Ohio measures the conveyance fee on the property's value, so a $0 deed into your LLC isn't automatically a $0 bill

The Ohio Exemption, and the Conditions That Void It

Read the imposition before the exemption, because Ohio's is worded in a way that matters. R.C. 319.54(G)(3) charges the fee "[f]or receiving statements of value and administering section 319.202 of the Revised Code," measured on "the value of the real property transferred", not on the consideration recited, and not on what you paid for the property years ago. A deed reciting no consideration therefore does not produce a nil fee arithmetically. It produces a fee computed on value unless an exception applies.

The exception that fits is subparagraph (m): a transfer "[t]o or from a person when no money or other valuable and tangible consideration readily convertible into money is paid or to be paid for the real estate or manufactured or mobile home and the transaction is not a gift." An individual deeding a rental into an LLC they wholly own, for nothing, is the classic (m) transfer. The neighbouring exceptions look adjacent but do not reach you: (g) covers a distribution in kind on the dissolution of a corporation in exchange for the stockholder's shares, and (h) covers a conveyance "[b]y a subsidiary corporation to its parent corporation for no consideration, nominal consideration, or in sole consideration of the cancellation or surrender of the subsidiary's stock." Neither describes an individual moving a house into a new LLC.

The county layer is where the money usually is. R.C. 322.02(A) lets "any county ... levy and collect a tax to be known as the real property transfer tax on each deed conveying real property or any interest in real property located wholly or partially within the boundaries of the county," at a rate capped per hundred dollars of value, and the section is explicit about who pays: "[t]he tax shall be levied upon the grantor named in the deed and shall be paid by the grantor." On a taxable deed the permissive county tax can be several times the mandatory fee, so "how much is the conveyance fee in Ohio" has a different answer in each county.

One thing we could not settle, and it is the thing worth a phone call. The (m) exemption turns on whether "money or other valuable and tangible consideration readily convertible into money is paid or to be paid." Whether a mortgage the LLC takes the property subject to, or assumes, falls inside that phrase is not resolved by the statutory text, and we could not reach a Department of Taxation statement on it, four candidate URLs for Form DTE 100(EX), the Statement of Reason for Exemption from Real Property Conveyance Fee, all returned 404 on tax.ohio.gov when we checked. Because the fee base is value rather than price, the downside of assuming and being wrong is a fee computed on the whole property. Ask the county auditor's transfer desk before you present the deed, particularly if the property is financed.

One workaround Ohio does not close: neither R.C. 319.54(G)(3) nor R.C. 322.02 contains a controlling-interest provision. Both operate on a deed. A transfer of membership interests in an LLC that owns Ohio real estate is not itself a deed, and neither imposition section reaches it.

One thing we could not settle from a primary source: whether Ohio treats a mortgage the LLC takes the property subject to as taxable consideration. Several states do, and it is what turns an apparently free transfer into a real bill. Ask the recording office or a Ohio attorney before you record, particularly if the property is financed.

Whatever the state does, counties and municipalities in Ohio can levy transfer tax of their own on the same deed. Whether a local exemption follows the state one varies, and it is not safe to assume either way. Check with the recorder for the county the property sits in before you assume the total.

Authority: R.C. 319.54(G)(3)(m). codes.ohio.gov

Does the Transfer Reset Your Property Tax in Ohio?

No. Ohio does not cap a property’s assessed value at what you paid for it, assessments track market value on the assessor’s own cycle regardless of who holds title. A deed from you to an LLC you own does not change the assessment, because there was never an acquisition-date value locked in to lose. This is the part of the California story that gets copied onto pages about states where it simply does not apply.

Ohio county auditors appraise to true value on a six-year cycle. R.C. 5713.01(B) directs the auditor to "view and appraise or cause to be viewed and appraised at its true value in money, each lot or parcel of real estate ... at least once in each six-year period," and to "revalue and assess at any time all or any part of the real estate in such county ... where the auditor finds that the true or taxable values thereof have changed." There is no cap and there is no uncapping event, so there is nothing for a deed to reset.

