Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: Illinois permits it, in both directions, under 805 ILCS 415/301(a); but if you’re checking Illinois’s own LLC Act (805 ILCS 180) for this, you’re looking in the wrong place: the sections that used to cover it there were repealed in 2018. The live authority moved to a separate statute, the Entity Omnibus Act. The entity-law filing fee is $100. This page covers the entity-law half only.
The statute, and why Illinois gets miscounted
Section 301(a) reads: ‘a domestic entity may become a domestic entity of the same type in a foreign jurisdiction if the domestication is authorized by the law of the foreign jurisdiction’: the standard reciprocity condition running against the destination state’s law. The naming trap for Illinois isn’t a different word; it’s a stale location. The old LLC Act provisions (805 ILCS 180/37-31 through 37-34) that used to house this were repealed effective July 1, 2018, by the same public act (P.A. 100-561) that created the Entity Omnibus Act’s domestication article. A source still citing ’37-31′ as current Illinois authority for this transaction is citing law that no longer exists.
What the filing costs
Outbound, an Illinois LLC files a statement of domestication with the Illinois Secretary of State under 805 ILCS 415/301(a) and 415/305; 805 ILCS 415/401(b)(2) sets the fee at a flat $100 (‘Filing statement of domestication, $100’), with no separate line for inbound versus outbound. The domesticated entity’s public organic document is attached to this same filing under 415/305(b)(5) rather than filed as a second document, so there’s no extra formation-fee add-on for the outbound direction.
That is the entity-law filing fee only. It is not the cost of leaving, and anyone who tells you the cost of leaving Illinois 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 Illinois’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 Illinois 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 Illinois, and why it is wrong
Any table or page citing 805 ILCS 180/37-31 (or 37-32, 37-33, 37-34) as current authority for Illinois LLC domestication.
Those sections were repealed as of July 1, 2018; the current, live authority is 805 ILCS 415/301-306, enacted by the same public act that repealed the old ones.
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.
- Illinois: https://www.ilga.gov/Documents/legislation/ilcs/documents/080504150K301.htm. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12.