Updated August 14, 2026. Quick answer: moving house does not register anything. Across eleven registration sections in four states read for this page, not one asks where the owner lives. Every test is about what the company does. So the honest answer is that the move itself changes nothing — and that what usually happens alongside the move changes everything.
What the statutes actually test
Here is the trigger in each state. Read them for the subject of the sentence.
“A foreign limited liability company may not transact business in this state until it obtains a certificate of authority from the department.”
Fla. Stat. § 605.0902(1)
“To transact business in this state, a foreign entity must register under this chapter if the entity:”
Tex. Bus. Orgs. Code § 9.001 (read from an archived capture, 2025-11-19)
The subject is the company, every time. There is no clause in any of these sections about a member’s home address, domicile, driver’s licence or voter registration. That is a negative established by reading the sections, not an inference from silence in a search result.
Why the move usually changes the answer anyway
The move is not the trigger. The move is what causes the trigger. If you now run the business from the new state — you work there, you manage from there, the clients you sign are handled from there — then the company is doing something in the new state, and that is the thing the statute asks about. California’s version of the test is the clearest:
“(a) A foreign limited liability company that enters into repeated and successive transactions of business in this state, other than in interstate or foreign commerce, is considered to be transacting intrastate business in this state within the meaning of this article.”
Cal. Corp. Code § 17708.03(a)
A consultant who moved to California and kept working is transacting business in California. Not because they moved: because they are working there.
The three routes, and what each one leaves behind
- Register as a foreign LLC in the new state. The company stays formed where it was formed and is now on two registers. Two annual reports, two registered agents, two sets of fees, permanently. This is the route most people end up on by default.
- Move the company itself. Many states let a company change its home state without dissolving. The mechanism’s name varies and its availability genuinely varies, so it is a question to ask of both states before assuming it.
- Close the old one and form a new one. Clean, and more expensive than it looks: new formation, new EIN, contracts to reassign, bank account to reopen. If you go this way, close the old entity properly — walking away is the expensive option.
What you still owe the state you left
Nothing about moving stops the old state’s clock. Its annual report is still due, its minimum tax is still due, and its registered agent still has to exist. Those obligations run until you file something that ends them, and the bill for ignoring them is on the consequences page. What each state actually requires and charges is on the annual-report table and the five-year cost table. If you are paying for a registered agent in a state you no longer live in, that question is here.
What it costs to sit between the two
The failure mode is not choosing. You have left the old state and not registered in the new one, and both meters run. The new state’s penalty is real money — California’s is a flat annual charge from the tax authority, not the Secretary of State:
“The Franchise Tax Board shall impose a penalty of two thousand dollars ($2,000) per taxable year whenever an entity described in paragraph (2) is doing business in this state”
Cal. Rev. & Tax. Code § 19135(a)
$2,000 a taxable year, so $4,000 by the time two returns have gone in. And unregistered means you cannot bring a claim in the new state’s courts until you fix it.
What this page does not do
- It reads four states. Florida, Texas, California and New York. The proven negative — that no registration section turns on the owner’s residence — is proven for those eleven sections and no others.
- It does not tell you whether your company is transacting business in your new state. That is a facts question, and the facts are yours.
- It does not cover personal state income tax or residency. Where you owe income tax after a move is a separate regime from where your LLC registers, and moving is a trigger for one and not the other.
- It does not price the move-the-company route, because whether that route exists depends on both states and the fee schedules were not read here.
- Texas statutory text is from an archived capture of the state’s own site; the live site no longer serves the statute text itself.
Sources
Every figure on this page is computed from the text quoted below, as read on August 14, 2026. Each row links the document it was read from.
| What it establishes | Source |
|---|---|
| Florida’s registration mandate; the trigger is the entity’s activity. | Fla. Stat. § 605.0902(1) |
| Texas’s registration trigger is the entity’s activity, not the owner’s address. | Tex. Bus. Orgs. Code § 9.001 — archived capture 2025-11-19 |
| California’s general test – and the one a landlord falls to, because California never wrote a property exemption. | Cal. Corp. Code § 17708.03(a) |
| TRAP: California’s dollar penalty is not in the Corporations Code at all. It is a tax-code penalty of $2,000 a year, imposed by the FTB. | Cal. Rev. & Tax. Code § 19135(a) |
General consumer information, not financial, tax or legal advice. State rules are as published by the cited source on 2026-08-14 and change; your own facts govern, and a registration or reinstatement question with money on it is one to put to a lawyer or accountant in that state.