What a Carry Permit Really Costs

Almost every state publishes a fee for its carry permit. Almost none of them publish what the permit costs.

The gap is not a rounding error. California publishes a $93 state fee, while the real outlay runs $414.50 to $938 once the county fee, fingerprints and sixteen hours of training are counted — the floor being the cheapest county with no psychological assessment, the ceiling Orange County plus one. Neither end is a statewide mandatory total, and neither supports a national superlative while ten jurisdictions remain uncosted. It does show why a fee-only ranking can understate the burden in a high-cost county.

Where the money actually goes

A state fee buys the application. It does not buy the things the state requires you to have before applying.

Fingerprinting is nearly always a private vendor charge. Florida folds $42 into its published $97; Michigan adds $15 by statute; Indiana’s IDEMIA capture is $12.95. Many states simply say the applicant bears “the actual cost” and leave it there. Kansas is the cleanest illustration that the fee and the license are different things: the license has been free since July 2023, and the entire $32.50 the applicant pays is the sheriff taking the prints.

Training is bought from an instructor, not the state, which is exactly why it never appears on an official fee schedule. In the 16-hour states it is usually the largest single line — bigger than the state fee.

Local fees are the wild card. Colorado’s statewide CBI portion is a fixed $52.50, itemised in statute as $17.50 for the CCIC fingerprint check, $13.00 for InstaCheck and $22.00 for the FBI check — and then each sheriff adds a processing fee of up to $100. California goes further: Penal Code § 26190 lets every county and city set its own, and Orange County charges $300 on top of the state’s $93.

And then the unusual ones. Delaware requires newspaper publication of the application. Rhode Island wants notarisations and passport photos. California can require a psychological assessment — the only state we have found that does.

The table

Estimated or illustrative totals for the 41 states we can currently compare. The state fee column is what the government publishes; the total includes fingerprinting, mandatory training, and known local charges. A range may combine official figures with the explicitly marked $15–45 fingerprint estimate, and California’s row is a county-variable scenario rather than a statewide price.

Rows marked * contain one estimated component. In eighteen states nobody publishes what fingerprinting costs, so we use $15–45 — derived below from the thirteen jurisdictions that do publish a figure. Every other number in the table is sourced.

State	Published fee	Realistic total	Term	Per year
South Dakota	$0	$0	5 yr	$0
Vermont	—	$0	no permit	$0
New Hampshire	$10	$10	5 yr	$2
Indiana	$0	$14–15	5 yr	$3
Pennsylvania	$20	$20	5 yr	$4
Alabama	$125	$37.50–125	5 yr	$16
Georgia	$75	$72–87	5 yr	$16
South Carolina	$0	$80–295 *	5 yr	$38
Kansas	$32.50	$108–283	4 yr	$49
Mississippi	$112	$112	5 yr	$22
Wisconsin	$40	$115–290	5 yr	$41
Iowa	$50	$125–300	5 yr	$43
Maine	$50	$125–300	4 yr	$53
Virginia	$50	$125–300	5 yr	$43
West Virginia	$50	$125–300	5 yr	$43
Montana	$50	$125–305	5 yr	$43
Texas	$40	$125–335 *	4 yr	$58
Utah	$52	$127–302	5 yr	$43
Colorado	$152.50	$128–403	5 yr	$53
Kentucky	$60	$135–310	5 yr	$45
Arizona	$60	$150–355 *	5 yr	$51
Ohio	$67	$157–362 *	5 yr	$52
North Carolina	$80	$165–340	5 yr	$51
Wyoming	$64	$169–374 *	5 yr	$54
Florida	$97	$172–347	7 yr	$37
Oklahoma	$100	$175–375	5 yr	$55
Alaska	$87	$177–382 *	5 yr	$56
Arkansas	$50	$180.61–385.61 *	5 yr	$57
District of Columbia	$75	$185–373	2 yr	$140
Michigan	$100	$190–365	4.5 yr	$62
Massachusetts	$100	$190–395 *	6 yr	$49
Nebraska	$100	$190–395 *	5 yr	$59
Tennessee	$100	$190–395 *	8 yr	$37
Oregon	$115	$205–410 *	4 yr	$77
Louisiana	$125	$215–420 *	5 yr	$64
Hawaii	$150	$240–445 *	4 yr	$86
New Mexico	$100	$265–495 *	4 yr	$95
Maryland	$125	$290–520 *	2 yr	$203
Illinois	$150	$315–545 *	5 yr	$86
New Jersey	$226	$316–521 *	2 yr	$209
California	$93	$414.50–938 *	2 yr	$338

Five things fall out of that table that a fee list cannot show you.

