Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: yes: an LLC formed in another state can become a Ohio LLC and stay the same legal entity, keeping its EIN, formation date and contracts. Ohio’s statute calls the mechanism conversion, at Ohio Rev. Code § 1706.72(A). The filing fee could not be officially confirmed and is omitted here rather than guessed. The catch is at the other end of the move, not this one.
What Ohio’s statute actually says
The operative provision is Ohio Rev. Code § 1706.72(A), and Ohio’s Revised LLC Act never uses the word “domestication” at all; the function lives entirely inside its generic conversion provisions. The trap is in the definitions: § 1706.01 defines “limited liability company” as an Ohio-domestic entity only, so the statute’s phrase “an entity other than a limited liability company” isn’t limited to non-LLC entity types; it reaches a foreign LLC, which by that narrow definition isn’t “a limited liability company” under the Act’s own vocabulary. A foreign LLC converting into an Ohio LLC under that clause is inbound domestication in substance. The reciprocity condition runs both ways: § 1706.72(A)(2) requires that the law of the jurisdiction governing both the converting and converted entity not prohibit the conversion.
What the filing is and what it costs
Certificate of conversion filed with the Ohio Secretary of State under Ohio Rev. Code § 1706.722.
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 Delaware page. 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 Ohio 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.
- Ohio: https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-1706.72. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12 (statute-tier, official government source).