Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: Montana permits it, in both directions, under Mont. Code Ann. § 35-8-1402(1): the statute itself uses the word ‘domestication,’ so there is no keyword-search trap. The real catch is timing: this mechanism did not exist before 2025. The dollar filing fee could not be confirmed from an official source and is left blank rather than guessed. This page covers the entity-law half only.
What Montana’s statute actually says
Section 35-8-1402(1) reads: ‘By complying with this part, a domestic entity may become a domestic entity of the same type of entity in a foreign jurisdiction if the domestication is authorized by the law of the foreign jurisdiction’: the standard reciprocity condition, confirmed verbatim on re-fetch this session. Before Chapter 317, Laws of 2025, Montana’s LLC Act (Title 35, ch. 8) had only Part 10 (foreign LLC registration/certificate of authority) and Part 12 (merger and entity-type conversion); there was no jurisdiction-change route at all, and any source describing Montana as a domestication state before that enactment was simply wrong at the time. Part 14 is the new domestication article that Chapter 317 added.
What the filing costs
Outbound, a Montana LLC files Articles of Domestication with the Montana Secretary of State under § 35-8-1406 (a signed plan of domestication meeting the same content requirements may be filed in lieu of separate articles, with the same effect, per § 35-8-1406(5)). The dollar fee could not be confirmed: Montana’s general LLC filing-fee statute, § 35-8-212, contains only foreign-LLC surcharge amounts and no domestication line item, meaning Montana appears to set this fee administratively rather than in the code. Both the Secretary of State’s own fee-schedule PDF and its online filing portal served a challenge page rather than readable content, so the fee is left null rather than filled in from secondary formation-cost sites (several of which quote a general $35 online LLC-formation fee, which is a different filing, not the domestication-specific fee).
That is the entity-law filing fee only. It is not the cost of leaving, and anyone who tells you the cost of leaving Montana 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 Montana’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 Montana 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.
What is commonly published about Montana, and why it is wrong
A claim, accurate before 2025, that Montana does not permit LLC domestication.
Chapter 317, Laws of 2025 created a new domestication route (Title 35, ch. 8, Part 14) that did not previously exist; a source describing Montana as non-permitting is now stale, and one asserting a specific dollar filing fee for it should be checked skeptically, since that figure isn’t confirmed on any official Montana source this project could reach.
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.
- Montana: https://mca.legmt.gov/bills/mca/title_0350/chapter_0080/part_0140/section_0020/0350-0080-0140-0020.html. Statutory text, independently re-verified 2026-09-03, matches dataset; fee amount remains unresolved (official Montana sources still blocked).