Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: yes: an LLC formed in another state can become a District of Columbia LLC and stay the same legal entity, keeping its EIN, formation date and contracts. The District of Columbia’s statute calls the mechanism domestication, at D.C. Code § 29-809.06(a). Unlike Delaware and Florida, the District does not limit this mechanism to non-US entities; the same provision covers a move from any US state.
What District of Columbia’s statute actually says
D.C. Code § 29-809.06(a) authorizes a foreign limited liability company to become a domestic District of Columbia LLC under a plan of domestication, conditioned on the foreign LLC’s own governing statute authorizing the domestication, that governing statute’s jurisdiction not prohibiting it, and the foreign LLC complying with its governing statute in effecting it. This is a reciprocity condition tied to the origin jurisdiction’s own law, not a District-side restriction. The mechanism sits in Title 29, Chapter 8, Subchapter IX, captioned Merger and Domestication, part of the District’s 2006 Uniform LLC Act as enacted by D.C. Law 18-378, effective in 2011. Section 29-809.09 confirms the domesticated company is for all purposes the company that existed before the domestication and that the domestication does not dissolve it.
What the filing is and what it costs
The inbound filing is Articles of Domestication, filed under D.C. Code § 29-809.08(a) with the Mayor, in practice through DLCP’s Corporations Division; the practitioner-facing form is DC form GN-13, the Statement/Plan of Domestication of Domestic & Foreign Filing Entity.
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 District of Columbia 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.
- District of Columbia: https://code.dccouncil.gov/us/dc/council/code/sections/29-809.06. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12 (statute-tier, official government source for the statute text, confidence VERIFIED_CURRENCY_RISK for the fee); independently re-read on 2026-09-04 from code.dccouncil.gov, and section 29-809.06(a)-(b) matched the dataset verbatim. Separately re-fetched DLCP’s live fee page at dlcp.dc.gov/node/1621921, HTTP 200, which still lists $220.00 for Filings required for domestication and $99.00 for a Certificate of organization for a domestic LLC. As the dataset flagged, these two live DLCP figures do not cleanly reconcile with 17 DCMR § 17-601(k)’s formula-based fee text, which ties the domestication fee to the fee for registering a domestic filing entity; that reconciliation gap was not resolved today. $220 is used here as the current, live, operative DLCP figure, not as a fully reconciled statutory computation..