When to get a new EIN

If you have an EIN as a sole proprietor or household employer, use that EIN for care you receive in your home. Don’t get a new EIN.

Get a new EIN if you:

• Incorporate
• Form a partnership
• Declare bankruptcy
• Purchase or inherit a business that you operate as a sole proprietor

You don’t need a new EIN if you:

• Change your business name or locations
• Own multiple businesses

Get a new EIN if you:

• Get a new charter for a corporation from the secretary of state
• Are a corporation’s subsidiary
• Change to a partnership or a sole proprietorship
• Merge and create a new corporation

You don’t need a new EIN if you:

• Change your business name or locations
• Declare bankruptcy
• Are a division of a corporation
• Are the surviving corporation after a corporate merger
• Choose to be taxed as an S corporation
• Reorganize to change only your identity or location
• Convert at the state level and don’t change your business structure

Get a new EIN if you:

• Incorporate
• Take over a partnership to operate as a sole proprietor
• End a partnership and begin a new one

You don’t need a new EIN if you:

• Change your name or locations
• Declare bankruptcy
• Form a new partnership after terminating one under IRC Section 708(b)(1)(B)
• Change ownership of 50% or more of the partnership within 12 months (See terminated partnerships under Treas. Reg. 301.6109-1)

Get a new EIN if you:

• Form a new single-member LLC and choose to be taxed as a corporation or S corporation
• Form a new single-member LLC and have to file excise or employment taxes
• Form a new multi-member LLC

You don’t need a new EIN if you:

• Change your name or locations
• Report income tax as a branch or division of another entity and you don’t have employees or owe excise tax
• Convert a partnership to an LLC classified as a partnership
• Change your tax election to a corporation or S corporation
• Form a single-member LLC and don’t choose to be taxed as a corporation or S corporation and don’t have employees or owe excise tax

Get a new EIN if you:

• Create a trust with estate funds (not simply a continuation of the estate)
• Represent an estate that operates a business after the owner's death

You don’t need a new EIN if you:

• Change your name or address and are the administrator, personal representative or executor

Get a new EIN if you:

• Have many trusts and one person is the grantor or maker
• Change to an estate
• Change a living or intervivos trust to a testamentary trust
• Terminate a living trust by distributing its property to a residual trust

You don’t need a new EIN if you:

• Change the trustee
• Change the grantor or beneficiary name or address