What the deed does end is the owner-occupancy relief in R.C. 323.152. Both of its divisions operate only on a "homestead," and R.C. 323.151(A)(1)(a) defines that as a dwelling "owned and occupied as a home by an individual whose domicile is in this state." The section then lists what counts as owning it, "a holder of one of the several estates in fee, a vendee in possession under a purchase agreement or a land contract, a mortgagor, a life tenant, one or more tenants with a right of survivorship, tenants in common, and a settlor of a revocable or irrevocable inter vivos trust holding the title to a homestead occupied by the settlor as of right under the trust." That is a closed list and a limited liability company is not on it.

Timing helps a little: R.C. 323.152(C) provides that where a reduction has already been applied for, "if there is a transfer of ownership subsequent to the filing of an application for a reduction in taxes, such reductions are not forfeited for such year by virtue of such transfer," so the loss is prospective rather than clawed back mid-year.

One Ohio credit is not lost, and this is worth stating affirmatively because it is widely assumed to be. The partial exemption in R.C. 319.302 survives an LLC deed on a small rental. R.C. 319.302(A)(2) defines "[r]esidential activity" to include "leasing property improved with single-family, two-family, or three-family dwellings," and R.C. 319.302(B)(1) provides that "[r]eal property that is intended primarily for use in farming activity or residential activity shall qualify for a partial exemption from real property taxation." A one- to three-family rental held in an LLC still qualifies. The reduction percentages in R.C. 323.152(B) are on a rising schedule under H.B. 96 with staged effective dates through 2026, and R.C. 319.302 was itself amended in the same cycle, so any Ohio credit figure you find quoted elsewhere is worth re-checking against the current text.

Separately, and this catches people converting a former home into a rental: the benefits that turn on owning and occupying the property as your residence, a homestead exemption, an owner-occupancy credit, a residential assessment rate, are not things an LLC occupies a home to earn. Where the property still carries one, the deed puts it at risk, and the bill goes up whether or not the assessment itself moves. Which benefit is at stake, and on what terms, is a question for the assessor in the county the property sits in.

Authority: R.C. 5713.01(B); R.C. 323.151(A)(1)(a) and R.C. 323.152(B), codes.ohio.gov

Moving a Property You Already Own Into the LLC in Ohio

1. 1

   Call the county auditor's transfer desk before you draft the deed

   Ask two questions: whether your facts fit the R.C. 319.54(G)(3)(m) exemption, and whether the county levies a permissive transfer tax under R.C. 322.02. If the property carries a mortgage the LLC will take it subject to, raise that specifically. The statutory phrase is "money or other valuable and tangible consideration readily convertible into money," and whether an assumed mortgage sits inside it is not resolved by the text.

2. 2

   Get the current exemption statement form from the auditor

   The exemption is claimed when the deed is presented, on the Statement of Reason for Exemption from Real Property Conveyance Fee, DTE 100(EX). Get the version the auditor is actually accepting rather than a copy found elsewhere, and fill in the reason that matches the subparagraph you're relying on.

3. 3

   Ask your lender in writing before recording

   Get consent to the conveyance to a limited liability company you own, in writing, before the deed goes in. A recorded deed is public and can't be quietly undone, and in Ohio an unwinding deed is a second trip past the same conveyance fee analysis.

4. 4

   Present the deed and the exemption statement to the county auditor, then record

   In Ohio the deed goes to the county auditor for the conveyance fee and the transfer of the parcel on the tax list before it's recorded with the county recorder. Doing it in that order isn't optional and it's where the fee question actually gets answered.

5. 5

   File the R.C. 5323.02 update within sixty days

   If the property is in a county over the two hundred thousand population line, the ownership information on file with the county auditor is now wrong. Division (C) gives you sixty days from the change to update it, and the filing must name a member, manager or officer of the LLC with an address and telephone number. Nothing prompts this, and R.C. 5323.99 lets the auditor impose a special assessment on the property for a violation.

6. 6

   Check what happens to your credits before the next tax bill

   If the property still carried the owner-occupancy reduction, that ends prospectively. The R.C. 319.302 partial exemption should not, because leasing a single-family, two-family or three-family dwelling is "residential activity" under that section. Read the next bill against the previous one rather than assuming, since the reduction schedules were amended for 2026.

