LLC vs C-Corp for Serbian founders
For most Serbian founders the answer is an LLC, and the deciding factor is not the usual one. It is that the IRS A-to-Z income-tax treaty index does not list Serbia — which removes the treaty-rate argument that makes a C-Corp attractive for founders in Poland, Turkey or the UK.
That is the claim, stated exactly. No treaty listing on the IRS index — and nothing about information-exchange arrangements follows from that, in either direction.
Why the missing treaty listing points toward an LLC
A C-Corp is a separate taxpayer. It pays US corporate tax on its profits, and when it distributes those profits to a foreign shareholder, the distribution is a US-source dividend subject to US withholding.
Where a treaty applies, that withholding rate can be reduced from the statutory rate. That reduction is a large part of why a C-Corp makes sense for founders in treaty countries who intend to take dividends.
Serbia is not listed on the IRS treaty index. So a Serbian founder planning to extract profits as dividends from a C-Corp should assume no treaty-reduced rate is available and get the statutory position confirmed by a cross-border adviser before choosing the structure. Do not let anyone quote you a reduced rate on the basis of a treaty nobody can point to.
An LLC's default treatment is different in kind. It is a pass-through — profits are attributed to the members rather than taxed at entity level and then again on distribution. There is no dividend withholding question because there is no dividend. Whether that produces a better outcome for you depends on your Serbian position, and that is the part I cannot answer for you, for reasons set out below.
A caution about the direction of the money. If your US company is being paid by US customers for services you perform in Serbia, US withholding under §1441 is generally not the issue — services performed outside the United States are generally foreign-source income. Withholding matters when you are receiving US-source income of the right character, and the mechanism for establishing your status is a correctly completed W-8BEN. Guides conflate these two directions constantly and it leads Serbian founders to solve a problem they do not have while missing the one they do.
What Serbian law actually says about getting the money out
This is the part where Serbia's position is unusually good, and it is worth knowing before you agonise over entity type.
The governing instrument is the Law on Foreign Exchange Operations (2006, amended 2025), administered by the National Bank of Serbia.
Under Article 11, there is no restriction on outward direct investment. Investment remittances can occur freely and without limits. Outward wires use standard AML processes with purpose codes — 179 for outward direct investment.
So capitalising your US entity is not the obstacle. You have a named statutory permission with a specific article number, which is more than a founder in Morocco or Jordan has.
Then the constraint that catches people, and it is genuinely Serbian: under Article 35, residents may hold foreign currency in local bank accounts, but residents are generally not allowed to keep accounts abroad.
Read that against what you are planning. A US entity will have a US bank account. Whether, and in what circumstances, a Serbian resident's relationship to that account engages Article 35 is a question you need answered by a Serbian adviser before you open anything — because the answer may depend on whether the account belongs to you or to the company, and on how the company is structured and controlled.
That is a structuring question that most guides on this topic never mention, and for a Serbian founder it may matter more than the LLC-versus-C-Corp choice itself.
Check before you rely on this: the detailed conditions attached to Article 11 and Article 35, and the outward-wire document requirements, are not laid out in publicly accessible summaries — they live in the law text and the NBS framework. Get your own position confirmed with those in front of you rather than from a guide.
And to be plain: a US entity does not put you outside Serbian FX law. Your outbound leg is a Serbian transaction under the Law on Foreign Exchange Operations; your US company's payments to other US companies are domestic to the US. We will not help anyone structure around Article 35, and any adviser offering to is offering you an exposure, not a solution.
Where the Serbian tax analysis stops, honestly
Serbian corporate income-tax law sets a resident and non-resident framework. Beyond that, this guide states nothing: not the individual tax framework, not a residence or worldwide-income rule, and — importantly — not the widely repeated conclusion that Serbia has no CFC regime, which nobody has ever substantiated.
That last one deserves emphasis, because the absence of a documented CFC rule is not evidence that none exists. Guides on Serbian structures routinely assert there are no controlled-foreign-company provisions to worry about. If that assertion is wrong, the founder who relied on it has a problem that compounds annually.
So the honest state of this analysis: the US-side logic points to an LLC because no treaty listing exists to make C-Corp dividends efficient. The Serbian side is unresolved on residence, on personal taxation, and on CFC treatment, and those three unknowns could change the recommendation for your specific facts.
Take the LLC as the working default. Then get the Serbian side answered before you form, not after.
The provider constraint that should influence your choice
The position for Serbia: Mercury is prohibited. Stripe, Wise, Airwallex and Shopify Payments are unavailable. PayPal and Payoneer are accepted. Relay requires the US entity formed first.
Mercury being prohibited rather than merely restricted is the sharpest fact on this page for practical purposes. A large share of the advice aimed at non-US founders assumes Mercury as the default banking answer, and for Serbia that assumption fails outright.
This bears on your entity choice more than it looks. Whichever structure you pick still needs somewhere to bank and something to collect payments with, and your realistic options are narrower than a German or Irish founder's. Design the stack and the structure together rather than sequentially.
Check before you rely on this: provider country policies change without announcement. Verify each one directly.
What Serbian founders get wrong
Assuming a US–Serbia tax treaty exists. It is not on the IRS A-to-Z index. Founders plan C-Corp dividend extraction around a reduced withholding rate that has not been shown to be available.
Being told Serbia has no CFC rules. Nobody has substantiated that conclusion and it should not be relied on, however confidently the material aimed at Balkan founders states it.
Overlooking Article 35 entirely. Residents may hold foreign currency locally but are generally not permitted to keep accounts abroad. Anyone forming a US entity with a US bank account should have that question answered rather than discovered.
Planning around Mercury. Prohibited for Serbia. This wastes more Serbian founders' time than any tax misconception.
Treating purpose code 179 as an obstacle. It is not. It is a code you write on a form for an outward direct investment, and it exists precisely because the transaction is permitted under Article 11.
So which one
Default to the LLC, for the reason at the top: with no treaty listing, the C-Corp's dividend advantage is not established, and the pass-through structure avoids the entity-then-dividend layering entirely.
Consider a C-Corp seriously if you are raising from US venture investors who require one, or if you have a specific reason to retain profits inside the entity rather than distribute them. Neither of those depends on a treaty.
In both cases, resolve three things before you file anything: your Serbian tax residence position, whether any CFC-type provisions reach your structure, and how Article 35 interacts with a US company account you control. A Serbian adviser answers all three faster than you would expect, and getting them after formation is how a clean structure becomes an expensive one.
Don't guess on the CFC question. It is the one with compounding consequences.
When you don't need us
If your only requirement is a single-member LLC in a straightforward state, and you can satisfy a provider's onboarding directly, the mechanics are genuinely doable alone. State filing is a state filing, and the EIN application is free.
The ITIN, where you need one, is Form W-7 to the IRS. Nobody needs paying to post it.
Your Serbian tax and FX questions belong with a Serbian adviser, not with us, and we will say so rather than pretend otherwise.
Where help earns its cost is the US address problem, the entity and payment stack designed together around Serbia's real provider constraints, and getting the sequence right so you do not form something you then have to unwind.
What we do
Keystone Bridge handles the US side for founders outside the United States — formation, EIN, ITIN, US business banking access, and business credit. Pricing is published on this site.
For the broader picture, see LLC vs C-Corp for non-US founders, opening a US business bank account as a non-resident and building US credit as a foreigner.