Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: Pennsylvania permits it, in both directions, under 15 Pa.C.S. § 371(a); and Pennsylvania is unusual in that its own statute actually uses the word ‘domestication,’ with an entire subchapter captioned that way. The catch is that Pennsylvania also runs a separate ‘Conversion’ subchapter for in-state entity-type changes, and some published pages cite that one by mistake. The entity-law filing fee for the outbound direction is $70. This page covers the entity-law half only.
The statute, and why Pennsylvania gets miscounted
Section 371(a) reads: ‘Except as provided in section 318 …, by complying with this chapter, a domestic entity may become a domesticated entity of the same type in a foreign jurisdiction if the domestication is authorized by the laws of the foreign jurisdiction’: a reciprocity condition on the destination state’s law. Because Pennsylvania’s own vocabulary already uses ‘domestication,’ the naming trap here isn’t a different word; it’s a same-chapter, different-subchapter mixup. Chapter 3’s Conversion subchapter governs an entity changing type inside Pennsylvania and is numbered and captioned separately from the Domestication subchapter (§§ 371–376) that actually answers a jurisdiction-change question.
What the filing costs
Outbound, a Pennsylvania LLC files a Statement of Domestication (15 Pa.C.S. § 375) with the PA Department of State, Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations. Because § 375(b)(5) only requires attaching the destination entity’s public organic record when the resulting entity is a PA domestic filing entity, the outbound direction does not carry that attachment, and the filing is the flat $70 fee alone. That is distinct from the inbound direction, where a separate $125 Certificate of Organization line applies on top, for a combined $195.
That is the entity-law filing fee only. It is not the cost of leaving, and anyone who tells you the cost of leaving Pennsylvania is a filing fee is selling something.
The part this page does not answer
The reason people search for this is usually not the filing. It is the tax exposure: what Pennsylvania’s own revenue agency does when you leave, whether a final return is due, and whether the state agrees the entity has actually stopped doing business there. Those questions are governed by Pennsylvania tax law and administrative practice, not by the entity-law citation above, and this cluster does not source them. We have the entity-law answer at primary and the tax answer not at all.
Two things worth knowing even so, both the general shape rather than a state-specific finding: changing the entity’s state of organization does not by itself end an obligation to register as a foreign LLC anywhere you still do business, and a state’s revenue department is a separate counterparty from its filing office. If you are moving to cut a tax bill, the entity move is the easy half.
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.
What is commonly published about Pennsylvania, and why it is wrong
Some formation-service compilations cite Pennsylvania’s entity-type ‘Conversion’ provisions (Chapter 3, Subchapter F) as the domestication statute for Pennsylvania.
That subchapter governs an entity changing type within Pennsylvania, not jurisdiction; the correct, separately numbered statute for a jurisdiction change is Subchapter G, ‘Domestication,’ §§ 371–376.
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.
The full 51-jurisdiction table 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.
- Pennsylvania: https://www.palegis.us/statutes/consolidated/view-statute?txtType=HTM&ttl=15&div=0&chpt=3&iFrame=true. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12.