Arkansas Economic Development Commission (AEDC)

The State of Arkansas operates the way businesses do, proactively anticipating opportunities and quickly responding to challenges in innovative ways. This approach, combined with our incentive programs, makes Arkansas a profitable choice for locating or expanding a business.

Arkansas's performance-based incentives are nationally competitive and easy to use. The Arkansas Economic Development Commission will focus on your business's specific needs, conduct a cost-benefit analysis and design a tailored incentive package.

Arkansas's incentives, which were updated in 2003, are based on payroll instead of number of jobs and are determined according to location. Counties are divided into four tiers, based on poverty rate, unemployment, per capita income and population growth. Tiers are assigned annually on July 1, based on the previous year's statistics.

In addition to an array of competitive incentives, when a business locates in Arkansas, it can take advantage of the following additional benefits:

• Favorable unemployment insurance and workers' compensation rates;
• A right-to-work state, as guaranteed by the Arkansas Constitution; and
• Favorable individual and corporate income tax rates.

AEDC's project managers work with existing industries in their assigned regions. However, they can work on new-business projects anywhere in Arkansas. They will be happy to provide additional information or clarification regarding any of Arkansas's incentives.

The new incentives may be combined to allow for more flexibility.

There are special incentives for start-up businesses in six targeted sectors.

• Advantage Arkansas (Income Tax Credit)
• InvestArk (Sales and Use Tax Credit)

For more information on Incentives please visit:
http://www.arkansasedc.com/business_development/incentives