Skip to content
Independent money guidance
Clear Money Guide
Start here
Menu

How to Move an LLC Out of South Dakota (Domestication)

Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: South Dakota permits it, in both directions, under S.D.C.L. § 47-34A-910(b), and South Dakota is one of the more straightforward states here: its own statute actually uses the word ‘domestication,’ so there is no keyword-search trap. What is genuinely unresolved is the fee: South Dakota’s official fee schedule prices Articles of Domestication only for corporations, not LLCs, so this page does not assert an LLC filing fee. This page covers the entity-law half only.

What South Dakota’s statute actually says

Section 47-34A-910(b) provides that ‘a limited liability company may become a foreign limited liability company pursuant to §§ 47-34A-911 to 47-34A-913, inclusive, and a plan of domestication, if: (1) the foreign limited liability company’s governing statute authorizes the domestication; (2) the domestication is not prohibited by the law of the jurisdiction that enacted the governing statute; and (3) the foreign limited liability company complies with its governing statute in effecting the domestication.’ Read together with § 47-34A-913(c), which requires a departing South Dakota LLC to file a statement surrendering its certificate of organization and naming ‘the jurisdiction of formation of the domesticated foreign limited liability company,’ this is a standard destination-state-reciprocity structure confirmed verbatim on re-fetch.

What the filing costs

An outbound-domesticating South Dakota LLC files Articles of Domestication under S.D.C.L. § 47-34A-912, plus a statement surrendering its South Dakota certificate of organization under § 47-34A-913(c). The fee for the LLC version of this filing could not be confirmed on an official page. The South Dakota Secretary of State’s official fee schedule (sdsos.gov) lists ‘Articles of Domestication, $150’ only inside its Business Corporations fee table; the separate LLC fee table on the same page lists Articles of Organization, Amended Articles, Articles of Termination, Articles of Merger, and other LLC filings, but has no line item captioned Articles of Domestication, even though § 47-34A-912 requires exactly that filing for an LLC. A dedicated LLC domestication form URL returned a 404. Per the never-guess rule, no filing fee is stated here rather than assuming the $150 corporate figure also applies to LLCs.

That is the entity-law filing fee only. It is not the cost of leaving, and anyone who tells you the cost of leaving South Dakota 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 South Dakota’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 South Dakota 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.

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 leavingWhy there is no route outWhat the code offers instead
Delawarethe statute affirmatively limits it6 Del. C. § 18-209
Kentuckynothing in the code permits itKRS 275.345 to 275.365
Massachusettsthe statute affirmatively limits itMass. Gen. Laws ch. 156C, § 59(b)
Missourinothing in the code permits itMo. Rev. Stat. §§ 347.127 to 347.135
New Mexiconothing in the code permits itNMSA 1978 § 53-19-62
New Yorknothing in the code permits itNY LLC Law § 1001(b), certificate of merger under § 1003
South Carolinathe statute affirmatively limits itS.C. Code Ann. § 33-44-904
Washingtonthe statute affirmatively limits itRCW 25.15.416 to 25.15.431
West Virginianothing in the code permits itW. 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.

Next step