Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: North Dakota permits it, in both directions, under N.D. Cent. Code § 10-32.1-67(2): a domestic LLC may become a foreign LLC if the destination state’s own law authorizes and does not prohibit the domestication. This is one of the cleaner citations on this list: North Dakota’s own statute uses ‘domestication’ as a defined, dedicated term, distinct from its separately defined ‘conversion’ (entity-type change) and ‘merger’ articles, so there is no naming trap. The base filing fee is $50, with a conditional $135 add-on depending on what the resulting entity becomes.
What North Dakota’s statute actually says
Section 10-32.1-67(2) reads: ‘A limited liability company may become a foreign limited liability company pursuant to this section, sections 10-32.1-67 through 10-32.1-71, and a plan of domestication if: a. The governing statute of the foreign limited liability company authorizes the domestication; b. The domestication is not prohibited by the law of the jurisdiction that enacted the governing statute; and c. The foreign limited liability company complies with its governing statute in effecting the domestication.’ That mirrors the inbound subsection’s structure exactly, meaning the destination state’s law has to authorize and not prohibit the move. Section 10-32.1-68 requires member consent to the plan, and Section 10-32.1-69 requires filing Articles of Domestication stating that the company has been domesticated from or into another jurisdiction and the effective date under the governing statute of the domesticated company.
What the filing costs
Outbound, a North Dakota LLC files Articles of Domestication with the ND Secretary of State under § 10-32.1-69. Section 10-32.1-92(8) sets a base fee of $50 for Articles of Domestication, plus a second, conditional fee depending on what the domesticated entity becomes: if the resulting entity will be a domestic organization governed by North Dakota law, the additional organization fee applies ($135 under § 10-32.1-92(1)); if it will be a foreign organization transacting business in North Dakota, the additional certificate-of-authority fee applies (also $135, under § 10-32.1-92(20)). $50 is recorded here as the base statutory line item for the domestication filing itself; the conditional $135 add-on only applies in some cases and is not folded into this figure.
That is the entity-law filing fee only. It is not the cost of leaving, and anyone who tells you the cost of leaving North Dakota 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 North Dakota’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 North Dakota 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.
- North Dakota: https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t10c32-1.pdf. Statutory text, independently re-verified 2026-09-03, matches dataset.