Twenty-One States Require Carry Training and Never Say How Much

Ask what training your state requires to carry a handgun and you expect a number. Forty-one of the fifty-one jurisdictions do require training for a permit. Only twenty of them tell you how much.

The other twenty-one require training and set no hour count at all. That is not a gap in our research. It is what the statutes say.

What the twenty-one substitute instead

A legislature that declines to specify hours has to specify something, and the somethings do not resemble one another.

South Dakota sets no clock hours for its enhanced permit and instead requires, at SDCL 23-7-58, live fire of at least 98 rounds, four named subject areas, and an NRA-certified instructor who also holds a current use-of-force certificate from the state Division of Criminal Investigation. Online courses are not accepted. Out-of-state courses are not accepted.

Rhode Island goes the other way and requires no classroom instruction whatsoever. What it requires is a score: 195 out of 300, thirty consecutive rounds at 25 yards, slow fire, ten minutes per ten-shot string. The application packet adds the line that tells you what kind of requirement this is — “you cannot qualify yourself.” A Rhode Island applicant need not learn anything. They must shoot well.

New Jersey defines its requirement by task and round count rather than clock time, which is why no hour figure appears in the state’s own materials.

Virginia, Oregon, Iowa, Montana, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Utah take the opposite approach again: a list of acceptable proofs, any one of which satisfies the mandate, with no hours and — in these seven — no live fire. The lists are broad. Several include a hunter education course, with no recency limit in the statute, so a card earned as a teenager can discharge an adult carry-training requirement thirty years later.

Where hours do exist, the range is 12-fold

Jurisdiction	Hours	Live fire
District of Columbia	18 (16 classroom + 2 range)	yes
New York	18 (16 classroom + 2 live fire)	yes
California, Illinois, Maryland	16	yes
New Mexico	15	yes
Alaska	12	yes
Louisiana	9	yes
Kentucky	up to 8	yes
Colorado, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma	8	yes
Arkansas	5	yes
Texas	4–6	yes
Hawaii	4+	yes
Tennessee (concealed permit only)	1.5	no (Enhanced is 8 hours with a range portion)

Tennessee is instructive because both ends of that table exist inside one state. The Enhanced permit takes an 8-hour course with a range portion. The Concealed permit, added in 2019, takes a 90-minute video that may be watched online, ending in a quiz. Both are carry permits. One is twelve times the other and reaches places the other does not.

Thirty states make you fire a gun. Eight do not.

Thirty of the forty-one require live fire. Eight explicitly do not — Arizona, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming — so in those a permit can be obtained without discharging a firearm.

Among the states that do require it, the round counts are as scattered as the hours: 30 in Illinois, with a 70% hit requirement at 5, 7 and 10 yards; 30 in Michigan; 30 in Rhode Island’s scored qualification at 25 yards; 98 in South Dakota.

Six jurisdictions attach no training condition to any permit

Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont attach no training condition to any permit they issue in the current snapshot. Vermont has no carry permit to attach a condition to; the other five jurisdictions issue permits without a training prerequisite. Permitless carry itself is a separate question from the optional permit’s requirements.

That claim is worth stating carefully, because “we found no requirement” and “there is no requirement” are different sentences. Each of these six was confirmed by reading the operative licensing statute in full: Ala. Code § 13A-11-75, O.C.G.A. § 16-11-129, IC 35-47-2, RSA 159:6, 18 Pa.C.S. § 6109. New Hampshire goes furthest — RSA 159:6, I(b) caps what the application form may ask, which prevents a town from adding a local training condition. Vermont requires nothing because there is no permit to attach a condition to.

Three other states require nothing for the standard permit but something for an upgraded one: Idaho, Mississippi and South Dakota for their enhanced tiers. Washington is a future-effective case: its standard permit has no training requirement until 1 May 2027.

Washington, on 1 May 2027

Washington requires no training for a concealed pistol license today. Two versions of RCW 9.41.070 are currently published — one headed “Effective until May 1, 2027” with no training provision, and one headed “Effective May 1, 2027”, enacted by 2025 c 370, which requires a certificate from a programme certified under RCW 43.43.575, taken within five years, with live fire of at least 50 rounds.

The State Patrol describes the certification programme as under development for early 2027. Anyone reading a guide to Washington written before that date — including this paragraph, after that date — should re-verify.

The part that matters if you drive

Twenty-one of the forty-one training states are permitless states. The mandate attaches to the optional permit, not to carrying. In Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming and the rest of them, you can decline the training by declining the document.

And then you have no document. A permit is the only thing another state has agreed to read, which is the whole argument for taking a course you are not required to take. The training requirement in a permitless state is not a condition of carrying. It is the price of being able to carry somewhere else.

What we do not know

Instructor verification is fragmented. We have located and linked official registry or verification URLs for 23 jurisdictions and ingested four of them in full. A URL is not always a statewide searchable roster: some are local, available on request, or identify an outside certifying body. The companion instructor-verification review separates those categories rather than treating every missing online roster as proof that no verification exists.

Three states could not be resolved to a single live-fire answer: Maine, North Dakota and Tennessee, each because the answer differs by permit type or is left to the issuing authority. They are recorded as unresolved rather than guessed.

Per-state detail, with the statute behind every figure, is on the state guides. The instructor registries we have ingested are searchable from each state’s page.