Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: you cannot. Kentucky has no statute letting an out-of-state LLC become a Kentucky LLC while remaining the same legal entity, confirmed by reading the complete table of contents of KRS Chapter 275 (all 81 sections): there is no section titled or substantively covering domestication, redomestication, transfer of domicile, or continuance. This rests on the absence of any permitting text, not on an affirmative statutory bar. The route that does work is a merger under KRS 275.345-.365.
Why the answer is no
KRS Chapter 275 does have sections using the word ‘conversion’ (KRS 275.370-.377), but they govern entity-TYPE conversions: a partnership or limited partnership becoming an LLC, or a corporation/foreign corporation becoming a Kentucky LLC, never an LLC-to-LLC jurisdiction change. KRS 275.376 is the closest mis-cite risk: it lets a foreign corporation convert into a Kentucky LLC, but that is a corporation converting, not an LLC changing its state of organization. This was confirmed by a search of the chapter’s normalized section titles for ‘domesticat’, ‘redomestic’, ‘transfer of domicile’, ‘continuance’, and ‘another jurisdiction’ (none found), and corroborated by an outside check of the Kentucky Business Entity Filing Act (KRS ch. 14A, all nine subchapters) and the Kentucky Secretary of State’s complete Business Forms Library, which offers a Statement of Merger and no conversion or domestication form for any entity type.
The route that does work
Merger into a newly formed LLC under KRS 275.345 (‘Right of company to merge with other business entities’) through .365 (‘Effect of merger’); .345 is the authorizing section (independently re-fetched and confirmed in force, effective June 27, 2019, not repealed), with .350 (‘Approval of proposed merger’) governing the approval procedure. KRS 275.015(2) defines ‘business entity’ to include a foreign limited liability company, so a Kentucky LLC may merge with or into an out-of-state LLC, and vice versa, with either as the surviving entity under KRS 275.345(1). In practice that means forming the new-jurisdiction LLC and then merging the original LLC into it; for the Kentucky-side filings alone, an Articles of Organization at $40 plus Articles of Merger at $50 under KRS 275.055, $90 combined. Rights, contracts and liabilities pass by operation of law under KRS 275.365. The honest caveat is that this produces a surviving entity rather than a continuation of the original one: the formation date belongs to the new entity, and continuity of EIN, bank accounts and counterparty consents depends on IRS and counterparty rules rather than on this statute. A cheaper option many people skip is simply to foreign-qualify, register the existing out-of-state LLC to transact business in Kentucky without changing its state of organization.
What is commonly published about Kentucky
Formation-service marketing pages describe a named ‘Kentucky domestication’ filing procedure (read only to identify the claim, not cited as a source of law), with no statutory citation given.
Kentucky has no such filing at any tier; the Secretary of State’s complete Business Forms Library offers a Statement of Merger and no conversion or domestication form for any entity type. A Kentucky lawyer’s own blog post independently corroborates the gap, discussing the absence of a domestication statute as an open legislative question rather than a completed one. What such marketing pages describe is not a real Kentucky Secretary of State filing; the actual route is the two-filing merger substitute above, or foreign qualification without dissolving.
We would rather be the table that says a widely repeated figure is not in the statute than the table that repeats it.
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.
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 is on the domestication states list.
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.
- Kentucky: https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/chapter.aspx?id=38578. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12; re-fetched fresh 2026-09-03, which also independently corrected the merger-substitute citation from KRS 275.350-.365 to the verified KRS 275.345-.365 (see README.md).