US LLC Compatibility Index by Country of Residence

Six countries have a page of their own, going column by column with the provider wording behind each cell: Brazil, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the UAE.

Sources for every column are at the foot of this page.

Founders treat the two as interchangeable and apply to one. They are not interchangeable.

Blocked by Mercury, allowed by Relay: Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, Vietnam.

If you live in one of those five, a Mercury rejection tells you nothing about Relay, and the reverse application is the obvious next move rather than the end of the project. Both lists were read.

The overlap is narrower than people assume. Mercury's institutional list runs to 48 countries. Relay's runs to 31. Relay includes Ethiopia and Guinea-Bissau, which Mercury does not. Neither list is a subset of the other.

Blocked by both: Nigeria, Pakistan, Ukraine. For those three, US fintech banking through these two providers is closed and the answer is a different institution or a different structure, not a better application.

Stripe, Shopify Payments, Apple Developer and Google Play all read Entity for every row. That is not laziness in the table. It is the finding.

None of those four asks where you live. They ask whether the company is a US legal entity, and your LLC is. Stripe's residency sentence is scoped to unregistered businesses. Shopify's is scoped to individuals and sole proprietorships.

Apple states no residency or citizenship requirement anywhere on its enrollment page. Google Play accepts a photo ID "issued in any country" from an organization's authorized representative, while demanding a United States government-issued ID from an individual account.

So for four of the twelve, the thing that decides your outcome is the business type you select at signup, not your passport or your address.

Upwork reads Yes for all twenty because its restriction list covers Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk, plus suspended operations in Russia and Belarus, and none of these twenty countries appears on it. Note that Upwork's list binds "businesses or individuals," so a US LLC would not cure a listed-country presence if you had one.

Every PayPal cell reads ! because PayPal's User Agreement, last updated September 1, 2026, contains these two sentences one after the other:

"If you are an individual, you must be a resident of the United States or one of its territories [...] to open a U.S. PayPal account and use the PayPal services."

"If you are a business, the business must be organized in, operating in, or a resident of, the United States or one of its territories to open a U.S. PayPal account and use the PayPal services."

PayPal, User Agreement. Last updated September 1, 2026. Your LLC is organized in the United States, so the business sentence is satisfied. You are not a US resident, so the individual sentence is not. Every business account has an individual behind it, and PayPal publishes no reconciliation of the two.

We are not going to resolve that for them by writing "Yes" or "No" in twenty cells. The cell says the terms conflict, because they do.

Wise operates an inclusion list rather than an exclusion list. You may hold money if you live in one of 79 countries and territories, hand-counted from Wise's page. Absence from that list is a no by default, and nothing announces it.

Of these twenty countries, only five are on it: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines and South Africa. India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, Nepal, the UAE, Turkey, Egypt, Kenya, Ghana, Mexico and Morocco are all absent.

Two things stop that from being the whole story, and both matter.

That page governs holding money. Sending and receiving money have separate coverage, so the honest reading of a No in the Wise column is "cannot hold a Wise balance," not "cannot use Wise for anything." We have not yet retrieved the send and receive coverage pages, so this index does not speak to them.

India appears only in Wise's restrictions note, which says you can hold money in your account "when travelling overseas." That is a different thing from residency eligibility and we have not tested how it operates.

Payoneer publishes no retrievable restricted-country list. What it publishes is a description of sanctions screening against OFAC, SDN, HMT and other lists. Geo-blocked users are shown a bare unavailability page with no country named. Every Payoneer cell is therefore ?, and we would rather ship twenty question marks than a list we assembled from forum posts.

There is one piece of indirect evidence worth stating. Etsy marks sixteen countries whose sellers reach Etsy Payments through a Payoneer Payment Account, including Pakistan, Brazil, Egypt, India, Ukraine, the UAE and Argentina. That implies Payoneer coverage in those markets. It is an inference from another company's page, not a Payoneer statement, and it is not enough to turn a ? into a Yes.

Amazon Seller Central publishes no accessible current country list. Its seller policy pages are login-gated. A figure of 188 countries circulates widely; it dates from May 2021 and we will not republish it as current. Every Amazon cell is ?.

Google Play's merchant availability is a separate question from developer account eligibility, follows the payments-profile location, and we have only verified the identity-document rules. The Entity verdict in that column covers account eligibility, not the ability to sell in every market.

If you have opened one of these accounts from one of these countries, or been refused, we want to hear it, with the month it happened. First-hand dated reports are how the unknown cells become known. Corrections go to the address on our corrections page and are credited unless you ask otherwise.