Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: Tennessee permits a Tennessee LLC to convert into another state’s LLC as the same legal entity, under Tenn. Code Ann. § 48-249-704: Tennessee’s caption is ‘conversion,’ not ‘domestication,’ but the substance is the same. The flat filing fee is $20, on Tennessee’s own Certificate of Conversion form.
The statute, and why Tennessee gets miscounted
§ 48-249-704(a) allows a domestic LLC to ‘convert to another entity’ by filing a certificate of conversion; § 704(b) requires the conversion to comply with the destination jurisdiction’s law; § 704(f) specifically requires, when converting to a foreign entity, a statement that the foreign entity accepts service of process in Tennessee for pre-conversion obligations: confirmed verbatim on re-fetch, and matched directly on Tennessee’s own Form SS-4269, which has a checkbox for exactly this appointment. ‘Entity’ is defined in § 48-249-102(9) to include foreign entities, confirming this is true same-entity continuity, not a dissolve-and-reform.
What the filing costs
$20 flat filing fee for the Certificate of Conversion (LLC into another Business Entity), Form SS-4269, filed with the Tennessee Secretary of State, Business Services Division. No separate Tennessee-side formation fee applies outbound, since the converted entity organizes under the destination state’s law instead.
That is the entity-law filing fee only. It is not the cost of leaving, and anyone who tells you the cost of leaving Tennessee 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 Tennessee’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 Tennessee 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 Tennessee, and why it is wrong
Aggregated relocation/registered-agent advisory content states flatly that ‘Tennessee law has no provisions for entity domestication’ and that a Tennessee LLC ‘cannot be domesticated to another state through a formal domestication process.’
This is accurate about Tennessee’s vocabulary but wrong about the substance: §§ 48-249-703 and -704 provide the functional equivalent under the label ‘conversion,’ with Tennessee’s own SS-4269 form explicitly handling the outbound cross-state case.
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.
- Tennessee: https://codes.findlaw.com/tn/title-48-corporations-and-associations/tn-code-sect-48-249-704/. Statutory text, independently re-verified 2026-09-03, matches dataset.