Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: yes: an LLC formed in another state can become a Illinois LLC and stay the same legal entity, keeping its EIN, formation date and contracts. Illinois’s statute calls the mechanism domestication, at 805 ILCS 415/301(b). The filing fee is $100. The catch is at the other end of the move, not this one.
What Illinois’s statute actually says
The operative provision is 805 ILCS 415/301(b), and Illinois’s own term for the transaction is domestication. The trap here is location, not substance: domestication used to live in the Illinois LLC Act itself, at 805 ILCS 180/37-31 through 37-34, but those sections were repealed effective July 1, 2018 (P.A. 100-561), and the mechanism moved to a separate cross-entity statute, the Entity Omnibus Act (805 ILCS 415), enacted by that same public act. A table or page still citing the old LLC Act section numbers is citing dead law, even though the underlying right to domesticate is unchanged.
What the filing is and what it costs
Statement of domestication filed with the Illinois Secretary of State, which attaches the domesticated entity’s public organic document rather than requiring a second filed document.
That is the entity-law filing fee only. Registered agent, foreign qualification in any state where you still do business, and any tax clearance the state you are leaving demands are all separate.
Check both ends of the move, not just the destination
A move needs two things to be true: your destination has to let the entity in, and your current state has to let it out. Nine states have no statutory route out, so an LLC formed in one of them cannot domesticate anywhere, however welcoming the destination is. That is where most published advice goes wrong; it checks one end.
| State you would be leaving | Why there is no route out | What the code offers instead |
|---|---|---|
| Delaware | the statute affirmatively limits it | 6 Del. C. § 18-209 |
| Kentucky | nothing in the code permits it | KRS 275.345 to 275.365 |
| Massachusetts | the statute affirmatively limits it | Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 156C, § 59(b) |
| Missouri | nothing in the code permits it | Mo. Rev. Stat. §§ 347.127 to 347.135 |
| New Mexico | nothing in the code permits it | NMSA 1978 § 53-19-62 |
| New York | nothing in the code permits it | NY LLC Law § 1001(b), certificate of merger under § 1003 |
| South Carolina | the statute affirmatively limits it | S.C. Code Ann. § 33-44-904 |
| Washington | the statute affirmatively limits it | RCW 25.15.416 to 25.15.431 |
| West Virginia | nothing in the code permits it | W. Va. Code § 31B-9-904, articles of merger under § 31B-9-905 |
Delaware is the surprise on that list and it is not a mistake; see the Delaware page. For the other eight, the substitute is a merger, not a dissolution: form the new entity in the destination state and merge the old one into it. Merger produces a surviving entity rather than a continuation, so it is genuinely not the same thing as domestication, but it keeps far more alive than dissolving does.
What is commonly published about Illinois, and why it is wrong
Some formation-guide tables still cite 805 ILCS 180/37-31 through 37-34 (the old LLC Act sections) as the current authority for Illinois LLC domestication.
Those sections were repealed effective July 1, 2018 by the same public act (P.A. 100-561) that created the current authority, 805 ILCS 415/301 through 306 in the separate Entity Omnibus Act, so a citation to the old numbering is citing dead law, not an alternate route.
What this page does not tell you
This is entity law. It does not tell you whether the IRS will treat your Illinois LLC as a continuation for federal tax purposes, what happens to your EIN, or what the state you are leaving will want in tax clearance before it lets the entity go. Those are real questions with different sources behind them, and we would rather leave the gap visible than fill it with something we have not read. This page sells nothing and links to no filing service. Moving an LLC is a filing-desk task with a statutory answer, and the answer is either in your two states’ codes or it is not.
The full 51-jurisdiction table, with the statute behind every cell, is on the domestication states list; the three routes are compared on how to move an LLC to another state.
Sources
Every row on this page is statutory text. 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.
- Illinois: https://www.ilga.gov/Documents/legislation/ilcs/documents/080504150K301.htm. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12, independently re-fetched from the same official source and confirmed unchanged, 2026-09-03.