Aircraft LLC in New York (2026): The Full GA Tax Exemption

For decades, New York was the state aviation buyers structured around: a combined sales-and-use-tax rate pushing 8.875% in the city, aggressive enforcement, and a cottage industry of out-of-state closings built to dodge it. Then, on September 1, 2015, Albany did something almost nobody expected — it exempted general aviation aircraft from sales and use tax entirely, state and local, purchase or lease, avionics included. The ramps at Republic, Westchester County, Long Island MacArthur, and Sullivan County are now some of the most tax-friendly places in the Northeast to base an airplane. If you’re forming an LLC for a New York aircraft, the tax planning is — genuinely — the easy part. The LLC paperwork is where New York still makes you work.

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

Since September 1, 2015, New York exempts general aviation aircraft — and machinery or equipment installed on them — from state and local sales and use tax under Tax Law §1115(a)(21-a). Purchases, leases, and rentals all qualify.
The exemption is broad but not total: accessories added to the aircraft’s invoice (décor, tableware, linens, small appliances) stay taxable, and drones, military aircraft, and commercial aircraft fall outside the GA definition.
Maintenance, repair, installation labor, component parts, and lubricants are separately exempt under §1115(dd) — permanent since 2009.
New York has no personal property tax, so there is no annual county assessment on the airplane — a real contrast with California.
An LLC still earns its keep for liability, co-ownership, privacy, and estate planning — and since there’s no tax to dodge, there’s no structure for an auditor to unwind.
The genuinely expensive part of a New York LLC is the newspaper publication requirement: six weeks in two papers plus a $50 certificate, from a few hundred dollars upstate to $1,000–$2,000+ in New York City.

GA aircraft sales/use tax: 0%; state + local, since Sept 1, 2015
Would-be rate in NYC: 8.875%; what the exemption saves you
Maintenance & parts: Exempt; Tax Law §1115(dd)
Annual property tax: None; NY taxes real property only

September 1, 2015: the day the math flipped

Part TT of Chapter 59 of the Laws of 2015 amended the Tax Law to exempt general aviation aircraft, and machinery or equipment to be installed on general aviation aircraft, from state and local sales and compensating use tax. The Tax Department’s guidance memo, TSB-M-15(3)S, is the controlling plain-English reference, and the exemption lives at §1115(a)(21-a).

The definition is generous: a general aviation aircraft is any aircraft used in civil aviation, excluding only:

a commercial aircraft (as defined in Tax Law §1101(b)(17) — those have their own long-standing exemption at §1115(a)(21)),
a military aircraft, and
an unmanned aerial vehicle or drone.

Your Skyhawk, Cirrus, Bonanza, TBM, PC-12, or privately operated jet is squarely inside the definition. And the exemption applies to the sale, lease, or rental — a 72-month lease signed after September 1, 2015 is exempt for its entire term.

Run the number that used to drive New York aircraft deals offshore. Per Publication 718 (rates effective March 1, 2025), the combined state-and-local rate is 8.875% in New York City, 8.75% in Suffolk County (Republic, MacArthur), 8.625% in Nassau, and 8.375% in Westchester. Apply today’s Suffolk rate to a $600,000 aircraft based at Republic and the use-tax bill would be $52,500 — the kind of number that drove the pre-2015 structuring industry. Today it is zero: no delivery-state gymnastics, no offshore closing, no exemption affidavit clock to beat.

What’s exempt — and the short list that isn’t

TSB-M-15(3)S draws the line at what the aircraft is versus what merely rides along on the invoice:

Item	NY sales/use tax	The fine print
The aircraft itself — purchase, lease, or rental	Exempt	§1115(a)(21-a), effective Sept 1, 2015
Avionics, radios, weather radar, navigation and emergency lighting outfitted at sale	Exempt	Property “necessary for its normal operation”
Built-in furniture, fixtures, appliances, climate-control and entertainment systems	Exempt	Property “affixed to the aircraft for its equipping”
Machinery or equipment installed after purchase	Exempt	Claim with Form ST-121 (Exempt Use Certificate), “Other” box
Maintenance, servicing, repair, and installation labor	Exempt	§1115(dd) — separate exemption, permanent since 2009
Parts that become a component of the aircraft; lubricants	Exempt	§1115(dd)
Aircraft storage during that service work	Exempt	Only “in conjunction with and during” the exempt service
Décor and artwork, tableware, small appliances, linens, other accessories on the invoice	Taxable	Invoice these separately from the aircraft price
Drones and unmanned aerial vehicles	Taxable	Expressly excluded from the GA definition

The maintenance line deserves its own sentence, because it predates the aircraft exemption and is easy to miss: originally enacted by Chapter 60 of the Laws of 2004 and made permanent by Chapter 204 of the Laws of 2009 — it would otherwise have expired December 1, 2009, per TSB-M-09(18)S — New York exempts the services of maintaining, servicing, and repairing aircraft, the installation of tangible personal property in aircraft, the parts and lubricants consumed in that work, and storage during the work. An annual, an engine overhaul, or a panel upgrade at a New York shop carries no sales tax on the labor or the parts.

