Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: The District of Columbia permits it, in both directions, under D.C. Code § 29-809.06(b): an LLC may become a foreign LLC if the foreign jurisdiction’s governing statute authorizes the domestication, the destination allows it, and the LLC complies with the destination’s own law, again a reciprocity condition. DC’s statute (Title 29, Chapter 8, Subchapter IX) is unusual in not reserving the word ‘domestication’ for non-US moves the way Delaware and Florida do: the same mechanism covers both interstate and international jurisdiction changes. The entity-law filing fee is $220. This page covers the entity-law half only.
What District of Columbia’s statute actually says
Section 29-809.06(b) reads: ‘A limited liability company may become a foreign limited liability company pursuant to this section, §§ 29-809.07 through 29-809.09, and a plan of domestication, if: (1) The foreign limited liability company’s governing statute authorizes the domestication; (2) The domestication is not prohibited by the law of the jurisdiction that enacted the governing statute; and (3) The foreign limited liability company complies with its governing statute in effecting the domestication.’ Section 29-809.09 confirms what domestication actually does to the entity: the domesticated company remains ‘for all purposes the company that existed before the domestication,’ keeping its property, debts, and pending legal actions, and the statute states explicitly that ‘the domestication shall not dissolve a domesticating limited liability company.’
What the filing costs
Outbound, a DC LLC files Articles of Domestication with the Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection (DLCP) Corporations Division under D.C. Code § 29-809.08(a), in practice using form GN-13 (Statement/Plan of Domestication of Domestic and Foreign Filing Entity). DLCP’s current live fee page lists $220.00 for LLC domestication filings. That figure sits awkwardly against 17 DCMR § 17-601(k), which prices a domestication filing at whatever the fee is for registering a domestic filing entity, and DLCP’s own $99.00 line for ordinary domestic Articles of Organization: the two schedules do not cleanly reconcile, so treat $220 as the currently operative live-page number rather than a value independently derived from the regulation’s formula.
That is the entity-law filing fee only. It is not the cost of leaving, and anyone who tells you the cost of leaving District of Columbia 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 District of Columbia’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 District of Columbia 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 move-to-another-state guide, which covers Delaware’s route directly. 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.
- District of Columbia: https://code.dccouncil.gov/us/dc/council/code/sections/29-809.06. Statutory text, independently re-verified 2026-09-03 against code.dccouncil.gov; matches dataset..