In Rhode Island the deed is the cheap part and the rental registry is the part that can cost you an eviction.

The Rhode Island Exemption, and the Conditions That Void It

Start with what Rhode Island doesn't have. § 44-25-2 lists the instruments the real estate conveyance tax doesn't apply to, and it's a list of specific situations rather than a general relief for related-party transfers: instruments “given to secure a debt”; instruments “wherein the United States, the state of Rhode Island, or its political subdivisions are designated the grantor”; certain deeds in the Providence capital center district; “[t]he qualified sale of a mobile or manufactured home community to a resident-owned organization”; acquisitions of real estate by the state or its subdivisions; and certain transfers among the owners of federally subsidised affordable-housing entities. A deed from you to an LLC you wholly own is none of those. If a page has told you Rhode Island exempts the entity transfer, it has invented a category.

What decides the bill is the base. Rhode Island measures the tax on what is paid, not on what the property is worth, and § 44-25-1(a) defines what counts as paid: the consideration is “inclusive of the value of any lien or encumbrance remaining at the time the sale, grant, assignment, transfer, or conveyance or vesting occurs.” Read that carefully, because it's broader than the usual assumption rule. The lien is counted because it remains, not because the LLC assumes it. So a debt-free rental deeded to your LLC for no money is a transfer where the consideration doesn't exceed the statutory floor and nothing is due; a mortgaged rental deeded on identical paperwork is taxed on the outstanding balance. Same deed, same parties, entirely different answer, and the variable is your mortgage statement rather than the deed.

Rhode Island also taxes the sale of the company instead of the building. The tax reaches the interest in an “acquired real estate company,” and a real estate company becomes acquired when a change in ownership that doesn't affect the continuity of the company's operations transfers, directly or indirectly, 50 percent or more of the total ownership in the company within three years. We took that definition from the Division of Taxation's own conveyance tax page; we didn't reach the full statutory definition text in § 44-25-1(c), so we're stating the rule without pinning a subsection quote to it. The three-year look-back is the part people miss when they sell a share at a time.

One freshness note. The Tier 1 rate rose effective October 1, 2025, and a great deal of what is published about Rhode Island conveyance tax is still on the old figure. The rate in the table above is the current one, taken from the statutory text and from the Division of Taxation's page, both of which we read. The Division's Notice 2025-05 and Advisory 2025-13 announce the change; we couldn't parse either PDF, and we didn't need to, but they're the documents to cite if someone tells you the rate is lower than what you see here.

Whatever the state does, counties and municipalities in Rhode Island 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.

Rhode Island also taxes transfers of a controlling interest in an entity that owns real property, which is aimed at the obvious workaround, selling the LLC rather than the building. How far it reaches varies: some states apply it to any realty-holding entity, others only above an ownership threshold or only to commercial property, so whether it touches a residential rental is a question for the state’s own rules rather than something to assume in either direction.

Authority: R.I. Gen. Laws § 44-25-1(a). webserver.rilegislature.gov

Does the Transfer Reset Your Property Tax in Rhode Island?

No. Rhode Island 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.

Rhode Island settles this in one sentence, which is unusual. Most states leave it to be inferred from how assessors work. R.I. Gen. Laws § 44-5-11.6 provides that “Cities and towns shall not change the assessment of any property based on the purchase price of the property after a transfer occurs except in accordance with a townwide or citywide revaluation or update schedule,” with an exception for newly constructed real estate. That's a direct statutory bar on repricing a parcel because it changed hands. Recording the deed can't move your assessment; the number changes when the municipality's scheduled revaluation or statistical update reaches the whole city or town, and not before.

On homestead exemptions the honest answer is that there's nothing statewide to lose or keep. Under § 44-3-9 an exemption is a local option: “the electors of any city or town qualified to vote on a proposition to appropriate money or impose a tax when legally assembled, may vote to authorize the city or town council … to exempt from payment, in whole or in part, real and personal property.” Several municipalities, Providence among them, do grant homestead exemptions. Whether a particular town's exemption survives ownership by an LLC is a question for that town's ordinance, and we didn't survey the ordinances, so this page makes no claim about them. Ask the assessor in the city or town the property sits in, and ask before the deed is recorded rather than after.

