Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: Maine permits it, in both directions, but not under the word ‘domestication’: the LLC Act calls this ‘conversion’ (31 M.R.S. § 1645), and the chapter that is actually captioned ‘Domestication’ (Title 13-C) only reaches corporations, not LLCs. The trap runs deeper than vocabulary, though: § 1645(1) reads, on its face, like it excludes an LLC converting into another LLC, and only tracing the chapter’s own definition of ‘limited liability company’ back to § 1502(14) shows that a foreign LLC counts as ‘an organization other than a limited liability company’ for purposes of that clause. The Statement of Conversion filing fee for an outbound move to a foreign LLC is $175. This page covers the entity-law half only.
The statute, and why Maine gets miscounted
Section 1645(1) reads: ‘An organization other than a limited liability company, including but not limited to a foreign organization, may convert to a limited liability company…’ Read with the plain dictionary sense of ‘limited liability company,’ that clause looks LLC-to-LLC-exclusive. But § 1502(14) defines the bare term this way: ‘”Limited liability company,” except in the phrase “foreign limited liability company,” means an entity formed under this chapter or under former chapter 13’: confirmed verbatim on re-fetch. That carve-out means every unqualified use of ‘limited liability company’ in chapter 21, including in § 1645(1), refers to a Maine-domestic LLC only; a foreign LLC is therefore ‘an organization other than a limited liability company’ under the statute’s own vocabulary, and squarely covered by § 1645(1)’s ‘including but not limited to a foreign organization’ clause. The same substitution runs in reverse for the outbound direction: a Maine LLC converting into a foreign LLC is converting into ‘an organization other than a limited liability company.’ Sections 1647(1)(A)(6) and 1648(3) then supply mechanics (service-of-process acknowledgment, continuing Maine court jurisdiction over pre-existing liabilities) that only make sense if the converted organization can in fact be foreign, and § 1648(1)-(2)(F) confirms the converted entity is ‘for all purposes the same entity’ and that the conversion ‘may not be deemed to constitute a dissolution.’ Maine’s own implementing form, MLLC-CONV, independently confirms this reading in practice: it lists ‘Foreign Limited Liability Company’ as a selectable resulting-organization type at a $175 fee, with a section captioned ‘(Foreign Converted Organization Only).’
What the filing costs
Outbound, a Maine LLC converting to a foreign LLC files a Statement of Conversion (form MLLC-CONV) with the Maine Secretary of State under § 1647. The form’s own fee table pairs a ‘Foreign Limited Liability Company’ resulting-organization type with a $175 fee; that figure is confirmed directly on the form rather than inferred.
That is the entity-law filing fee only. It is not the cost of leaving, and anyone who tells you the cost of leaving Maine 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 Maine’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 Maine 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 Maine, and why it is wrong
A formation-service page (myusacorporation.com, checked only to identify the claim, not cited as authority) states: ‘Step 2: Your entity needs to file Articles of Domestication with Maine Secretary of State.’ No such filing exists.
The Maine Secretary of State’s own published list of every LLC business form contains no ‘Articles of Domestication’ and no form or fee line using the word ‘domestication’ at all; the correct filing is the Statement of Conversion, form MLLC-CONV, filed under § 1647.
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.
- Maine: https://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/31/title31ch21sec0.html. Statutory text, independently re-verified 2026-09-03, matches dataset.