Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: yes: an LLC formed in another state can become an Alabama LLC and stay the same legal entity, keeping its EIN, formation date and contracts. Alabama’s statute calls the mechanism conversion, at Ala. Code § 10A-1-8.04. The filing fee is $100, though a separate ordinary formation fee also applies for the new Alabama entity. The move is permitted only if the LLC’s home state also allows it to convert out.
What Alabama’s statute actually says
Alabama’s Title 10A, Chapter 1, Article 8 is captioned ‘Conversions and Mergers,’ and neither the code nor any Secretary of State form uses the word ‘domestication,’ so a search for that term alone would wrongly suggest Alabama has no such route. The general conversion provision, § 10A-1-8.01, is written broadly enough to reach foreign entities: it defines ‘foreign entity’ at § 10A-1-1.03 as one governed by another jurisdiction’s law and requires a statement of conversion to address foreign-entity approval. The more specific and current provision, § 10A-1-8.04, is captioned ‘Merger with or conversion from a foreign entity’ and states the transaction is authorized only if it is ‘permitted by the law of the state or country under whose law each foreign entity is formed and each foreign entity complies with that law in effecting the merger or conversion.’ That is a reciprocity condition: Alabama’s door only opens if the LLC’s home state also permits the exit. The Alabama Secretary of State’s own conversion forms cite this same statutory framework for exactly this transaction.
What the filing is and what it costs
The inbound filing is titled ‘Formation of Domestic Entity by Conversion,’ filed with the Alabama Secretary of State’s Business Services division in Montgomery, alongside the Articles/Certificate of Formation required to create the new Alabama LLC.
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 Alabama 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.
- Alabama: https://al.elaws.us/code/10a-1-8.01. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12 (statute-tier, official-adjacent mirror; the official statute hosts alisondb.legislature.state.al.us and its replacement were unreachable at that time); independently re-read on 2026-09-04 from al.elaws.us for both § 10A-1-8.01 and § 10A-1-8.04. Both pages are unchanged from the 2026-08-12 read, and § 10A-1-8.04’s reciprocity clause quoted above was confirmed verbatim on this pass. However the mirror is still self-stamped ‘Last Updated: November 28, 2014,’ and the statute’s own legislative history shows amendments in 2018, 2019 and 2020 that this mirror predates, so this record does not claim full current-year certainty. Currency is confirmed only through roughly 2021 (per an independently checked onecle.com copy dated ‘last modified: May 3, 2021’); no reachable 2020s-dated official Alabama government source exists for this provision as of this write-up..