Aircraft LLC in Delaware (2026): Zero Sales Tax, Real Rules

Delaware is where American business entities go to live, and aircraft brokers have noticed: it’s one of only five states with no general sales tax, it runs no state aircraft registry, and its counties are legally barred from taxing personal property — so a based aircraft never draws an annual ad-valorem bill. On paper, Delaware taxes an airplane at almost exactly zero. That makes “buy the plane in a Delaware LLC” one of the most-marketed structures in general aviation — and, for owners who hangar the plane in another state, one of the most misunderstood. The entity is genuinely useful. It just doesn’t do the one thing the sales pitch implies.

This guide is general information, not legal or tax advice. Aircraft ownership sits where FAA regulation, state tax, and insurance overlap; an aviation attorney and a CPA who knows aircraft are worth every dollar before you close.

Key takeaways

Delaware has no general sales or use tax — an aircraft purchased or delivered in Delaware owes $0 Delaware tax at closing, with no exemption paperwork to file.
Delaware requires no state aircraft registration (“Currently, Delaware has no law requiring aircraft be registered with the State” — DelDOT), and 9 Del. C. § 8103 bars its counties from taxing personal property, so there’s no annual property tax on a based aircraft.
The catch is jurisdictional: use tax follows the hangar. A Delaware LLC owning a plane based in another state owes that state’s use tax exactly as a local owner would.
Delaware’s one quiet aircraft tax: leases of property used within Delaware carry a 1.9914% lessee use tax on rent, plus lessor license and gross-receipts obligations — relevant if your structure dry-leases a Delaware-based plane.
The FAA’s citizenship rules and the flight department company trap apply to a Delaware LLC exactly as anywhere else — the state of formation changes neither.
A Delaware LLC costs $110 to form and a flat $400 franchise tax every June 1; Wyoming does the same holding job at $100 up front and a $60 minimum annual license tax.

What Delaware actually charges on an aircraft: almost nothing

Most aircraft-state guides on this site are a tour of exemptions — Texas’s fly-away paperwork, California’s 12-month test. Delaware’s is short because there’s nearly nothing to exempt your way out of:

Sales/use tax at purchase: $0; no general sales tax
Annual property tax: $0; personal property untaxable
State registration fee: $0; no state registry
Jet fuel tax: $0; avgas 23¢/gal, refundable

No sales or use tax. Delaware has no general sales tax on anything, aircraft included. DelDOT’s Office of Aeronautics puts it in one line: “Delaware has no sales tax” — while warning, correctly, that aircraft bought elsewhere or brought into Delaware “may be subject to the taxes of that jurisdiction.” More on that warning below, because it’s the whole story.
No state aircraft registration. Unlike states with their own registries and annual fees, Delaware has “no law requiring aircraft be registered with the State” — the FAA’s Civil Aviation Registry is the only registration a Delaware-based aircraft carries.
No personal property tax — by statute. Delaware’s counties tax real estate only. 9 Del. C. § 8103 is unambiguous: “No county or other political subdivision of the State shall levy, assess or collect any tax upon personal property, whether tangible or intangible.” Compare that to California, where the county assessor values the plane every January and bills roughly 1%+ of it, forever.
Fuel: Delaware’s 23¢/gal gasoline tax applies to avgas — but DelDOT maintains a refund mechanism: save your fuel receipts and apply for the tax back. Jet fuel is excluded from the gasoline tax entirely (“This includes Av Gas (but not Jet Fuel)” — DelDOT).

For a plane that genuinely lives at Wilmington (ILG) or Delaware Coastal (GED), that combination — zero at purchase, zero per year, zero to register — makes Delaware one of the cheapest states in the country to base an aircraft. That part of the pitch is simply true.

The myth to clear first: Delaware doesn’t erase your hangar state’s tax

Here’s the version of the pitch that fails audits: form a Delaware LLC, close the purchase through it, pay no sales tax — done. It works only if you stop reading before the use-tax chapter.

Sales tax follows the closing; use tax follows the hangar. Nearly every sales-tax state imposes a complementary use tax on property brought in and based there, precisely so its residents can’t shop their purchases to no-tax states. Where the LLC was formed never enters the analysis — the states look through the entity to where the aircraft actually lives. A Delaware LLC hangaring a Cirrus in Texas owes Texas’s 6.25%-plus-local use tax like any local owner; hangar it in California and the 12-month test and annual property tax apply, Delaware paperwork notwithstanding.

What Delaware’s zero rate does legitimately give an out-of-state buyer is a clean delivery situs. Closings are routinely staged in no-tax states so that no sales tax attaches at the moment of transfer — take delivery on a Delaware ramp and Delaware charges nothing, with no exemption certificate or fly-away deadline to manage, because there’s no tax to be exempt from. Your home state’s use tax then applies (usually with credit for tax lawfully paid elsewhere — here, none) when the plane goes home. Delivery planning buys time, optionality, and the avoidance of a second state’s tax at closing; it does not repeal the tax where you hangar. The full state-by-state picture is in the aircraft sales tax guide.

