Updated September 4, 2026. Quick answer: you cannot. West Virginia has no statute letting an out-of-state LLC become a West Virginia LLC while remaining the same legal entity, keeping its EIN, formation date, and contracts intact. Chapter 31B, Article 9 (Conversions and Mergers) and Article 10 (Foreign Limited Liability Companies) contain no provision for it. The route that does work is a merger under W. Va. Code § 31B-9-904.
Why the answer is no
Article 9, sections 31B-9-901 through 31B-9-907, was read in full. Section 31B-9-902 converts only a partnership or limited partnership into an LLC, an entity-type change that does not reach an existing LLC of any kind. Sections 31B-9-904 through 31B-9-906 govern merger, a different transaction from domestication. Article 10, sections 31B-10-1001 through 31B-10-1009, governs an out-of-state LLC registering to transact business in West Virginia as a foreign LLC; section 31B-10-1001(a) expressly leaves that LLC’s governing law with the state where it was organized, so registering under Article 10 does not change the entity’s home jurisdiction. No section in either article, or anywhere else in Title 31, uses the words domestication, redomestication, transfer of domicile, or continuance in connection with an LLC.
The route that does work
Section 31B-9-904 authorizes a limited liability company to merge with or into one or more limited liability companies, foreign limited liability companies, corporations, foreign corporations, partnerships, foreign partnerships, limited partnerships, foreign limited partnerships, or other domestic or foreign entities, with articles of merger filed under section 31B-9-905. This produces a surviving entity, not a continuation of the original LLC’s own legal identity: if a newly formed West Virginia LLC is the surviving entity, the result is a different legal entity with a new formation date, and continuity of the EIN, bank accounts, and contracts depends on IRS and counterparty treatment rather than on this statute. West Virginia’s merger filing fee was not independently verified in the underlying research, so no dollar figure is stated for it here.
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.
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 is on the domestication states list.
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.
- West Virginia: https://code.wvlegislature.gov/email/31B/. Statutory text, read 2026-08-12 (statute-tier, official government source); independently re-read on 2026-09-04 from code.wvlegislature.gov/31B-9/. The Article 9 table of contents (sections 31B-9-901 through 31B-9-907, captioned Conversions and Mergers) still matches the dataset exactly, confirming no new domestication or LLC-to-LLC conversion section has been added. As the dataset itself notes, this site lazy-loads section body text through a separate call that a direct page fetch does not retrieve, so today’s re-fetch, like the original research, confirms the article structure and section captions rather than the full body text of section 31B-9-902 and section 31B-9-904; this caption-only limitation is carried over honestly from the original sourcing, not a new gap introduced today..