Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: a Tennessee for-profit corporation dissolves by filing Articles of Dissolution, followed by Articles of Termination of Corporate Existence under T.C.A. §§ 48-24-103, 48-24-108 for $20, but Tennessee will not accept it without a tax clearance certificate in hand first.
The filing, and what Tennessee calls it
Tennessee is a two-stage process filed with the Division of Business Services: Articles of Dissolution (Form SS-4410, T.C.A. § 48-24-103) begins winding up, and Articles of Termination of Corporate Existence (§ 48-24-108) finishes it.
The tax clearance question
Tennessee will not accept the Articles of Dissolution, followed by Articles of Termination of Corporate Existence without a tax clearance in hand. Tax clearance is enforced at both stages. By statute, the Articles of Termination must be ‘accompanied by a tax clearance’ before the Secretary of State will file them; in practice the Division of Business Services also requests electronic tax-clearance verification from the Department of Revenue at the initial Articles of Dissolution stage, and rejects that filing too if clearance cannot be obtained electronically. (T.C.A. § 48-24-108; TN DOR guidance F&E-15)
Creditors and the claims window
Tennessee provides for a formal notice-to-known-and-unknown-creditors procedure, with a 120-day claims-bar window. Available under T.C.A. § 48-24-106, with a claims deadline of not fewer than four months (about 120 days) from the effective date of written notice. Whether the notice procedure itself is mandatory or optional could not be independently confirmed this session from a clean statute-text fetch, so that framing is not asserted either way here. (T.C.A. § 48-24-106)
What the filing costs
The Articles of Dissolution, followed by Articles of Termination of Corporate Existence carries a $20 filing fee.
What this page does not answer
Dissolving the entity at the state level and closing it out with the IRS are two separate processes. A final federal return, IRS Form 966 in some circumstances, and canceling the EIN are governed by federal law, not by Tennessee’s corporation statute, and this cluster does not source them. We have the state-filing answer at primary and the federal-closeout answer not at all.
This page sells nothing and links to no filing service. Dissolving a corporation is a filing-desk task with a statutory answer, and the answer is either in the state’s code and the Secretary of State’s own instructions or it is not.
This page covers a for-profit business corporation. If you are closing an LLC in Tennessee instead, the filing, fee and statute are different: see dissolving an LLC in Tennessee.
Sources
Every citation on this page is statutory or the Secretary of State’s own official filing instructions. No formation service, no registered-agent marketing page and no aggregator is cited anywhere in this cluster; those are the only publishers of the competing versions.
- SS-4410, Articles of Dissolution (Tennessee Secretary of State): https://sos-prod.tnsosgovfiles.com/s3fs-public/forms/ss-4410.pdf
- TN Dept. of Revenue, F&E-15 guidance: https://revenue.support.tn.gov/hc/en-us/articles/360057956112-F-E-15-Inactive-Business-Final-Return-and-Closing-Your-Account