Authority: R.I. Gen. Laws § 44-5-11.6, webserver.rilegislature.gov

Moving a Property You Already Own Into the LLC in Rhode Island

1. 1

   Price the deed off the mortgage statement, not the deed

   Because § 44-25-1(a) counts a lien remaining at the time of conveyance as consideration, the outstanding balance is the tax base for a mortgaged rental even on a no-money deed. Get the payoff figure first. A paid-off property and a financed one at the same address produce completely different bills, and no drafting choice changes that.

2. 2

   Check the local layer before you assume the state figure is the total

   Municipal and land-trust conveyance fees exist alongside the state tax, and a local charge doesn't automatically follow a state outcome. Ask the city or town where the property sits what it levies on a deed, and ask specifically about any land trust fee, because those are municipality by municipality rather than statewide.

3. 3

   Record the deed with the city or town

   Rhode Island records at the municipal level rather than by county, so the recording office is the clerk in the city or town where the property sits. Absent an agreement to the contrary § 44-25-1(a) puts the tax on the grantor (you, not the LLC), which is worth settling in writing if anyone other than you has an interest in either side.

4. 4

   Re-register with the Department of Health in the LLC's name

   Subsection (d) gives you thirty days from the acquisition, and your LLC acquired the property when the deed was recorded. Subsection (a)(1) expressly contemplates “any business entity responsible for leasing to a tenant,” so the LLC is what goes on the registration. Then re-register by October 1 each year like every other landlord.

5. 5

   If the building predates 1978, sort the certificate of conformance for every unit

   Subsection (b) requires a valid certificate of conformance under the Lead Hazard Mitigation Act for each dwelling unit, or evidence of exemption. Being on the Department's lead-certificate exemption list doesn't exempt you from subsection (a) registration, and subsection (g) blocks a nonpayment eviction for non-compliance with (a), (b) and (d) alike.

6. 6

   If you let short-term, rebuild the tax stack from the current notice

   The composition changed on 1 January 2026 and the posted statutory text hasn't caught up. Work from the Division of Taxation's current notice, check whether your stays are whole-home or single-room because they're taxed by different routes, and confirm what your platform is filing on Form RI-8478 versus what you owe on direct bookings.

One LLC Per Property, or One for the Portfolio?

Rhode Island has no series LLC statute, so separating properties means a separate LLC for each one.

Rhode Island's LLC act simply doesn't contain the concept. We read the full index of sections for R.I. Gen. Laws ch. 7-16, from § 7-16-1 through § 7-16-77 including the lettered insertions at 7-16-3.1, 7-16-5.1, 7-16-50.1, 7-16-52.1 and 7-16-62.1, and none of them concerns series. We then pulled the definitions section, § 7-16-2, and searched it for “series”: zero occurrences. A series would have to be defined there, and it's not. So separating two Rhode Island rentals means two limited liability companies.

The Rhode Island-specific cost of that's not just the second filing fee. Every LLC that leases a dwelling is a landlord under § 34-18-58, and subsection (a)(1) requires the registry to carry the “[n]ames of individual landlords or any business entity responsible for leasing to a tenant.” Subsection (a)(6) requires “[i]nformation necessary to identify each dwelling unit.” A four-property portfolio split across four LLCs is four registrations, re-registered by October 1 of each year, and a lapse at one of them is a lapse at that property specifically. Separate entities are a compliance surface as much as a liability boundary here, which is a consideration most states don't force on you.

The other recurring cost is the conveyance tax itself, and it's per property rather than per portfolio. Because the base is the lien remaining on each parcel, a portfolio with three mortgaged properties and one paid off produces three bills and one free transfer. Pricing the whole restructure means pricing each deed against its own mortgage balance, not applying a single answer across the portfolio.