One LLC Per Property, or One for the Portfolio?

Ohio authorises series LLCs, so one filing can hold several properties in separate series.

Ohio's series provisions came in with S.B. 276 of the 133rd General Assembly and took effect on 12 April 2021. The block runs from R.C. 1706.76, which lets an operating agreement establish one or more designated series of assets, through R.C. 1706.7613 on distribution of funds when a series winds up, with the intervening sections covering how series assets are held, when the limited liability statement takes effect, and wrongful dissociation from a series. What Ohio does not have is a registered series: nothing in that block creates a series-level filing with the Secretary of State, so a series here is an internal creature of your operating agreement and your articles.

The shield at R.C. 1706.761 has three conditions and division (B) makes them cumulative, "applies only if all of the following conditions are met." The records maintained for the series must account for that series' assets separately from the company's other assets and from every other series; the operating agreement must contain a statement to the effect of the limitation; and the articles of organization must contain a statement that the company may have one or more series of assets subject to that limitation. The third one is the trap for an existing Ohio LLC. If your articles were filed without that statement, you cannot start running series inside the company by amending the operating agreement alone. The articles have to say it too.

The practical point specific to Ohio is that a series does not spare you the conveyance question. Moving a property into a series still means a deed presented to the county auditor, and the auditor is where the R.C. 319.54(G)(3)(m) exemption and the county's permissive tax get decided. What a series saves is the recurring cost of separate entities. What it does not save is the trip to the counter, and it adds a bookkeeping obligation you carry for as long as you hold the properties.

codes.ohio.gov

What Creditors Can Reach, What the Ohio Statute Says

The reason to hold a rental in an LLC is usually to keep a claim arising at the property from reaching everything else you own. The reverse question matters just as much and gets far less attention: if someone wins a judgment against you personally, can they reach the rental inside the LLC? That is what a state’s charging-order provision decides.

Ohio's LLC act makes the charging order the exclusive remedy, but does not address the single-member case one way or the other.

Ohio's charging order is R.C. 1706.342, "Charging order relating to judgments," effective 12 April 2021 under S.B. 276. Division (A) gives the creditor the ordinary remedy: a court "may charge the membership interest of the judgment debtor with payment of the unsatisfied amount of the judgment with interest," and once the company has been served, "the judgment creditor has only the right to receive any distribution or distributions to which the judgment debtor would otherwise be entitled in respect of the membership interest." Division (C) makes the charging order a lien on that interest.

Division (F) does the most work in the section, and it is worth reading in full rather than summarised. It provides that the section "provides the sole and exclusive remedy by which a judgment creditor of a member or assignee may satisfy a judgment out of the judgment debtor's membership interest, and the judgment creditor shall have no right to foreclose, under this chapter or any other law, upon the charging order, the charging order lien, or the judgment debtor's membership interest." It continues: "A judgment creditor of a member or assignee has no right to obtain possession of, or otherwise exercise legal or equitable remedies with respect to, the judgment debtor's membership interest or the property of a limited liability company. Court orders for actions or requests for accounts and inquiries that the judgment debtor might have made to the limited liability company are not available to a judgment creditor attempting to satisfy the judgment out of the judgment debtor's membership interest and may not be ordered by a court." Three separate closures in one division: no foreclosure, no possession, no discovery-style orders.

What division (F) does not do is address the single-member case. The words "single member," "sole member" and "one member" appear nowhere in R.C. 1706.342. Several states with much weaker protection wrote that question into the statute; Ohio wrote strong general language and left the question open. We are reporting the text, not predicting what an Ohio court would do with a one-owner rental LLC.

We are reporting what the section says, not what a court would do with your facts. Outcomes turn on how the LLC was capitalised, how it has been operated and what the creditor is owed, and none of that is something a page can assess. If the answer above is load-bearing for you, it is a question for a Ohio attorney.

