LLC Charging Order Protection by State — Explainer

Matrix explainer. Coverage: whether a charging order is a creditor's exclusive remedy against an LLC interest, and whether single-member LLCs are carved out. Source matrix: llc-charging-order-protection-by-state. 51 jurisdictions. Not legal advice.

Short answer

Most states protect LLC membership interests the way the pitch describes it: a personal judgment against an owner can redirect distributions but can't force a sale of the interest or hand the creditor a seat at the table. 42 of 51 jurisdictions call the charging order the exclusive remedy. But "exclusive" is doing less work than it sounds like in roughly half of those states, and single-member LLCs — the structure most real-estate investors and solo operators actually use — get materially weaker protection than multi-member LLCs in 10 states. The strongest, cleanest protection (exclusive remedy, foreclosure barred outright, no single-member carve-out) is Texas, Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, and Michigan. The weakest is Colorado and Oregon, where the statute doesn't claim exclusivity at all and openly contemplates foreclosure.

Three layers to check, not one

• Is the charging order exclusive? (42 yes / 9 no) Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Mexico, Oregon, and Rhode Island do not make the charging order the exclusive remedy. Georgia is the most explicit about it — its statute affirmatively names garnishment as an available alternative, something no other state in the matrix does. Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Missouri are simply silent: sparse, pre-2006 statutes with no exclusivity language, no foreclosure provision either way, and no single-member language — weak by omission rather than by an affirmative creditor-friendly rule.
• If it's exclusive, can the interest still be foreclosed? (mixed) Two sub-models exist inside the "exclusive" group. The strict model — Delaware, Texas, Alaska, Connecticut, Kansas, Michigan, Maine, and others — bars foreclosure outright, in the statute's own words. The permissive model — DC, Idaho, Iowa, Hawaii, Maryland, Illinois, Kentucky, Montana, South Carolina, Washington, West Virginia, and more — still calls the charging order exclusive but lets a court order foreclosure once distributions won't satisfy the debt in a reasonable time (a few, like Hawaii and Illinois, allow it on no showing at all — "at any time").
• Does a single-member LLC lose ground? (10 states carve it out, 3 states affirmatively don't) DC, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin share a specific, recognizable rule: when a sole member's interest is foreclosed, the purchaser doesn't just get the distributions — they become a full member, and the original owner is dissociated. New Hampshire's version is the most detailed, running a multi-paragraph statutory framework rather than a single clause. North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota went the opposite direction and wrote in language stating the protection covers single-member LLCs specifically — removing any ambiguity a court might otherwise read into silence.

The pattern behind the pattern

The permissive-foreclosure states aren't random — most trace to the same source text. DC, Idaho, and Iowa are near word-for-word matches to the 2006 Uniform LLC Act's charging order section, right down to the sole-member-foreclosure-conversion clause. Delaware and Kansas share different but also near-identical language to each other (Kansas's statute was evidently modeled on Delaware's). Pennsylvania, Utah, and Vermont share an almost-identical single-member carve-out clause that isn't part of either template — a specific, later model-act provision a subset of states adopted independently. Knowing which family a state's statute belongs to is a faster way to predict its shape than reading each one cold.

A few states are genuine outliers worth naming directly. Florida is the one state that explicitly departs from Texas/Nevada/Wyoming's no-carve-out model by name — a 2013 codified response to the Florida Supreme Court's Olmstead decision, letting a court foreclose a sole member's entire interest. North Dakota and Oklahoma both go further than most states and expressly bar foreclosure by name in the statute text, rather than leaving it to silence. New Hampshire draws a sharper line than almost anyone else in the matrix: execution against a multi-member LLC's debtor-member is categorically unavailable, full stop — but becomes available against a single-member LLC's owner on a reasonable-time showing.

What the matrix does not prove

• Statutory silence isn't the same confidence level as an affirmative rule. Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, Colorado, Oregon, New Mexico, and Rhode Island all reach an exclusive_remedy=false or no-carve-out reading from the statute simply not addressing the question — a real but lower-confidence finding than a state that states its rule outright. The matrix records which case applies per row.
• Case law can move the answer without amending the statute. Several rows flag reported court decisions — a 2024 Second Circuit ruling read as narrowing New York's exclusivity for wholly-owned interests; a 2026 Virginia decision reportedly reading a foreclosure bar into otherwise-silent statutory text — that were not independently verified against the underlying opinions. These are noted as lower-confidence context, not folded into the primary statutory finding.
• This tracks the domestic-LLC line only. Foreign-LLC, corporate, and partnership charging-order provisions can differ from the domestic-LLC citation this matrix is bound to, even within the same state's code.
• Reverse veil-piercing is a separate legal theory. A small number of states have case law (California's Curci v. Baldwin is noted in this matrix) letting a creditor reach LLC assets directly rather than through a charging order at all. That doctrine is outside this matrix's scope.

See also: LLC Charging Order Protection by State (matrix) · Homestead Exemption by State — Explainer · Domestic Asset Protection Trust States — Explainer