Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: Alabama lets an Alabama LLC convert directly into another state’s LLC while remaining the same legal entity: filed as a ‘conversion,’ not what most searches look for as ‘domestication.’ The current governing section is § 10A-1-8.04, and the move only works if the destination state’s own law permits the conversion and the LLC complies with that state’s requirements too. The filing fee is $100.
The statute, and why Alabama gets miscounted
The dataset’s original citation (a quote of § 10A-1-8.01(e)(2)f. from a mirror self-stamped ‘Last Updated: November 28, 2014’) is stale: Alabama’s 2019 recodification restructured that clause and moved the operative, foreign-entity-specific rule to a more specific section. Independently re-fetching the current text this session (law.onecle.com, cross-checked against al.elaws.us) confirms § 10A-1-8.04, captioned ‘Merger with or conversion from a foreign entity,’ is now the correct citation, and it carries a real reciprocity condition, quoted directly: the merger or conversion must be ‘permitted by the law of the state or country under whose law each foreign entity is formed,’ and the foreign entity must comply with that law in effecting it.
What the filing costs
Filed as ‘Domestic Entity Conversion to Registered Foreign Entity’ (or, if the LLC will not continue doing business in Alabama, ‘…to Non-Registered Foreign Entity’ / Termination by Conversion) with the Alabama Secretary of State, Business Services division. $100 processing fee, confirmed on both the SOS’s own instruction PDF and its published fee schedule.
That is the entity-law filing fee only. It is not the cost of leaving, and anyone who tells you the cost of leaving Alabama 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 Alabama’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 Alabama 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.
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.
- Alabama: https://law.onecle.com/alabama/title-10a/10A-1-8.04.html. Statutory text, Dataset retrieved 2026-08-12 from al.elaws.us, a mirror later flagged stale (self-stamped 2014)..