How to Do NY LLC Publication Yourself: DIY Checklist

You can absolutely complete New York's LLC publication yourself — the law doesn't require a professional, just precision and about ten weeks of follow-through. This is the honest, complete checklist, including the parts that trip people up. (And if you get three steps in and decide your time is worth more than this, the automated version does all of it for $99 plus the papers' listed rates.)

Before you start: the three facts that decide everything

Your county is the one in your Articles of Organization — not where you live or operate. Publishing in the wrong county's papers voids the entire six-week run. Check your filed Articles, not your memory.
Your deadline is 120 days from formation. Check it free with our deadline checker. Past it? Nothing is lost — the suspension cures retroactively whenever you finish — but start now.
The notice must match your Articles character for character. The LLC's exact legal name, formation date, county, and service-of-process address. A mismatched name is the single most common reason publications fail.

Step 1 — Get the county clerk's designated newspaper list

Only newspapers designated by your county clerk count. Call your county clerk's office (find every clerk's phone, address, and hours in our free clerk directory) and ask for the current LLC publication list. In Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, the clerk typically assigns your papers rather than letting you choose — ask for your assignment; in Queens there's a designation step with a gold-seal letter that must happen first. Staten Island's clerk publishes its list, and you choose.

Step 2 — Draft the notice

The published notice must contain the substance §206 requires: the LLC's name, the date of formation, the county, a statement that the Secretary of State is designated as agent for service of process, the address SSNY should mail process to, and the business purpose. Our free notice drafter generates compliant text from your details in both standard and compact wordings — copy it and go. If a paper charges by the printed line, shorter wording is literally cheaper.

Step 3 — Get prices and place two insertion orders

Call each candidate paper's legal-notice desk and ask their rate for a six-week LLC formation notice. Most desks don't publish prices; totals range from under $150 at cheap upstate weeklies to several hundred dollars at metro dailies (see real numbers in the county rate book). Then place an order with one daily and one weekly: send the exact notice text and ask each paper for its first run date and its affidavit process. The two papers don't need to start the same week.

Step 4 — Track six weeks × two papers

Each paper must run the notice once a week for six consecutive weeks. Mark all twelve dates on a calendar. If a paper skips a week, that paper's six-week clock restarts — you need to know the day it happens, not a month later. Buying the actual editions (or asking the desk to confirm each run) is tedious and worth it.

Step 5 — Collect two notarized affidavits

After each paper's sixth insertion, it owes you a notarized Affidavit of Publication — sworn proof your notice ran. Papers vary from same-week to glacial; chase politely and early, and check the affidavit's rendering of your LLC name against your Articles the moment it arrives. New York DOS accepts electronically notarized affidavits, so a PDF is fine.

Step 6 — File the Certificate of Publication

Complete Form DOS-1708 (the Certificate of Publication), attach both affidavits, and send it to the Department of State with the $50 fee. Keep copies of everything. The DOS filing receipt that comes back is your permanent proof — store it with your Articles.

The honest cost-benefit

Done yourself: roughly 4–8 hours of calls, drafting, tracking, and chasing, spread over ten weeks, plus the papers' rates and the $50 fee. Done on our platform: the same designated papers and the same state receipt, with the form pre-filled from the state's record, the notice written and shown before checkout, papers priced side by side, and every step after payment automated — for a flat $99 on top of the papers' listed rates. Either way, now you know exactly what the job is.