How to Migrate a Stripe Account to a New Country

BySteve Burge

A few months ago, Logtivity was a UK-based company. Because of ownership changes, we needed to move the business to the USA. This move turned out to be far more difficult than we anticipated, because of Stripe.

The move was difficult enough that I wanted to write about it and help other people in the same situation. This post isn’t intended to criticize Stripe, but to help other people in the same situation.

You Can’t Move Stripe Accounts Between Countries

This is the first and most important fact that you need to know. If you create a Stripe account in one country, you can never move it to a different country.

Here’s the official Stripe documentation:

“As soon as an account has been activated on Stripe, there is no way for us to change the country of the account. At that point, the charge has gone through a specific gateway and changing it would be impossible as handling refunds or disputes for the charge(s) would be broken. The only solution is to create a brand new Stripe account set to the correct country moving forward.”

How to Move the Stripe Data

Here’s the process you’ll need to follow when moving Stripe data to a new country.

  • Step #1: Create your new Stripe account in the new country. For us, this meant opening a new account in the USA.
  • Step #2: Start the migration request. Log in to your old account. You can start the migration process here. Stripe will ask for the details of your new account.
  • Step #3. Accept the migration request. Log in to your new account. You can accept the migration.

Those three steps are the easy parts. Stripe will quickly and painlessly migrate some customer data to the new account. Your old account will stay active so you don’t have to use the new account until you’re ready.

However, this is the easy part of the move and there are plenty of potential issues.

Potential Issues With the Migration

The key problem is that only the basic customer details get copied over. This is what Stripe can move:

  • Billing name/name
  • Email
  • Telephone
  • Address/billing address
  • Cards, including card, source, and object of payment method

This means that all this other data is not moved:

  • Charges
  • Invoices
  • Plans
  • Subscriptions
  • Coupons
  • Events
  • Logs

Depending on the complexity of your old account, you will need to find some way to re-create all of that data. Logtivity is a subscription service so we had to rebuild all those subscriptions. We created a large spreadsheet and entered all of that data manually. If you have too many subscriptions to consider that, you will probably need to build a custom tool using the Stripe API.

This key problem is likely to cause related issues. For example, your old invoices will probably break and be unavailable to customers. You may find yourself manually creating past invoices, or downloading them from the old Stripe account.

We also ran into a different problem that is not unique to Stripe, but is still a headache. Over the last few years, Stripe has updated its codebase for payments. Our old Logtivity account was created three years ago, but we needed to make some noticeable changes to be ready for the new account created in 2024.

Conclusion

It is far from easy to migrate a business using Stripe to a new country. You will almost certainly need help from a developer and some detailed spreadsheets.

There is a company called “Stripe Transfer” than specializes in Stripe migrations. I didn’t realize it until after our migration, but that company is run by Colin Devroe. He’s a WordPress expert who works at NerdPress, who are Logtivity customers. I highly recommend talking with Collin if you need to migrate Stripe accounts.

Overall, I recommend planning carefully if you are thinking about buying or moving a business that has a Stripe account in a different country.

Also, if you plan to ever sell your business, it’s worth thinking ahead to the eventual sale. It will be far easier to sell if your Stripe account is registered in the same country as the buyer. For many of you, this means it will be smart to consider registering a legal entity in the USA so that your Stripe account can be created here too. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Stripe’s Atlas program is an excellent way to do this.