There are several long discussions on this on the net. The bottom line is there are four states that are used by a great majority of the full time RVers. These are Florida, Texas, South Dakota, and Montana. All of the others states have various tax, registration, or licensing issues that make them less attractive.

 

Depending on what RV, your income source, property ownership, and investment selections, one may be better than the other. Most fulltimers are domiciled in Texas, or South Dakota.

 

If you own real estate, then regardless of the tax benefits, it may be necessary to use that state as your domicile.

 

It appears that you can not easily register a converted HDT as a Motorhome in SD or PA. For this reason, we will probably select Texas as our domicile state.

 

There are a few states in which it would be ridiculous to use as a domicile. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, and Californistan.

 

Once you have selected a home state, then you need to establish residency. For the sake of simplicity, it makes sense to be fully domiciled in one state. There are those that make use of the liberal LLC registration process in Montana to set up RV ownership with a second state for domicile. While this may have some finacial advantages, the complexity of the paperwork and annual maintenance of the paperwork is just too much work for us.

 

Each state is different is how to establish residency. The easiest seems to be SD where almost all of it can be done remotely with just one trip to get dirvers licenses. However, SD won't recognize our converted HDT as a motorhome. To do that it needs to have a fully plumbed water closet.

 

You will need to have your "address", drivers licenses, vehicle registrations, auto insurance, financial portfolio, and mail forwarding service based in your domicile state. The financial portfolio is a matter of your current broker/advisor being licensed in your domicile state.

 

We will set up an "address" and mail forwarding first. The the TV and 5th wheel will be registered and insured in our new state. Then we will get our drivers licenses and voter registrations moved over.

 

Texas wins! Lvingston Texas to be exact. The combination of escpaees mail forwarding, no state income taxes, and southern climate make it our choice.