Carry Reciprocity Is Not Mutual, and the Gap Is Enormous

Almost everyone thinks about carry reciprocity as a property of a pair of states. Either they honor each other or they do not. You look up whether your permit “works” somewhere and you drive.

That model is wrong often enough to get someone arrested.

We built the complete grid — every jurisdiction against every other, assembled from each state’s own official recognition list rather than from a secondary map. Vermont is excluded throughout: it issues no permit, so there is nothing for another state to recognise or refuse, and counting it would inflate every figure below with relationships that cannot exist. That leaves 50 issuing jurisdictions and 1,225 possible pairs, of which 370 disagree with each other. Thirty percent of the time, recognition runs one way and not the other.

What one-way looks like

Alaska recognizes a California permit. California recognizes nothing — no out-of-state permit authorises carry there, from Alaska or anywhere else.

That is not an oversight on somebody’s part. It is two states making unrelated decisions about an inbound question, and there is no reason those decisions should line up. Reciprocity sounds mutual because of the word. The underlying law is not a treaty; it is fifty-one separate statutes about who may carry inside one particular border.

So the only question that matters is directional: not “do these two states have reciprocity”, but “does the state I am entering recognize the permit I am holding.” The reverse fact is irrelevant to you while you are driving into it.

The states that recognize everything, and the ones that recognize nothing

Nine jurisdictions recognize every permit another state actually issues: Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia, in this 10 August 2026 snapshot.

That number is only meaningful with the denominator attached, which is why most published versions of it disagree. Virginia’s own list recognizes every row in the grid including D.C., Vermont and itself. Indiana, Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma list every row but their own. Florida, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas list every issuing jurisdiction and, correctly, no Vermont permit — because there is none. Count the raw lists and you get four different answers to the same question. Count what a traveller can actually present at a traffic stop and you get nine.

A green cell is still only a boolean. It does not encode permit class, magazine limits or duty-to-inform. Check the destination state’s page for those.

Eleven recognize none at all: California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Rhode Island. If you carry, these are the borders that matter, and no permit you can obtain elsewhere changes the answer.

Two more jurisdictions have an empty recognition list for the opposite reason, and this is where a naive reading of the data goes badly wrong. New Hampshire and Vermont recognize nothing because they require nothing. Both allow permitless carry by residents and visitors alike, so there is no inbound recognition scheme to publish. Reading their blank rows as hostility inverts the truth: they are among the easiest places in the country to carry, and your permit is not rejected there so much as unnecessary.

Any reciprocity map that renders those two the same color as California is telling you the opposite of what is true.

How far each permit actually travels

The most widely recognized permit in the country is North Carolina’s, honored by 37 other jurisdictions. Kansas, North Dakota and Ohio follow at 36, and Idaho at 35. These are snapshot counts and can change when a statute, agency page, or permit-class restriction changes.

At the other end, a District of Columbia license is recognized by 11.

And then there is Vermont, which produces the strangest result in the dataset. Vermont is the most permissive state in the country on carry — it has never required a permit and does not issue one. Which means a Vermont resident has nothing to carry across a state line. The freest state to carry in leaves its own residents with no document that travels. A handful of states nominally list Vermont in their recognition rules, but there is no Vermont permit for them to recognize. Vermonters who travel armed generally have to obtain a non-resident permit from somewhere else — commonly Utah or Florida — precisely because their own state’s freedom does not export.

That is worth sitting with, because it is the clearest illustration of what a permit actually is once you leave home. It is not permission to own a gun. It is a travel document, and it is the only thing other states have agreed to read.

Why we built it from the states rather than from a map

There are several reciprocity maps online. Most of them are assembled in both directions at once, which is how they end up internally inconsistent: a chart can easily claim A honors B on one page and deny it on another.

We store one direction only. Each state’s record lists what that state honors, taken from the source that state publishes, because that is the direction each state has authority over. The reverse — who honors you — is computed by inverting the whole set. There is one fact per relationship and one source for it, so the two directions cannot drift apart.

The limitation of that method is worth stating: it is only as current as the state pages, and those go stale. Texas is the live example. Its statute was amended in September 2025 to recognize every other state’s license, and the DPS reciprocity chart still displayed the older position afterwards, including entries saying Minnesota and Wisconsin holders could not carry there. We follow the statute and flag the conflict on the state page. But it demonstrates the underlying problem: recognition can change by legislation or by an attorney general’s opinion, without anyone updating the page you are reading.

The practical version

If you carry across state lines, three things follow from the data.

Check the direction you are travelling, not the pair. Thirty percent of pairs are asymmetric, so the reverse fact is a coin flip.

Recognition is a property of the permit, not of you. Which is why residents of permitless-carry states still tend to get the permit their state made optional — constitutional carry stops at the border, and the permit is the part that moves.

Confirm before a long trip. Not because our grid is careless, but because the underlying facts change without notice and the consequence of being wrong is criminal rather than inconvenient.

The full grid, including which pairs disagree, is at our reciprocity matrix. Every row links to that state’s own official source so you can check us.