Practically, that leaves the familiar trade-off. Separate LLCs mean separate filing fees, separate annual reports, separate registered agents and separate bank accounts, every year, for as long as you hold the properties. One LLC holding several properties means one set of costs and one pool of assets exposed to a claim arising at any of them. Which side of that you land on is a function of how much equity is in the portfolio, and it is worth pricing the recurring cost before deciding, our Rhode Island LLC cost breakdown has the per-entity figures.

What Creditors Can Reach, What the Rhode Island 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.

Rhode Island's LLC act contains no exclusive-remedy provision.

The whole of § 7-16-37 (“Rights of judgment creditor”) is three sentences: “On application to a court of competent jurisdiction by any judgment creditor of a member, the court may charge the membership interest of the member with payment of the unsatisfied amount of judgment with interest. To the extent charged, the judgment creditor has only the rights of an assignee of the membership interest. This chapter doesn't deprive any member of the benefit of any exemption laws applicable to that member's membership interest.” That's the entire provision.

Read what it does and doesn't do. It gives a creditor a charging order and limits what the charging order delivers, assignee rights, meaning distributions if and when they're made. It doesn't say the charging order is the exclusive or sole remedy. It doesn't mention foreclosure of the charged interest, in either direction. And it doesn't use the words “single member,” “sole member” or “one member,” so the structure most rental owners actually use is neither singled out for protection nor singled out for exclusion. Rhode Island isn't unusual in that; it's unusual in not having revisited it. The history note reads P.L. 1992, ch. 280, § 1, and the section hasn't been amended since original enactment in 1992, while a number of other states have rewritten their equivalent provisions two and three times since.

The practical consequence is that the questions asset-protection marketing answers confidently are, in Rhode Island, answered by case law and by a court's reading of a 1992 sentence rather than by statutory text you can point at. We're not going to tell you how that comes out. We're telling you the text is silent, which is a different thing from the text being against you and a very different thing from the text protecting you.

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 Rhode Island attorney.

Authority: R.I. Gen. Laws § 7-16-37, webserver.rilegislature.gov

Three Problems No State Transfer Rule Solves

These land the same way in Rhode Island 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 Rhode Island 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 Rhode Island does still report. More on what compliance actually requires →

Does Rhode Island Make You Register the Rental?

Yes. Registration is administered by the Rhode Island Department of Health, under R.I. Gen. Laws § 34-18-58. 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 Rhode Island Department of Health which of the two applies before you record, because nothing in the filing process prompts you to.

Two corrections before the detail, because both are common. First, the operative authority is § 34-18-58, headed “Statewide mandatory rental registry,” enacted by P.L. 2023, ch. 156 and 157 and effective June 20, 2023, not § 23-24.6-18, which is sometimes cited for this and which reads, in its entirety, that nothing in that chapter alters the responsibilities of owners and occupants under the Housing Maintenance and Occupancy Code. That's a savings clause with no registration content. Second, the registry isn't a lead programme with a wider name. Subsection (a) applies to “[a]ll landlords” with no carve-out for unit type, building age or portfolio size.

The lead requirement sits on top of it. Subsection (b) requires landlords of pre-1978 residential property that's not exempt from the Lead Hazard Mitigation Act, ch. 42-128.1 of title 42, to provide the Department of Health with a valid certificate of conformance for each dwelling unit, or evidence of exemption. The exemptions the Department lists, a Full Lead-Safe Certificate, a Conditional Lead-Safe Certificate, a Certificate of Lead-Free Status, zoned housing for people 62 years or older, and temporary seasonal housing rented for no more than 100 days a year to the same tenant, are exemptions from the lead certificate under subsection (b). They're not exemptions from registration under subsection (a). Landlords read that list, find themselves on it, and conclude they have nothing to file. That's the mistake.

Timing is what makes this an LLC issue rather than a background one. Under subsection (d), a landlord who “acquires a rental property, or begins leasing a rental property to a new tenant” after September 1, 2024 must register “within thirty (30) days after the acquisition or lease to a tenant, whichever date is earlier,” and every landlord must re-register by October 1 of each year.