Authority: Ohio Rev. Code § 1706.342, codes.ohio.gov

Three Problems No State Transfer Rule Solves

These land the same way in Ohio as everywhere else. One because it is federal law, two because they are contracts you signed. Which is exactly why they get left off state pages. They are also the three most likely to actually cost a landlord money, so they are here rather than buried.

The due-on-sale point is the one that generates the most bad advice. The Garn-St Germain Depository Institutions Act, at 12 U.S.C. § 1701j-3(d), bars a lender from enforcing a due-on-sale clause on nine categories of transfer of residential property of fewer than five dwelling units. The one people cite is the eighth: a transfer into an inter vivos trust in which the borrower is and remains a beneficiary and which does not relate to a transfer of rights of occupancy in the property. Neither that paragraph nor any of the other eight names a transfer to a limited liability company. The protection quoted for an LLC transfer is written for trusts, and the occupancy qualifier is the limb that matters most to a landlord, because a rental is occupied by someone else.

One honest caveat on that list. The ninth category is open-ended. It reaches any other transfer described in regulations issued under the Act, at 12 C.F.R. § 591.5(b), so it is a list that can be extended by regulation rather than a closed set fixed by the statute. We have not read those regulations end to end, and say so rather than describing the statute as more settled than we checked.

In practice lenders often do not call a loan when payments keep arriving, and that is genuinely what usually happens, but “usually not enforced” is a different thing from “not permitted,” and only one of them is a plan. The way to find out is to ask your servicer for written consent before you record, not after.

Which deed you use is a decision, not a formality. A quitclaim deed transfers whatever interest you happen to have and warrants nothing, which is why it is the cheap default for a transfer between yourself and your own company, and why title professionals warn against it. It can leave a gap in the chain of title that surfaces years later when you sell or refinance, and because it warrants nothing it gives the LLC no recourse against you if a defect turns up. A warranty deed carries the covenants across. Which one is appropriate depends on how the property was acquired and what your title history looks like, and it is a question worth asking before the deed is drafted rather than after it is recorded.

Tell your title insurer before you record. An owner’s title policy insures the person named in it. Convey the property to an LLC and the insured owner and the record owner are no longer the same. Which is the fact pattern in which coverage gets argued about at the worst possible moment, when a claim is already live. Some insurers will endorse an existing policy across to the entity, sometimes for a modest fee; some will not, and a new policy means a new premium on the current value. Either way it is a phone call before the deed rather than a discovery afterwards, and it belongs in the same budget as the tax above.

On the fourth thing people ask about: beneficial ownership reporting. Under 31 C.F.R. § 1010.380, a “reporting company” is an entity formed outside the United States and registered to do business in a State, and paragraph (c)(2)(xxiv) separately exempts any entity created by filing with a Secretary of State. A rental LLC you form in Ohio is therefore exempt and files no beneficial ownership report. Pages telling you to file within 30 days of formation are describing the rule as it stood before March 2025. The exception runs the other way: an LLC formed in another country and registered to do business in Ohio does still report. More on what compliance actually requires →

Does Ohio Make You Register the Rental?

Yes, for some rentals. Registration is administered by the County auditor of the county in which the property is located (duty imposed by state law, Ohio Rev. Code ch. 5323), under Ohio Rev. Code §§ 5323.01, 5323.02, 5323.99. A single-family dwelling can fall within it, not just apartment buildings. Read the scope below before assuming it does or does not reach yours.

The duty attaches to the rental itself, so it does not disappear when the deed does, but the registration is in your name and the owner is about to be the LLC. Some states let you amend the existing record; others treat a change of owner as ending the old registration and requiring a fresh one, sometimes with its own fee. Ask County auditor of the county in which the property is located (duty imposed by state law, Ohio Rev. Code ch. 5323) which of the two applies before you record, because nothing in the filing process prompts you to.

The reach is set by R.C. 5323.01(E), which defines residential rental property as property "located in a county that has a population of more than two hundred thousand according to the most recent decennial census and on which is located one or more dwelling units leased or otherwise rented to tenants solely for residential purposes, or a mobile home park," excluding a hotel or a college or university dormitory. One dwelling unit is enough, so a single rental house in a qualifying county is covered.

