Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: yes: an LLC formed in another state can become a Kansas LLC and stay the same legal entity, keeping its EIN, formation date and contracts. Kansas’s statute calls the mechanism domestication, at K.S.A. 17-78-501(b). The filing fee could not be pinned to a single confirmed number as of retrieval: official Kansas fee documents from 2026 show conflicting figures for the domestication certificate itself, ranging from $5 to $50, plus a separately sourced $165 combined total for LLC formation and the certificate together. Kansas also requires that the departing state’s own law authorize the move, and the certificate is filed together with new Kansas Articles of Organization.
What Kansas’s statute actually says
Kansas keeps domestication (same-type, cross-jurisdiction continuation) and conversion (change of entity type) as two separately numbered transactions inside the general Business Entity Transactions Act, Chapter 17, Article 78, rather than inside the LLC Act itself (Article 76). K.S.A. 17-78-501(b) provides that a foreign entity may become a domestic entity of the same type in Kansas if the domestication is authorized by the law of the foreign entity’s jurisdiction of organization, and subsection (a) grants the reverse right outbound. Subsection (c) defines a ‘domestic entity’ with reference to a foreign jurisdiction as one whose internal affairs are governed by that jurisdiction’s law, and the article’s general definition of ‘entity’ at K.S.A. 17-78-102 expressly includes a limited liability company, so an out-of-state LLC is squarely covered by the operative text. The reciprocity condition runs both ways, requiring the other state’s law to authorize the move, not just decline to forbid it. Do not confuse this with K.S.A. 17-78-401 through -406, a separate ‘Conversion authorized’ article that governs only a change of entity type, such as LLC to corporation, and never uses the phrase ‘same type,’ so it cannot be cited for a cross-state LLC-to-LLC move.
What the filing is and what it costs
The filing is a Certificate of Conversion/Domestication (Form CDD, citing K.S.A. 17-78-405 and 17-78-505), filed with the Kansas Secretary of State together with the new jurisdiction’s formation document, which for an inbound move means Kansas Articles of Organization. The current fee could not be pinned to one confirmed figure: a February 2026 Kansas Register notice lists a ‘domestication certificate or agreement’ fee of $50 in one schedule but also a $5 fee for ‘domestication agreement’ filings elsewhere in the same document, and the Certificate of Conversion/Domestication form’s own instructions cite a combined $165 total for LLC formation plus the certificate, with a May 2026 Secretary of State press release describing further unitemized fee reductions after that date. No single current number could be confirmed from these conflicting official sources, so it is left null rather than guessed.
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.
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 Kansas 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.
- Kansas: https://www.ksrevisor.gov/statutes/chapters/ch17/017_078_0501.html. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12 (statute-tier, official government source); independently re-read on 2026-09-04 from ksrevisor.gov’s per-section page: confirmed still live and current, the text is verbatim identical to the dataset’s quote, including the ‘History: L. 2009, ch. 47, § 29; July 1, 2010’ citation. The fee ambiguity the dataset flagged as VERIFIED_CURRENCY_RISK/UNVERIFIED was not independently re-resolved this session and is carried forward honestly rather than resolved..