The out-of-state purchase, and the death of the Delaware closing

Before September 2015, the standard New York playbook was to close the purchase somewhere with no aircraft sales tax, hold the plane out of state, and hope the use-tax lookback never caught up with the N-number at a Westchester tie-down. The Tax Department was famously good at catching up.

The exemption made all of that obsolete for GA aircraft, because it covers compensating use tax too — state and local. Buy the plane in Florida, Delaware, or a private-party deal in Ohio, fly it straight to its new home at Republic, and New York imposes no tax on the aircraft either at the sale or on the use. There is nothing to plan around. If a broker or forum thread is still steering you into a delivery-state structure “because New York,” the advice is a decade stale — as our state-by-state aircraft tax table shows, New York is now one of the states buyers deliberately close into.

The one caveat worth repeating: the exemption follows the aircraft, not the invoice. Accessories bundled into the deal — cabin artwork, glassware, linens — are still taxable and should be separately stated, and a drone operation gets no help from this exemption at all.

New York vs. the neighbors

For pilots in the New York metro area, the based-aircraft decision often straddles state lines — and the tax table has quietly inverted. The Hudson is now a tax border that favors the New York side:

State	Sales/use tax on a GA aircraft	The fine print
New York	Exempt	Full exemption since Sept 1, 2015 — state and local, purchase or lease, machinery and equipment included (TSB-M-15(3)S)
New Jersey	6.625%	Taxable, but a casual-sale exemption covers genuine private-party sales where the prior owner held the plane for personal use — dealer inventory, rental/charter, and flight-school aircraft don’t qualify
Connecticut	6.35% under 6,000 lbs	Aircraft with a maximum certificated takeoff weight of 6,000 lbs or more are exempt (CGS §12-412) — most bizjets and turboprops clear the bar; most piston singles don’t. Repair and replacement parts used exclusively in aircraft, and aircraft repair services, are separately exempt at any weight (certificate CERT-110)
Massachusetts	Exempt	Sales of aircraft, and repair/replacement parts for them, exempt under G.L. c. 64H §6(uu)–(vv), effective March 1, 2002 (TIR 02-2) — no weight test

A Teterboro-based piston twin bought from a dealer owes New Jersey 6.625%; the same purchase based at Westchester owes New York nothing. A new Cirrus based in Danbury is taxable at Connecticut’s 6.35%; across the line in Dutchess or Putnam County, exempt. Basing decisions ride on hangar availability, commute, and weather far more than tax — but for once, the New York option is the cheap one.

No property tax on the plane, no state registry

Two more line items that other states charge and New York doesn’t:

Annual property tax: none. The Tax Department is blunt about it: “there is no personal property tax in New York” — only real property is taxed. No county assessor values your aircraft each January, no rendition forms, no escape assessments. (The hangar is real property and is taxed to its owner — expect that cost inside your hangar rent.)
State aircraft registration: none today. New York currently operates no state-level aircraft registry — the FAA’s Civil Aviation Registry is the only registration a New York-based aircraft carries, unlike Arizona’s state registration system. Worth knowing: bills to create a NYSDOT registration program with insurance minimums have been floated in Albany. None has become law as of this writing, but like the exemption itself, it’s a check-before-you-close item.

What still costs money: the LLC itself

Here’s the honest inversion at the heart of this guide: in New York, the aircraft is tax-free and the LLC paperwork is the expensive part. A New York LLC costs:

$200 to file the Articles of Organization with the Department of State (fee schedule).
The publication requirement — the one that stings. Within 120 days of formation, the LLC must publish notice for six consecutive weeks in two newspapers (one daily, one weekly) designated by the county clerk of the county in its Articles, then file a $50 Certificate of Publication. Newspaper rates vary wildly by county: a few hundred dollars upstate, $1,000–$2,000+ in New York City. Miss the deadline and the LLC’s authority to do business is suspended. Our publication requirement guide walks through the mechanics and the legitimate ways owners manage the cost.
$9 every two years for the biennial statement.
The IT-204-LL annual filing fee — often $0 for a pure holding company. The fee ($25 to $4,500, or a flat $25 for a single-member disregarded LLC) applies only when the LLC has New York-source income, gain, loss, or deduction. An LLC that just owns and flies a personal aircraft, with no income, generally has nothing to file — while an LLC running a leaseback or rental has crossed into income territory and should expect the fee (and, for that matter, a conversation with a CPA about whether its charter-adjacent activity is taxable).

FAA registration: the rules that actually bind the LLC

Whatever New York does or doesn’t tax, the FAA decides whether your LLC can hold the N-number. Under 14 CFR Part 47, an LLC is tested as a corporation or association: the president and at least two-thirds of the board of directors and other managing officers must be U.S. citizens (for an LLC, read that onto its managers or managing members), the entity must be under the actual control of U.S. citizens, and U.S. citizens must own or control at least 75% of the voting interest. A member-managed LLC whose members are all U.S. citizens clears the test comfortably; a non-citizen member or manager can knock it out.

