The rules that only apply to your industry.
A restaurant and a SaaS company share almost no compliance surface. These guides cover the licenses, entity choices, taxes, and rules of your specific business, not a national average.
Five industries, covered wall to wall.
Full compliance guides for the industries with the heaviest rulebooks, plus the license lookup for everyone.
E-commerce
Sales tax nexus across states, marketplace rules, and where your inventory creates obligations.
Restaurants
Health permits, liquor licensing, tipped payroll, and the local layer at full strength.
Real estate
Entity-per-property structures, holding companies, and keeping liability walls real.
Healthcare
Professional entities, licensing boards, and the rules layered on top of ordinary compliance.
SaaS
Delaware defaults, equity and 83(b) hygiene, and software sales tax by state.
License lookup
Every industry, every state: look up which licenses your specific business needs.
Find your industry, by name.
Every industry page covers formation, licensing, and the platform pieces built for that work.
Industry changes your compliance in exactly four ways.
Whatever you do for a living, the differences from the generic rulebook land in four places. This is the complete map; your industry page fills in the specifics.
Generic businesses answer to a city clerk. Regulated ones add agencies: health departments for food, licensing boards for professionals, transportation authorities for trucking, and state boards for contractors. Each licensor has its own renewal cycle and its own penalties, which is why the count of calendars grows with the industry.
Health permits · professional boards · DOT numbers · contractor licensesLicensed professions often cannot use a standard LLC: many states require professional entities whose owners all hold the license. Real estate rewards one entity per property so one lawsuit cannot reach the whole portfolio. Venture-track software standardizes on the Delaware corporation because investors do.
PLLC and PC rules · entity-per-property · the Delaware defaultRestaurants run tipped payroll with its own credits and reporting. E-commerce triggers sales tax nexus in states you have never visited, purely on volume. Software is taxable in some states and exempt in others, item by item. Your income tax model stays the same; the edges move.
Tip reporting · economic nexus · software taxability by stateIndustry sets the lawsuit profile, and the lawsuit profile sets the structure: healthcare and construction carry bodily risk, agencies carry contract risk, landlords carry premises risk. Insurance handles the first layer, and entity walls handle what insurance will not.
Liability insurance tiers · holding structures · contract standardsThat is the whole taxonomy. Read your industry page for the specifics of each, run the license lookup for Change 1 in your city, and let the entity quiz resolve Change 2 for your case.
Industry rules, answered.
My industry is not in the list. What now?
Start with Compliance Basics, which covers the four layers every business shares, then use the license lookup for the local layer, since that is where industries differ most. If you tell a specialist what you do, they will point you to the closest guides, and real questions like yours are how new pages get written.
Does my industry change which entity I should form?
Sometimes decisively. Licensed professionals often need professional entities, real estate rewards entity-per-property structures, and venture-track software companies usually end up as Delaware corporations. The entity quiz accounts for this, and LLC vs corporation explains the tradeoffs behind it.
Are some industries restricted on File.Business?
A small number of activities cannot be supported, and they are listed plainly in the acceptable use policy rather than discovered at checkout. Everything else forms normally, including regulated industries that simply need extra licensing.
Do these guides cover my state's version of the rules?
The industry guides cover what is true of the industry everywhere and flag where states diverge; your state guide carries the state's own rules; and the license lookup resolves the local layer where the two meet. Reading your industry page plus your state page covers the full picture.
What is on an industry page, concretely?
The entity structures that fit the work, the licenses and permits typical for it, the tax quirks that surprise owners in that business, and the platform pieces built for it, from sales tax registration for sellers to payroll for staffed businesses. The e-commerce deep dive is a good example of the format.
I run two very different businesses. Which guide applies?
Both, and possibly two entities. Mixing a high-liability activity with a quiet one inside a single LLC exposes each to the other's risk, which is why owners often separate them. Holding company structures explains the pattern, and a specialist can sanity-check your specific mix.
Read your industry. Then form for it.
Built for what you do, from day one.
Formation, licensing, and the operating stack, set up the way your industry actually runs, with a specialist review before anything files.
Not sure of the structure first? Take the entity type quiz. Costs live in one place: pricing.