The one Delaware aircraft tax nobody mentions: the lease tax

Delaware does have a tax that can reach aircraft — and since LLC structures often involve a dry lease (the LLC leasing the plane to its own members or a flight school), it’s worth knowing before you paper one for a Delaware-based aircraft.

Under 30 Del. C. ch. 43, leases of tangible personal property used within Delaware carry a lessee use tax of 1.9914% of the rent, collected and remitted by the lessor (the statute’s base rate is 1.92%; 1.9914% is the rate the Division of Revenue administers). The lessor side has obligations too: a Delaware business license ($75 for the first location, renewed annually) and a 0.2987% gross receipts tax on rental income above a $300,000 quarterly exclusion. The chapter’s exemption list — household goods, medical equipment, government lessees, agricultural equipment — contains no aircraft carve-out.

Scale check: the tax is real but small. On $60,000 a year of dry-lease rent for a Delaware-based plane, the lessee use tax is about $1,195 — a rounding error next to what a sales-tax state would have charged at purchase, but a compliance obligation all the same.

What the Delaware LLC genuinely buys an aircraft owner

Strip out the tax myth and a real case remains. Delaware’s advantages for an aircraft-holding entity are the same ones that made it the default for holding companies generally:

Liability separation. The core reason any aircraft goes in an LLC: the plane — a large, mobile, occasionally crashed asset — sits in its own entity, separated from your house and business. That works from any state; Delaware’s contribution is a deep, predictable body of entity law behind it.
Privacy. Delaware’s Certificate of Formation lists the LLC’s name and registered agent — not the members. Since the FAA registry is public and searchable by N-number, the entity name is what the world sees. (The state layer is only half the puzzle — the FAA’s own LLC filing requirements, covered below, put some ownership information in the registry file.)
Co-ownership mechanics. Delaware gives near-total freedom of contract in operating agreements and the Court of Chancery behind them — useful when three partners share a TBM and want scheduling, buyout, and cost-sharing terms that will be enforced as written. Aviation lenders and escrow agents see Delaware entities every day, so nobody on the closing call is reading your state’s LLC act for the first time.
Series LLCs exist here. Delaware pioneered the series structure — 6 Del. C. § 18-215 and § 18-218 — occasionally floated for multi-aircraft fleets (one series per airframe). Whether the FAA registry will register an aircraft in the name of a series, as opposed to the parent LLC, is a specialist question with real registry-eligibility stakes — treat it as aviation-attorney territory, not a DIY structure.

Delaware vs. Wyoming as the holding state

If the plane is based in Delaware, a Delaware LLC is the obvious answer. If the plane is based anywhere else, the entity is a pure holding vehicle and the comparison is about cost, privacy, and law — remembering that neither choice changes the hangar state’s tax, and an LLC that “does business” where the plane is based may owe a foreign-qualification filing there on top:

Holding-state question	Delaware LLC	Wyoming LLC
Formation fee	$110 Certificate of Formation	$100 Articles of Organization
Annual state cost	$400 flat franchise tax, due June 1 (no annual report)	$60 minimum license tax with the annual report
Late penalty	$200 + 1.5%/month interest	Administrative dissolution ~60 days after a missed report
Members on the public record	No	No
Entity case law	Court of Chancery — the deepest bench in entity law	Thinner precedent; modern, owner-friendly statute
Best fit	Multi-partner ownership, lender familiarity, planes based in DE	Cost-sensitive single-owner holding structures
Effect on your hangar state’s use tax	None	None

Over ten years the annual-cost line alone is $4,000 (DE) vs. $600 (WY) in state fees — real money for a single-owner holding LLC, trivial next to Chancery-grade certainty for a three-partner jet. The full Delaware LLC guide and the Wyoming vs. Delaware comparison go deeper on that trade.

FAA registration: Delaware changes nothing

The FAA registers aircraft under 14 CFR Part 47, and its citizenship test follows the people, not the state of formation. An LLC qualifies as a U.S. citizen only if its president and at least two-thirds of its managing officers are U.S. citizens, the entity is under the actual control of U.S. citizens, and U.S. citizens own or control at least 75% of the voting interest. A Delaware LLC with a non-citizen member or manager has exactly the same problem it would have as a Texas LLC — which is why non-citizen owners end up in trust structures under Part 47 with an aviation attorney, not in a different state’s LLC.

When an LLC owns the plane, the registry also wants paper: alongside the AC Form 8050-1 application, either a copy of the organizing document naming every member, the management structure, and each person’s citizenship — or a signed written representation covering the same facts and explaining how the company qualifies as a U.S. citizen (see the FAA’s LLC information sheet). Two practical notes: get the member and manager list right in the operating agreement at formation, and know that this filing puts more ownership detail in the FAA’s public file than Delaware’s own Certificate of Formation ever discloses.

