Is the Corporate Transparency Act Still in Effect? Current BOI Status

The short version: yes, the Corporate Transparency Act is still a valid federal law, and a federal appeals court has now held it constitutional. But almost no domestic business currently has to file a BOI report — not because the CTA was repealed, but because FinCEN itself narrowed its own regulation of who counts as a "reporting company." Those are two different questions, and the gap between them is exactly why this topic causes so much confusion. For the practical who-must-file, deadlines, and penalties picture, see our BOI Reporting Hub. This page is the litigation and rulemaking timeline behind that hub.

The Timeline So Far

• 2021: The CTA becomes law as part of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, directing FinCEN to build a beneficial ownership reporting regime.
• January 1, 2024: FinCEN's original final rule takes effect, requiring nearly every domestic and foreign LLC and corporation (absent one of 23 exemptions) to report beneficial ownership information.
• Late 2024 – early 2025: Multiple federal district courts hear constitutional challenges. A nationwide injunction is issued, appealed, stayed, and reinstated in rapid succession across several dockets (including Texas Top Cop Shop v. Garland and Smith v. U.S. Department of the Treasury), creating brief windows where enforcement was on, then off, then on again. FinCEN suspends enforcement and extends deadlines during this period.
• March 26, 2025: FinCEN publishes an interim final rule that removes the BOI filing requirement entirely for U.S.-formed entities and U.S. persons, and narrows "reporting company" to mean only entities formed under foreign law that are registered to do business in a U.S. state or tribal jurisdiction. 90 Fed. Reg. 13688. This is the rule currently in force.
• December 16, 2025: The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in National Small Business United v. Bessent (No. 24-10736), reverses the district court and holds the CTA constitutional under the Commerce Clause — the first federal appellate court to rule on the CTA's merits. The ruling upholds the underlying statute; it does not, on its own, change who currently has to file, because FinCEN's own March 2025 rule already narrowed that population independently of this litigation.
• April 15, 2026: The National Small Business Association petitions the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari seeking review of the Eleventh Circuit's ruling. A second, related petition (Texas Top Cop Shop, Inc. v. Blanche) is also pending before the Court. As of this writing, the Supreme Court has not decided whether to hear either case.
• June 5, 2026: A permanent final rule intended to replace the March 2025 interim final rule is submitted to the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for review. It had not been published as of this writing.
• Ongoing: The U.S. Government Accountability Office has flagged concerns that the domestic exemption leaves a gap in ownership transparency, since state-level ownership disclosure requirements vary widely and don't uniformly fill that gap — pressure that could factor into how the final rule is written.

Why "Constitutional" and "Nobody Has to File" Are Both True

The Eleventh Circuit's ruling and FinCEN's rulemaking sit on different tracks. The litigation asks whether Congress had the constitutional authority to enact the CTA at all. FinCEN's rulemaking asks — as a matter of the agency's own regulatory discretion — which entities the agency will currently require to report. The Eleventh Circuit said Congress could pass this law. It did not, and could not, force FinCEN to regulate domestic entities more broadly than FinCEN has chosen to under its March 2025 rule. Those are separate levers, and right now only one of them (FinCEN's own rule) is actually doing the work of exempting most domestic businesses.

That also means a Supreme Court decision on the pending cert petitions — whichever way it goes — would resolve the constitutional question but wouldn't automatically restore or remove anyone's filing obligation on its own. The obligation question depends on what FinCEN's final rule says once it's published, and on whether the agency (under continued litigation and GAO pressure) decides to re-expand the definition of "reporting company" back toward domestic entities.

What Could Change This Picture

• FinCEN's final rule could keep the current domestic exemption, narrow it, or expand it back closer to the original 2024 rule. It was still pending OMB review as of June 2026.
• Supreme Court action on the pending cert petitions could come at any time; a grant of certiorari would put the constitutional question back in play, though (as above) it wouldn't itself change who has to file today.
• Congressional action. Legislation to modify, repeal, or codify the current exemption has been discussed by advocacy groups on both sides; nothing has passed as of this writing.

Given how much has already shifted, the practical move for any business — especially one with foreign ownership, a foreign parent, or a foreign registration — is to check fincen.gov/boi directly before any filing deadline, rather than relying on any single article (including this one) as a permanent statement of the law.

Where to Go Next

• BOI Reporting Hub — who currently must file, deadlines, and penalties under the rule in force today.
• Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) Definitive Guide — the full legal explainer: definitions, the original 23 exemption categories, and the original 2024 rule.