Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: yes: an LLC formed in another state can become an Arkansas LLC and stay the same legal entity, keeping its EIN, formation date and contracts. Arkansas’s statute calls the mechanism domestication, at Ark. Code Ann. § 4-38-1051. The filing fee is $300 for the inbound transaction. Arkansas permits the move only if the LLC’s home state also authorizes it to leave.
What Arkansas’s statute actually says
Ark. Code Ann. § 4-38-1051 is part of Arkansas’s Uniform Limited Liability Company Act, enacted by Act 1041 of 2021 and applicable to every Arkansas LLC, including those formed before the 2021 effective date. Subsection (b) states that ‘a foreign limited liability company may become a domestic limited liability company if the domestication is authorized by the law of the foreign limited liability company’s jurisdiction of formation,’ a reciprocity condition. Section 4-38-1053 confirms the inbound LLC’s side must be ‘approved in accordance with the law of the foreign limited liability company’s jurisdiction of formation.’ The Arkansas Secretary of State’s own filing checklist independently enforces the same condition, requiring a certificate from the LLC’s home-state officer confirming it is authorized by law to domesticate to Arkansas.
What the filing is and what it costs
The inbound filing is the Certificate of Transfer of Domicile (Domestication) To Arkansas, filed with the Arkansas Secretary of State’s Business and Commercial Services division.
That is the entity-law filing fee only. Registered agent, foreign qualification in any state where you still do business, and any tax clearance the state you are leaving demands are all separate.
What is commonly published about Arkansas, and why it is wrong
A law-firm marketing page states that Arkansas allows the move through ‘statutory conversion for LLCs under Section 4-32-1202’ and that the filing fee is $25.
Both parts of that claim describe repealed law. Title 4, Chapter 32, which included § 4-32-1202, was repealed by Act 1041 of 2021, effective September 1, 2021, and replaced by the Uniform Limited Liability Company Act at Chapter 38, which now governs every Arkansas LLC, including those formed earlier. The current inbound fee, per the Arkansas Secretary of State’s own Certificate of Transfer of Domicile form, is $300, not $25.
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.
What this page does not tell you
This is entity law. It does not tell you whether the IRS will treat your Arkansas LLC as a continuation for federal tax purposes, what happens to your EIN, or what the state you are leaving will want in tax clearance before it lets the entity go. Those are real questions with different sources behind them, and we would rather leave the gap visible than fill it with something we have not read. 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.
The full 51-jurisdiction table, with the statute behind every cell, 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.
- Arkansas: https://codes.findlaw.com/ar/title-4-business-and-commercial-law/ar-code-sect-4-38-1051/. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12 (statute-tier mirror); independently re-read on 2026-09-04 from the same findlaw URL, which had refused a first attempt. That read returned the identical operative text quoted above and confirmed the page is marked ‘Current as of March 28, 2024.’ The $300 fee figure and the repeal history trace to the 2026-08-12 reading of the Arkansas Secretary of State’s own form PDF and the Arkansas Legislature’s Act 1041 text, neither of which was re-read today.