The flight department company trap — still the biggest risk

No state’s paperwork fixes this one, so it goes in every aircraft guide we write. When an LLC’s only business is owning and operating an aircraft for its own members, the FAA views that entity’s business as transportation by air — and under 14 CFR 119.1 and the Chief Counsel’s long-standing interpretations, money flowing to it for flights — even cost reimbursements from its own members — can count as compensation. Compensation plus carriage equals a commercial operation requiring a certificate (think Part 135) the LLC doesn’t hold.

So: should your aircraft LLC be a Delaware LLC?

Separate the two questions, because they have different answers:

Where is the aircraft taxed? Where it’s hangared and flown. If that’s Delaware, congratulations — zero purchase tax, zero property tax, zero registration fee, statutorily. If it’s anywhere else, that state’s rules govern and Delaware’s zeros are someone else’s good news.
Where should the entity live? Delaware earns its $400 a year when the ownership is complicated — multiple partners, outside lenders, an operating agreement doing real work under Chancery case law — or when the plane is actually based in Delaware. For a straightforward single-owner holding structure, Wyoming does the same job at $60 a year with the same privacy.

Where FilingDesk fits

FilingDesk forms the holding LLC that will own the aircraft — describe it in plain English, we run the name check, prepare and file the paperwork with a human specialist reviewing every filing, then handle the EIN and the operating agreement your aviation attorney can build the dry lease on. $99 flat plus the state fee: Delaware $209 all-in (registered agent included the first year), Wyoming $199, Florida $224, with a 60-day money-back guarantee and no upsells. The use-tax analysis for your hangar state, the lease structuring, and the FAA citizenship file stay with your aviation attorney and CPA — that’s their lane, and the math above is the same no matter who forms your entity. When your counsel signs off on the structure, start the entity.

FilingDesk is not a law firm and does not provide legal or tax advice. This guide is general information only; consult a licensed aviation attorney and a CPA about your specific aircraft and situation.

Frequently asked questions

Is there sales tax on an airplane in Delaware?

No. Delaware has no general sales or use tax at all, so an aircraft purchased or delivered in Delaware owes zero Delaware tax at closing. DelDOT's Office of Aeronautics states it plainly: Delaware has no sales tax, but aircraft bought elsewhere or brought into Delaware may be subject to the taxes of that other jurisdiction. The state where the plane is actually hangared can still charge its own use tax — that rule decides most aircraft tax bills.

Will a Delaware LLC let me avoid sales tax on my plane?

No. Use tax follows where the aircraft is primarily hangared and flown, not where the owning LLC was formed. A Delaware LLC hangaring a plane in Texas or California owes exactly what a local owner would — states audit N-number registrations against hangar and fuel records for precisely this setup. The LLC's real benefits are liability separation, privacy, co-ownership mechanics, and Delaware's entity law, not a tax result.

Does Delaware require state registration of aircraft?

No. Per DelDOT's Office of Aeronautics: 'Currently, Delaware has no law requiring aircraft be registered with the State. All aircraft must be registered with the FAA to legally operate.' There is no state sticker, decal, or annual state aviation fee for a Delaware-based aircraft — the FAA's Civil Aviation Registry is the only registration involved.

Does Delaware tax aircraft at all?

Barely, and only in specific situations. Leases of tangible personal property used within Delaware — aircraft included — carry a 1.9914% use tax on the rent, imposed on the lessee and collected by the lessor, and the lessor needs a Delaware business license with a 0.2987% gross receipts tax on rents above the quarterly exclusion. Avgas carries Delaware's 23-cents-per-gallon gasoline tax, which fliers can apply to have refunded with receipts; jet fuel is excluded from that tax. There is no annual property tax on the aircraft itself.

How much does a Delaware LLC for an aircraft cost?

$110 to file the Certificate of Formation, then a flat $400 annual franchise tax due every June 1 starting the year after formation (raised from $300 by HB 400 for tax year 2026), plus a Delaware registered agent if you don't have a Delaware address — typically $50–$300 a year. With FilingDesk it's $209 all-in for Year 1: the $99 flat fee plus the $110 state fee, with the registered agent included for the first year.

Can a non-U.S. citizen use a Delaware LLC to register a plane with the FAA?

Forming the LLC in Delaware doesn't help with FAA citizenship. Under 14 CFR Part 47, an LLC qualifies only if its president and at least two-thirds of its managing officers are U.S. citizens, U.S. citizens hold at least 75% of the voting interest, and the entity is under actual U.S.-citizen control — tests that follow the people, not the state of formation. Non-citizen owners typically work with an aviation attorney on a trust structure under Part 47 instead.

Sources

This guide is general information, not legal advice. FilingDesk is not a law firm.

Aircraft LLCs in Delaware: zero sales tax, and what it can't do