registration with the social agencies. Each stage can be priced and accepted on its own. A competent quote lets you see which stage the price stops at, rather than saying "full company registration package" and leaving the boundary undefined.

Why the cheap quote is cheap is usually one or more of the following. None of them is an efficiency advantage; each moves cost to a place you pay later:

• Short stage coverage. Delivery ends at the SEC certificate, and everything after it is renegotiated. You thought you were buying a company that can operate; you bought stage one.
• A bundled shared address. Usable at registration, but it stalls at city hall or fire inspection, or the renewal price in year two bears no relation to year one.
• Original documents held by the provider. Described as safekeeping, it becomes leverage when you change providers. The contract must state when and in what form the originals return to you.
• Signing under someone else's credentials, or promising that filings will never be returned for deficiency. That kind of assurance is itself a warning sign — no one can deliver that outcome. Treat it as a reason to walk.

How to vet the provider itself, and the five questions to ask before signing, are already covered in 菲律宾公司注册代办怎么选？费用构成、避坑五问 and are not repeated here; whether you should file yourself at all is answered by the decision table in 菲律宾 SEC 公司注册自己办还是找代办. For disputes over contracts or custody of original documents, consult a licensed lawyer; this article is not legal advice.

Does the paid-up capital really have to be deposited, and will there be more costs after registration?

Short answer: paid-up capital is not a cost — it is your own money, and it remains a company asset once it is in the company account. But it does feed the fee base for capital-linked charges, so it is not a number you can simply inflate for comfort. Whether it must actually be paid in, and whether a bank certification is required, depends on entity form, foreign equity level and industry; thresholds and evidence are set out in 菲律宾公司注册资本要求. What matters for cost is the trade-off: declare a higher figure and the capital-linked fees rise with it; declare too low and you may fail an industry or foreign-equity threshold, and it can affect later scrutiny of employment-visa matters. It is a number to compute, not to guess.

Bucket four, the pre-opening costs, is the one most often omitted wholesale, because it is neither collected by government nor included in most agencies' definition of "registration":

• Corporate bank account. Account opening has its own conditions and document list, and signatories are generally expected to appear in person for identity verification. Where a foreign shareholder is remitting funds, keep the remittance advice and the reference narration — you will need them later to evidence that capital arrived.
• Company seal. Inexpensive to produce, but many documents cannot be executed without it.
• Books of accounts. These must be prepared in the prescribed set and registered before use.
• Authority to print receipts and invoices. You obtain the authority first, then order from a compliant printer. Only when compliant receipts are in hand can you legally bill and collect. Many founders discover at exactly this point that the company is "registered" but cannot issue a single valid receipt.
• Other opening requirements. Depending on industry, fit-out, equipment or systems spending may also be required — beyond registration, but inside the same cash requirement.

Will there be more money afterwards? Yes, but of a different character. Registration is one-off; what recurs annually is maintenance — annual filings and financial statements, permit renewals, corporate secretary and registered address renewals, accounting services. That is a separate ledger, set out in full in 菲律宾公司维持费用全解. This article covers the one-off setup only. Mixing the two ledgers is how founders end up seriously short of cash in year one, when both happen at once.

Setup costs and annual maintenance are two ledgers, and year one triggers both. Have an adviser size your first-year cash requirement →

How do you compare two quotes fairly? Three variables and one request-for-quote checklist

Short answer: two quotes usually cannot be compared directly, and nine times out of ten the reason is scope definition rather than price level. Normalise the scope and the gap starts to mean something. First, the three variables that genuinely move the price:

• Variable one — entity form. A stock corporation, a One Person Corporation, a branch and a representative office follow different registration paths with different document volumes. And if what you actually need is a sole proprietorship, that runs through a different agency under different rules — see 菲律宾 DTI 注册个体户全解 — making the cost structures non-comparable in principle.
• Variable two — foreign or domestic equity. Foreign shareholding must first clear sector eligibility; see 菲律宾外资持股限制怎么看. That answer determines whether you can hold full ownership, whether local shareholders are required, and how the capital threshold is set — which in turn determines the workload of every later stage. Comparing quotes before this is settled means comparing two different products.
• Variable three — whether a prior licence is required. In regulated lines of business, the registration track is pulled along by the licensing track, and both time and cost are set by the regulator's rules.

Send the following checklist to every provider you are talking to, and the quotes that come back will finally sit on one ruler:

• Break the quote into the four buckets: government fees, third-party professional services, service fee, pre-opening costs. Government fees on their own line, marked "advanced and settled against official receipts, balance returned".
• List deliverables down to the certificate level: which certificates, electronic or hard original, when delivered, and who holds the originals.
• State which stage the price stops at: entity registration only, or through to being able to invoice and lawfully open.
• Identify every item that is billed separately: authentication, translation, registered address, corporate secretary, year-two renewals.
• Confirm whether the registered address is included, for how many years, at what renewal basis, and whether it clears city hall and fire inspection.
• State whether refiling after a deficiency notice is charged again, per instance or included.
• Set payment milestones, each tied to a specific deliverable that you sign off on.
• Confirm the contracting entity and the receiving bank account are in the same company name. That one is not a pricing question; it is a safety question.

Only once two quotes come back in the same format are you actually comparing prices; before that you are only comparing who is willing to look cheapest. The honest closing note: this article explains structure and computation rules, not figures. Your real number depends on entity form, shareholding, industry and which city you register in — tell our consultants those four things and let them compute it for your case. Where each filing is made is covered in 菲律宾公司注册在哪办, and our own scope and deliverables are listed on the company setup page.

Send one identical checklist to two providers and the returned quotes finally become comparable. Send us your shareholding and industry for an itemised four-bucket breakdown →