When an LLC owns the plane, the registry also wants proof of who’s behind it — either the organizing document naming every member, the management structure, and each person’s citizenship, or a signed representation laying out the same facts and explaining how the company qualifies as a U.S. citizen. The FAA’s LLC information sheet spells out both routes. Get the member list and citizenship statements right in the operating agreement at formation, and registration is routine; get them wrong and the filing bounces.

The flight department company trap

New York’s exemption removes the tax reason to over-engineer your structure — but the FAA trap that catches one-plane LLCs is fully alive in New York airspace, and it has nothing to do with tax.

When an LLC’s only business is owning and operating an aircraft for its own members, the FAA’s view is that the entity’s business is transportation by air. Under 14 CFR 119.1 and the Chief Counsel’s long-running interpretations, money flowing to that entity in connection with flights — even routine cost reimbursements from its own members — can count as compensation, converting private flights into commercial operations that require an air carrier or commercial operator certificate the LLC doesn’t hold.

So where should the LLC be formed?

With no New York aircraft tax in the picture, this is a pure entity question — cost, privacy, and mechanics:

A New York LLC keeps everything in-state and looks clean on the FAA paperwork. Budget the $200 filing, the publication cost for your county, the $9 biennial, and — only if the LLC earns New York-source income — the IT-204-LL fee.
A Wyoming LLC is the classic holding-company answer: members stay off the public record, annual costs are low, and there’s no publication ritual. The honest caveat: if the entity’s New York activities require it to register as a foreign LLC, the Application for Authority costs $250 and — a detail that surprises people — the publication requirement applies to foreign LLCs too, under LLC Law §802. Whether a company that merely holds a personally flown aircraft is “doing business” in New York in the qualification sense is a facts-and-circumstances call for your attorney; a leaseback or charter operation almost certainly is.
Either way, nothing about the choice changes the tax result — $0 is $0 in both directions, which is a sentence we can’t write about Texas or California.

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 operating agreement your aviation attorney can build the dry lease on. $99 flat plus the state fee: Wyoming $199 all-in, Delaware $209, Florida $224, with a 60-day money-back guarantee and no upsells. New York formation is on the FilingDesk roadmap — today, the practical route is a Wyoming, Delaware, or Florida holding LLC, or filing the New York entity directly with the Department of State and running the publication gauntlet with your attorney.

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 New York?

Not on a general aviation aircraft. Effective September 1, 2015, New York exempts general aviation aircraft — and machinery or equipment to be installed on them — from state and local sales and use tax under Tax Law §1115(a)(21-a). The exemption covers purchases, leases, and rentals, and it includes the avionics and other equipment the aircraft is outfitted with at sale. It does not extend to commercial aircraft (which have their own separate exemption), military aircraft, or drones.

Do I owe New York use tax if I buy a plane out of state and hangar it in New York?

Not for a qualifying general aviation aircraft. The 2015 exemption covers both sales and use tax, state and local, so buying in Florida and basing the plane at Westchester or Republic no longer creates a New York tax bill. Before September 2015 this was the classic trap — use tax at your county's combined rate, 8.875% in New York City. One caveat survives: accessories added to the aircraft's invoice, like artwork, linens, or small appliances, are still taxable and should be invoiced separately.

Is aircraft maintenance taxable in New York?

No. Under Tax Law §1115(dd), the services of maintaining, servicing, and repairing aircraft — and of installing tangible personal property in aircraft — are exempt from state and local sales tax. The exemption also covers parts that become a physical component of the aircraft, lubricants applied to it, and aircraft storage provided in conjunction with and during that work. The exemption dates to 2004 and was made permanent in 2009, which is part of why New York's MRO shops compete well with neighboring states.

Does New York charge annual property tax on aircraft?

No. In the Tax Department's own words, 'there is no personal property tax in New York' — only real property is taxed. So unlike California, where county assessors bill aircraft every January 1, a New York-based aircraft generates no annual property-tax assessment. The hangar it sits in is real property and is taxed to whoever owns the hangar, but the airplane itself is not on any assessment roll.

Why put a New York airplane in an LLC if there's no tax to avoid?

For the reasons that were always the honest ones: liability separation if someone is hurt in an incident involving the aircraft, clean co-ownership percentages and buyout mechanics for partnership planes, privacy on the registry, and estate planning. New York's exemption actually simplifies the decision — since there is no tax to dodge, there's no temptation to build a structure the state will later unwind. Just mind the FAA's flight-department-company trap if co-owners will share costs through the LLC.

Should the LLC be a New York LLC or an out-of-state LLC?

With no New York aircraft tax at stake, this is purely an entity-cost and privacy question. A New York LLC runs $200 to form plus the publication requirement — six weeks in two newspapers, a few hundred dollars upstate but $1,000–$2,000+ in New York City — plus a $9 biennial statement, and the IT-204-LL filing fee only applies if the LLC has New York-source income. A Wyoming holding LLC is cheaper and more private, but if it must register in New York as a foreign LLC ($250), the publication requirement follows it under LLC Law §802. FilingDesk forms Wyoming, Delaware, and Florida LLCs today.

Sources

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

Aircraft LLCs in New York: the full general-aviation exemption