The part that matters to a reader of this page is what the filing has to contain once an LLC owns the property. R.C. 5323.02(A)(2) requires that where the property is owned by a limited liability company, the filing gives the name, address and telephone number of "[a] member, manager, or officer". A human being who can be reached, not just the entity's name. And division (C) requires the owner to "update the information required under division (A) of this section within sixty days after any change in the information occurs."

Recording a deed from you to your LLC is exactly such a change, and sixty days from recording is a deadline nothing will remind you of. R.C. 5323.99 lets the county auditor impose a special assessment on the property for a violation. The current text of R.C. 5323.02 carries an effective date of 30 September 2025 under H.B. 96, so this is live law rather than a dormant chapter.

codes.ohio.gov

If You Rent Short-Term in Ohio

A short-term let is a different tax animal from a twelve-month tenancy, and the LLC has nothing to do with it. The lodging tax follows the stay, not the owner.

The room-count gate is doing the work here, and it cuts both ways. R.C. 5739.01(B)(2) makes taxable "[a]ll transactions by which lodging by a hotel is or is to be furnished to transient guests," and R.C. 5739.01(M) defines a hotel as an establishment offering sleeping accommodations "in which five or more rooms are used for the accommodation of such guests, whether the rooms are in one or several structures, except as otherwise provided in section 5739.091 of the Revised Code." R.C. 5739.01(N) then defines transient guests by length of stay. A typical whole-house short-term rental sits below the room count, so the state sales tax does not attach to it.

That is not the end of the bill. Local lodging excise taxes sit on a separate base and are the ones a small Ohio short-term rental is most likely to owe. R.C. 5739.09(A)(1) lets a board of county commissioners "levy an excise tax ... on transactions by which lodging by a hotel is or is to be furnished to transient guests," R.C. 5739.08 gives municipal corporations and townships a parallel power, and for those local taxes the definition of hotel may be extended below five rooms. Falling outside the state tax tells you nothing about the county, city or township.

One qualification on the platform column above. The marketplace facilitator duty comes from R.C. 5741.07, in the use tax chapter, which provides that a facilitator treated as a seller "has the same rights and obligations under this chapter as other sellers," including registering with the tax commissioner and "collecting and remitting the taxes levied under this chapter on sales facilitated by the marketplace facilitator." That is a general obligation about who collects a tax that is owed. It does not by itself make an otherwise-untaxed lodging sale taxable, and it says nothing about the separate local excise taxes.

A platform collecting the state tax does not always cover every local tax on the same booking, and it never covers a booking taken directly. If you take reservations off-platform as well, that is where the exposure sits.

Authority: Ohio Rev. Code §§ 5739.01(B)(2), 5739.01(M), 5739.01(N), 5739.02(A)(1), 5739.08, 5739.09, codes.ohio.gov

Who to Ask in Ohio

The county auditor is the office that matters most in Ohio, and it wears three hats on this transaction. The auditor collects the conveyance fee and the county's permissive transfer tax when the deed is presented, so the auditor's transfer desk is who to ask whether your facts fit the R.C. 319.54(G)(3)(m) exemption and whether an assumed mortgage changes the answer. The same auditor maintains the appraisal that sets your assessment and administers the R.C. 323.152 owner-occupancy reduction and the R.C. 319.302 partial exemption. And the same auditor receives the R.C. 5323.02 rental owner filing and the sixty-day update.

For the conveyance fee exemption there's a form, DTE 100(EX), the Statement of Reason for Exemption from Real Property Conveyance Fee, though the Department of Taxation pages we tried for it returned 404s, so the auditor's own office is the reliable place to get the current version. For county and municipal lodging tax on a short-term rental, the levying body administers its own tax; the Department of Taxation doesn't collect it for them.

Forming the LLC Itself

Nothing about the formation process changes because the LLC will hold rental property, the articles, the registered agent requirement and the annual filing are the same as for any other Ohio LLC. The walkthrough lives in the formation guide rather than being repeated here.

How to start an LLC in Ohio →

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