Can I put my LLC interest into my living trust?

Read the operating agreement first. If a trust is not on the list of permitted holders, the transfer into it may never have taken effect.

Usually yes — but read the operating agreement before you do it, because if a trust is not among the permitted holders, the transfer may be void, and the defect is typically discovered years later by whoever is administering your estate.

Why agreements restrict transfers at all

Most operating agreements and shareholder agreements limit who may hold an interest. That is deliberate and sensible: the other owners agreed to be in business with you, and a restriction on transfer is how they keep control over who joins them. The list of permitted holders often names spouses, children, or entities controlled by an owner.

A great many of those lists do not name a revocable trust. Not out of hostility — the agreement was drafted from a form, ten years before anyone in the room had an estate plan.

What "void" means here

If the agreement prohibits an unpermitted transfer, an assignment into your trust may have no effect at all. On paper the trust holds the interest. Legally it may never have left you, which means it is part of your probate estate — the exact outcome the trust was created to prevent.

Worse, some agreements treat an attempted transfer as a triggering event, giving the other owners a right to buy the interest out at a formula price.

The fix, and why it is easy now

A consent, or an amendment adding trusts to the permitted holders, signed by the other owners. It is a short document and a straightforward conversation while relations are good. It is neither of those things after a dispute, a departure, or a death.

Where a transfer was made years ago without consent, it can usually be re-papered — a ratifying amendment confirming the transfer and treating it as permitted from the outset. Also easy now. Also not easy later.

The order we work in

We read the agreement before the plan, every time, because that is the order in which they take effect. A trust drafted without reference to the operating agreement is a set of instructions about shares somebody else's document controls.