Your LLC acquires the property on the day the deed is recorded. Then subsection (e) sets monthly civil fines for failing to register, and subsection (g) supplies the sanction that actually bites: “a landlord or any agent of a landlord may not commence an action to evict for nonpayment of rent in any court of competent jurisdiction, unless, at the time the action is commenced, the landlord is in compliance with the requirements of subsections (a), (b), and (d) of this section.” An unregistered LLC landlord with a tenant who has stopped paying has a problem that no amount of asset protection addresses. Neither the statute nor the Department's registry page states a registration fee, and we looked, the blank in the table above is a checked absence, not an unchecked one.

webserver.rilegislature.gov

If You Rent Short-Term in Rhode Island

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 numbers moved on 1 January 2026, and almost everything published about Rhode Island short-term rental tax is now describing the old schedule. Two changes landed together: the “local” hotel tax rate went up, and a new whole-home short-term rental tax was created for a residential dwelling rented in its entirety. The second one exists because of a gap in the statute. The text of § 44-18-36.1(a) as posted on the General Assembly's server still says that “[a] house, condominium, or other resident dwelling shall be exempt from the five percent (5%) hotel tax under this subsection if the house, condominium, or other resident dwelling is rented in its entirety”. That's the whole-house exemption the new tax closes.

The two five-percent taxes are mutually exclusive. In the Division of Taxation's words, “No single short-term stay would be subject to both the 5% state hotel tax and the 5% whole home short-term rental tax.” The practical effect is that a whole-house let and a single-room let now arrive at the same total by different routes: the whole-house case picks up the new tax, the room case picks up the statewide hotel tax, and both carry the sales tax and the local hotel tax. If you're reconciling a platform's remittance statement against your own return, that composition is what you're matching, not just the total.

Two more things worth knowing. Timing is by stay, not by booking: “All state and local taxes are based on date of occupancy, not the date of booking,” so a reservation taken in 2025 for a 2026 stay is on the new schedule. And the 30-day exclusion is documentary. The Division requires “a documented arrangement, such as a written lease, for a rental period of more than 30 consecutive days” before a stay falls outside the tax and outside the registration requirement. A host in scope registers with the Division, pays the annual sales tax permit fee and remits, unless a platform files instead; Form RI-8478 is filed by hosting platforms and room resellers as well as by owners who rent directly.

One caveat we would rather state than hide: the statute page on webserver.rilegislature.gov hasn't been updated for the 2025 session and still shows the pre-2026 structure, with a history line ending at P.L. 2019. If you go to the statute to check this, you'll get the wrong answer. The Division of Taxation's Notice 2025-09 and ADV 2025-16 are the current authority and both are linked in the sources below.

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: R.I. Gen. Laws § 44-18-36.1; R.I. Division of Taxation Notice 2025-09 (Oct. 24, 2025); ADV 2025-16 (Aug. 29, 2025), tax.ri.gov

Who to Ask in Rhode Island

The Rhode Island Division of Taxation is the office for the conveyance tax and for short-term rental registration and remittance, and its notices, not the posted statutory text, are the current authority on 2026 lodging rates. The Rhode Island Department of Health runs the statewide rental registry under § 34-18-58 and issues the lead certificates that subsection (b) requires for pre-1978 units; that's one agency for two obligations that landlords tend to think of as unrelated.

Deeds are recorded with the city or town where the property sits, and that office is also where you find out whether your municipality or a local land trust levies a conveyance fee of its own, § 44-25-2(e) bars such a fee on acquisitions by the state, which presupposes they exist in other cases. Your municipal tax assessor holds the revaluation schedule that § 44-5-11.6 ties your assessment to, and is the only person who can tell you whether a local homestead exemption applies to a property held by an LLC.

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 Rhode Island LLC. The walkthrough lives in the formation guide rather than being repeated here.

How to start an LLC in Rhode Island →

Sources