Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: yes: an LLC formed in another state can become a Maine LLC and stay the same legal entity, keeping its EIN, formation date and contracts. Maine’s statute calls the mechanism conversion, at 31 M.R.S. § 1645(1). The filing fee is $175. Maine’s own definitions section carves ‘foreign limited liability company’ out of the bare term ‘limited liability company,’ which is what makes an out-of-state LLC an eligible converting organization under section 1645 rather than an excluded one, and the state’s own Statement of Conversion form confirms this by listing a foreign LLC as a selectable resulting entity type.
What Maine’s statute actually says
Maine’s LLC Act (Title 31, chapter 21) never uses the word ‘domestication’; the operative cross-jurisdiction mechanism is captioned ‘Conversion’ at section 1645, inside Subchapter 12, ‘Merger and Conversion.’ Section 1645(1) says that an organization other than a limited liability company, including but not limited to a foreign organization, may convert to a limited liability company, and a limited liability company may convert to an organization other than a limited liability company, subject to a reciprocity condition in subsections (A) through (C) requiring the converting organization’s own governing statute to authorize the move and the relevant jurisdictions’ laws not to prohibit it. The vocabulary quirk that matters here is section 1502(14)’s definition of the bare term ‘limited liability company,’ which expressly excludes the phrase ‘foreign limited liability company’; that carve-out means a foreign LLC is legally ‘an organization other than a limited liability company’ under Maine’s own definitions, so it falls inside section 1645(1)’s reach in both directions rather than outside it. Section 1648 confirms the converted entity is ‘for all purposes the same entity’ and that the conversion ‘may not be deemed to constitute a dissolution,’ which is what makes this a true same-entity continuation rather than a dissolve-and-reform. The Maine Secretary of State’s own Statement of Conversion form, MLLC-CONV, independently confirms this is what the state actually implements: it lists ‘Foreign Limited Liability Company’ as a selectable resulting-organization type at the $175 fee.
What the filing is and what it costs
The filing is a Statement of Conversion, form MLLC-CONV, filed with the Maine Secretary of State under 31 M.R.S. § 1647, with ‘Foreign Limited Liability Company’ selected as the resulting organization type.
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 Maine, and why it is wrong
A formation-service marketing page for Maine states that the 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 LLC business forms 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, under 31 M.R.S. § 1647, which is what actually accomplishes a foreign LLC’s move into Maine as the same entity.
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 Maine 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.
- Maine: https://www.mainelegislature.org/legis/statutes/31/title31ch21sec0.html. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12 (statute-tier, official government source, following an orchestrator adjudication that flipped an initial ‘not permitted’ misreading); independently re-read on 2026-09-04 from mainelegislature.org’s chapter table of contents and its section 1645 page: confirmed still live and current, Subchapter 12 is still captioned ‘Merger and Conversion’ with section 1645 captioned ‘Conversion,’ and the page still carries the same ‘PL 2009, c. 629’ legislative-history markers the dataset relied on. Did not independently re-fetch the MLLC-CONV PDF or section 1502’s definitions this session; those are carried forward from the 2026-08-12 record, including the adjudicator’s disclosed residual doubt that the form’s substantive content is dated 7/1/2011 (cover revised 6/26/2024), so a very recent unreflected amendment is not fully ruled out..