Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: yes: an LLC formed in another state can become a Hawaii LLC and stay the same legal entity, keeping its EIN, formation date and contracts. Hawaii’s statute calls the mechanism conversion, at Haw. Rev. Stat. § 428-902.5(b). The filing fee is $100. Hawaii permits the move only if the LLC’s home state also permits and complies with the conversion under its own law.
What Hawaii’s statute actually says
Hawaii’s LLC chapter, HRS chapter 428, is based on the original 1996 Uniform Limited Liability Company Act rather than the 2006 revision that introduced the word ‘domestication’ in other states, so chapter 428 never uses that term; Part IX is captioned ‘Conversions and Mergers.’ Section 428-902.5(b) provides that ‘any foreign limited liability company or other entity may adopt a plan of conversion and convert to a domestic limited liability company if the conversion is permitted by and complies with the laws of the state or country in which the foreign limited liability company or other entity is incorporated, formed, or organized,’ a reciprocity condition tied to the departing jurisdiction’s law. The outbound counterpart, § 428-902.5(a), imposes a mirror-image reciprocity condition tied to the destination jurisdiction’s law and confirms the transaction preserves the members’ equity interests without imposing new personal liability.
What the filing is and what it costs
The filing is Articles of Conversion on DCCA Business Registration Division Form X-10, filed with Hawaii’s Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Business Registration Division; the same form and $100 fee serve both inbound and outbound conversions.
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 Hawaii, and why it is wrong
A commonly repeated claim is that Hawaii does not permit LLC domestication because its LLC statute has no article literally titled ‘domestication.’
That claim mistakes vocabulary for substance. Chapter 428 predates the model-act revision that coined the word ‘domestication,’ so Hawaii uses the older term ‘conversion’ for the identical transaction. Haw. Rev. Stat. § 428-902.5(a) and (b) permit the same LLC to change jurisdiction in either direction without dissolving, subject to a reciprocity condition tied to the other jurisdiction’s law.
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 Hawaii 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.
- Hawaii: https://law.onecle.com/hawaii/title-23a/428-902.5.html. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12 (statute-tier mirror; the official host capitol.hawaii.gov was and remains closed to outside access, confirmed separately via a 2026-04-22 Wayback capture that showed no amendment to this section since 2001); independently re-read on 2026-09-04 from law.onecle.com, which carried the identical § 428-902.5 text quoted above, unchanged from the 2026-08-12 read. capitol.hawaii.gov itself was not re-tested this session; based on the prior confirmed block, it is assumed to remain inaccessible by direct fetch..