Eight things a China company registration quote leaves out

A China company registration quote usually covers name approval, the registration filing, the business licence and the chops. It usually leaves out the bank account, the filings needed to export in your own name, the licensed bookkeeper, the taxpayer status and the registered capital you commit to paying in within five years. Ask for the exclusions in writing.

Registration quotes are not usually dishonest. They are quotes for the filing, and the filing is the part that is easy to scope. The expensive surprises live in the steps that come after it, and in one commitment you make on the way in. A buyer reads “company registration” as “a working company”, and those are different finish lines.

Before any of this there is a prior question: whether you need a Chinese entity at all. If you only buy from or sell to China from abroad, you usually do not; see do you actually need a Chinese company?

What does a registration quote usually cover?

Name approval, preparation and lodgement of the registration documents, the business licence, and the set of company chops. That is a real piece of work and it is what most providers sell. How long it takes, and why the bank account is the step that runs longest, is set out in how long it takes to register a company in China.

What are the eight things it usually leaves out?

The eight below. Each is a step or a commitment that a working company needs and a filing quote does not have to include.

1. The registered address, and the paperwork behind it

The address is a registration item (Regulation on the Registration of Market Entities, Article 8), and the company must show it has lawful use of the premises (SAMR Order No. 95, Article 18).^⁠[1,2] That means a lease and the landlord’s evidence of title, for premises the registry will accept for the use you are registering. Addresses offered informally often cannot produce that paperwork, and the discovery usually comes after the name is approved.

2. The chops, and who holds them

A Chinese company acts through its chops rather than through signatures, and it will have several: the company chop, the legal representative’s chop, and finance and invoice chops. The engraver files each impression with the local public security authority within a day of carving it.^⁠[3] The chops are usually in the quote. The custody arrangement never is, and it matters more: whoever holds the company chop can bind the company, as why a company chop outranks a signature explains.

3. The corporate bank account

The single most common omission, and usually the longest step. The bank account permit was abolished, in batches from 25 February 2019 and entirely by the end of that year,^⁠[4] and account opening moved from approval to a filing.^⁠[5] That removed a regulator’s licence, not the bank’s own review. Banks run their own checks on a new foreign-invested company, on their own timetable. The legal representative may open the account or authorise someone else (PBOC account measures, Article 26),^⁠[6] but many banks want the legal representative’s identity verified by the bank itself, as registering without visiting sets out. A timeline that does not say whether the bank account is inside it is not a timeline.

4. Tax registration, and the taxpayer status that follows

The administrative half is nearly automatic: a company holding a unified-code business licence does not register again for tax.^⁠[7] The consequential half is whether it is a general VAT taxpayer or a small-scale one, which governs how it invoices and what it can deduct.

• Below RMB 5 million of annual sales it is a choice. A business at or under the threshold is a small-scale taxpayer (VAT Law, Article 9), and one with sound accounts may register as a general taxpayer instead.^⁠[8]
• Above it, registration is compulsory, within the filing period of the month after the threshold is crossed, measured over any period of up to twelve months.^⁠[9] Once a general taxpayer, a business cannot go back (Implementing Regulations, Article 36).^⁠[10]
• For an exporter it decides the refund. Goods exported by a small-scale taxpayer are exempt from VAT, not refunded (MOF and STA Announcement 2026 No. 11, Article 6),^⁠[11] so a trading company that expects export refunds needs general-taxpayer status.

It is a structural decision that arrives disguised as a form.

5. Exporting in your own name

If the company is to export under its own name, the licence is roughly half the job. The remaining sequence changed between 2022 and 2026, and a great deal of English-language guidance still describes the old one.

Step	What it is now
Foreign trade operator filing(对外贸易经营者备案登记)	Abolished on 30 December 2022. Under the Foreign Trade Law in force since 1 March 2026, any person or organisation that has completed market-entity registration is a foreign trade operator
Customs filing(报关单位备案)	A filing, granted within 3 working days, that does not expire. It can be ticked at company registration, with no separate application to customs
Electronic port enrolment	Made online. It no longer checks the customs filing or the foreign exchange directory, so the steps need not run in order
Foreign exchange directory registration	Made directly at a bank since 1 June 2024, not at a SAFE branch
Export refund filing	Made with the tax office when the company first claims a refund

If a proposal lists the foreign trade operator filing as a step, that tells you when the proposal was written.^⁠[19] If the customs box is not ticked at registration, the filing becomes a separate errand.^⁠[15]

6. The licensed bookkeeper, and the auditor

Three separate engagements, and none of them is the registration provider’s unless it holds the right approval. A company that does not keep its own books must use an approved bookkeeping agency (Accounting Law, Article 34),^⁠[20] and an agency other than a CPA firm needs approval from the local finance authority (Bookkeeping Measures, Article 3).^⁠[21] Tax agency is supervised by the tax authority, not the finance authority, and a provider must report its details to the tax authority before its first engagement (STA Order No. 58, Articles 10 and 12).^⁠[22] An audit report on company accounts is issued through a CPA firm (CPA Law, Articles 14 and 16).^⁠[23]

The audit is not optional either. The Company Law requires the annual financial report to be audited by an accounting firm in accordance with law (Article 208),^⁠[24] and for a foreign-invested company the bank enforces it: a profit remittance above US$50,000 is reviewed against audited financial statements (SAFE Huifa [2017] No. 3, item 7).^⁠[25] Who else asks for the audit report is set out in what annual filings a Chinese company must make. A quote that appears to include bookkeeping or audit is worth a question about who holds the approval.

7. Registered capital is a five-year clock, not a badge

The subscribed capital of a limited liability company must be paid in within five years of establishment (Company Law, Article 47).^⁠[24] A company registered on or before 30 June 2024 must, before 30 June 2027, bring any later payment date forward to 30 June 2032 or earlier (State Council Order No. 784, Article 2).^⁠[26] Each shareholder’s subscribed and paid-in contributions are published by the company on the national publicity system (Company Law, Article 40).^⁠[24] A large figure chosen to look substantial is therefore a public, dated commitment to transfer that money. The rule and the transition are set out in full in what registered capital is.

8. The annual report

Every company files an annual report for the previous year between 1 January and 30 June, and it is published (Interim Regulation on Enterprise Information Publicity, Article 8). A company that misses it is put on the abnormal operations list (Article 18),^⁠[27] which anyone can see, including your banks, customers and partners. The whole filing calendar is in what annual filings a Chinese company must make.

Whose fee is whose?

Item	Whose fee	Usually in a registration quote?
Name approval, documents, licence, chops	The provider’s	Yes
Registered address	Your landlord’s	No
Corporate bank account	The bank’s	No, and often not in the timeline either
Customs filing, electronic port, foreign exchange directory, export refund filing	Mostly official or at cost	No
Bookkeeping, tax filing, audit	An approved bookkeeping agency, a tax service provider and a CPA firm	No, unless the provider holds the approvals
Registered capital	Yours, within five years	Not a fee at all: a commitment

What we are not claiming

We have not given you a number. Setup costs vary by city, vehicle, scope and bank, and a figure here would be repeated back as though it were a quotation. What we have given you is the list of things to make a provider address in writing, ours included. The question to put to any proposal is not “how much” but “which of these eight are inside your scope, and who does the rest?”

Nor is this a criticism of fixed-fee registration providers. Filing work is a real service and scoping it tightly is reasonable. The failure is asymmetric information, not dishonesty, and one written question fixes it. Whether a foreigner can own all of the company, and when a Chinese partner is needed, is answered in whether a foreigner can own 100% of a Chinese company.

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