Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: yes: an LLC formed in another state can become a North Dakota LLC and stay the same legal entity, keeping its EIN, formation date and contracts. North Dakota’s statute calls the mechanism domestication, at N.D. Cent. Code Section 10-32.1-67(1). The base filing fee is $50, though an inbound domestication also triggers the ordinary new-entity organization fee on top of that base amount. North Dakota conditions the move on the departing state’s own law authorizing or at least not prohibiting the domestication.
What North Dakota’s statute actually says
N.D. Cent. Code Section 10-32.1-67(1) permits a foreign limited liability company to become a limited liability company under a plan of domestication if the governing statute of the foreign LLC authorizes the domestication, the domestication is not prohibited by the law of the jurisdiction that enacted that governing statute, and the foreign LLC complies with its own governing statute in effecting the domestication. Section 10-32.1-55 separately defines domesticated company and domesticating company as defined terms, and Section 10-32.1-67(3) requires the plan of domestication to state both entities’ names, their governing-statute jurisdictions, and the terms for converting interests. North Dakota’s LLC Act keeps domestication, conversion (Sections 10-32.1-61 through -66, which changes entity type rather than jurisdiction), and merger (Sections 10-32.1-56 through -60) as three separately defined, separately numbered transactions, so the statutory vocabulary is explicit and unambiguous on this point.
What the filing is and what it costs
Articles of Domestication are filed with the North Dakota Secretary of State under Section 10-32.1-69, together with an attached certificate of organization for the resulting North Dakota 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 North Dakota 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.
- North Dakota: https://ndlegis.gov/cencode/t10c32-1.pdf. Statutory text, Read 2026-08-12 (statute-tier, official government source, no mirror). Independently re-read on 2026-09-04 from ndlegis.gov, and the operative text of Section 10-32.1-67(1) and the Section 10-32.1-92(8) fee schedule both read word-for-word identical to the dataset’s quotes. The $50 figure is only the base articles-of-domestication filing fee under Section 10-32.1-92(8); for an inbound domestication resulting in a new North Dakota domestic LLC, a second fee of $135 under Section 10-32.1-92(1) also applies, so the total inbound cost is $185, disclosed honestly here rather than folded into a single filing-fee figure..