How to Start a US LLC From Jordan

Jordan has income tax treaties with more than 30 countries, but the United States isn't among them, a genuine gap given how extensive Jordan's own treaty network otherwise is. Jordan's domestic law does allow a deduction for foreign tax actually paid on foreign-source income that was also taxed abroad, functioning as a form of unilateral relief even without a treaty. In practice, this matters less for a typical single-member LLC than the missing treaty might suggest, since a non-resident-alien-owned LLC earning non-US-source income usually owes $0 US federal tax to begin with, leaving little for either mechanism to actually offset, though this becomes more relevant if the business later generates US-source income directly.

On the currency side, the Jordanian dinar has been pegged to the US dollar at a fixed rate of roughly 0.709 JOD per USD since November 1995, one of the longer-running currency pegs in the region, maintained through multiple periods of regional instability without the government revisiting the policy. For a Jordanian founder moving money between a local account and a US LLC's Mercury or Relay account, this removes a category of exchange-rate uncertainty that founders in freely floating-currency countries have to plan around, though transfers still move as standard international wires subject to normal banking documentation and KYC rather than at some preferential internal rate.

Putting it together: form the LLC (Wyoming and Delaware remain the two most common choices), get the EIN using the international applicant line above, open a Mercury or Relay account without either restricting Jordan, and keep clean records tracing your LLC's revenue and any personal distributions back to non-Jordanian sources, since that's what supports the specific dividend-sourcing rule protecting them from Jordanian tax. Between the territorial system, the absence of CFC rules, the lack of a GAAR, and the dinar's long-standing dollar peg, this is one of the more straightforward tax and currency stories in the entire series for a solo founder.

Jordan's growing tech and outsourcing sector, centered around Amman, has produced a steady wave of founders building SaaS products, e-commerce stores, and consulting practices aimed at US and global clients. For these founders, a US LLC offers direct Stripe and PayPal access as a genuine US entity, USD-adjacent invoicing that pairs naturally with the dinar's own long-standing dollar peg, and a formation process considerably simpler than establishing a Jordanian company specifically to serve international clients. What Jordanian founders will find, working through the tax side of this decision, is a genuinely straightforward story: Jordan's territorial tax system and its complete absence of controlled foreign company rules leave very little for a solo founder to actually worry about, and its absence of a general anti-avoidance rule makes the picture simpler still.

It's worth flagging something Jordan doesn't have that most countries in this series do, in some form: a general anti-avoidance rule (GAAR). Jordan's tax authorities rely on the specific rules actually written into the Income Tax Law rather than a broad, catch-all provision letting them recharacterize an arrangement simply because its main purpose looks like tax avoidance. Jordan does maintain thin-capitalization rules and a general arm's-length requirement for related-party transactions, but formal transfer-pricing documentation rules and a codified GAAR are both absent. For a solo founder running a genuinely operating US LLC, none of this changes the core picture, foreign-sourced business income already sits outside Jordan's tax net, but it's a useful data point on how light-touch Jordan's international anti-avoidance framework currently is compared to the EU-driven ATAD regimes covered elsewhere in this series.

Getting an EIN as a Jordanian founder works exactly like it does for any other non-US resident. Without a US Social Security Number or ITIN, you can't use the IRS's online EIN application — you'll file Form SS-4 and either call the IRS's international applicant line (267-941-1099, staffed 6am-11pm ET, for international applicants only) to receive the EIN over the phone, or fax the SS-4 (855-215-1627 from within the US, 304-707-9471 from outside) for a roughly 4-business-day official turnaround that often takes 1-2 weeks in practice. Mailing to Cincinnati, OH takes 4-5 weeks and should be a last resort. On Line 7b, write 'Foreign' or 'N/A' rather than leaving it blank. The responsible party listed must be the actual Jordanian owner, not EasyBrise or any formation agent. If you lose your CP 575 confirmation notice, request Form 147C, a letter, not a duplicate, instead. Don't skip Form 5472 plus a pro forma 1120 each year; the penalty for missing it starts at $25,000.

Jordan's Income Tax Law, under Article 3, taxes income on a source basis: any income incurred in or from Jordan is taxable, regardless of who earns it or where the payment is actually received, while income genuinely sourced outside Jordan generally isn't part of the tax base at all. This applies to both individuals and companies, a meaningfully different starting point from the worldwide-taxation systems most countries covered in this series use. On top of that, Jordan has no controlled foreign company regime whatsoever, confirmed consistently across multiple professional tax summaries: there's no mechanism attributing a foreign company's undistributed profit to a Jordanian resident who owns it, based on ownership percentage, effective tax rate, or income type. A Jordanian founder who owns 100% of a US LLC running an active, foreign-facing business isn't subject to any CFC-style attribution at all, active or passive income included, unlike the majority of countries covered elsewhere in this series.

On the banking side, Jordan is not on Mercury's or Relay's prohibited-country list, and Jordanian founders go through the same standard non-resident application process, passport, LLC formation documents, and EIN, as founders from most other countries in this series. There's no distinct Jordan-specific hurdle at the account-opening stage.

There's a specific, useful rule worth knowing about the distribution side too: dividends received by a Jordanian resident individual from a non-resident payer, a US LLC included, are taxable in Jordan only if they originate from money or deposits located inside Jordan. A distribution from a US LLC whose revenue comes from customers outside Jordan and whose funds were never routed through Jordanian deposits or accounts falls outside this rule entirely, meaning the distribution itself typically isn't taxable income in Jordan. This is a narrower, more specific mechanism than the general territorial principle above, and it directly addresses the exact situation a founder actually faces when they eventually draw profit out of the LLC personally, not just the LLC's underlying business income. Keeping documentation that traces the LLC's revenue and any resulting distribution back to non-Jordanian sources is worth doing from the start, in case this needs to be demonstrated later.