There is no national ranking to quote yet. The cheapest permit in the current table is free, so the spread cannot be stated as a ratio at all: it runs from nothing to the high end of a county-specific California scenario. Comparing published fees, the range across these states is wide but explicable. Comparing what people actually pay, South Dakota and a high-cost California county are not in the same category of thing, but the dataset does not establish California as the most expensive jurisdiction nationwide.

The published fee is honest in four states: South Dakota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Mississippi. All four require no training, which is not a coincidence — training is the component a state cannot price, because it is bought from a private instructor, so wherever it is required the official figure is guaranteed to be incomplete. The reverse does not follow, and Indiana is the proof: no training there either, but $12.95 of fingerprinting still sits outside its $0 fee. What separates the honest four is that fingerprinting is free, not required, or already folded in — Mississippi’s published $112 contains the $32 capture charge, as Florida’s $97 contains $42, where Michigan’s $100 and Indiana’s $0 do not.

Twice, the published figure is too high. Alabama publishes $125 for five years, but Ala. Code § 13A-11-75(f) applies that only where no local law exists: “the fee … shall be the same as currently provided by local law for that county.” Jefferson County charges $37.50 for the same permit. Georgia’s $75 is not a fee at all but an average of what its probate courts charge, which run $72 to $81.50. In both, the county fee is not added to the state’s — it is the fee, which is the reverse of the California and Colorado arrangement, and it means a fee table can mislead in either direction.

Below about $60, the fee stops carrying information. Wisconsin charges $40, Iowa, Maine, Virginia, West Virginia and Montana $50, Kentucky $60 — and all seven land between $115 and $310, because in each the state’s fee is the only government charge, no fingerprints are required, and the course is everything else. A reader comparing those seven by published fee would think Kentucky costs half again what Wisconsin does. The real gap between them is about 10%.

South Carolina is the limiting case. It charges nothing — SLED is forbidden by statute from charging a fee of any kind — and the permit still costs $80 to $295, because the training requirement it kept is bought from a private instructor. A published fee of zero and a published fee of $60 tell you almost the same thing about the bill, which is to say almost nothing.

Term length is half the story. The District of Columbia’s permit is cheaper than Michigan’s to obtain and more than twice as expensive to hold, because it expires in two years rather than four and a half. Maryland and New Jersey are punishing for the same reason. The bargains among the 41 costed rows are at the other end: Tennessee and Massachusetts both look mid-table at $190 or so up front, and both fall to about $37 and $49 a year on eight- and six-year terms — among those 41, Tennessee ties Florida’s seven-year permit for the cheapest annualized figure in a training-required state. Ten jurisdictions remain uncosted, so that is not a national ranking. Oregon costs slightly less to obtain than Louisiana and about a fifth more per year, purely because it expires a year sooner.

The other end

Five states are worth stating plainly because they are so far from everywhere else, and each arrives at a near-zero bill by a different route.

Vermont has nothing to charge for. It is the only state that has never issued a carry permit, so there is no application, no fee to waive and no training requirement — a license has to exist before a condition can attach to it. That makes Vermont’s $0 a different fact from South Dakota’s, and the distinction matters to anyone travelling: a South Dakotan carries a document other states can choose to recognize, and a Vermonter has none to show. Which is why Vermont residents who want that recognition apply to Utah or Florida for a non-resident permit and pay those states instead.

South Dakota charges nothing at all. This is not a waiver or a discount applied to a fee: since 2022 SDCL chapter 23-7 has contained no provision authorising a charge to the applicant. Under SDCL 23-7-72 the money runs the other way — the Secretary of State reimburses each county $3 for every regular permit issued. The Regular permit requires no training and no fingerprints, so nothing is bought privately either.

New Hampshire charges $10, and forbids asking for more than the money. RSA 159:6, I(b) sets $10 for residents, original or renewal, and caps what the form may ask so that a town cannot bolt on a local prerequisite. The same section bars fingerprints and photographs outright. Since carrying requires no license in New Hampshire at all, the $10 buys nothing but out-of-state recognition.

Indiana made the license free but not the fingerprints. IC 35-47-2-4(b): “There is no fee for a license to carry a handgun,” and since July 2021 local agencies have been barred from charging one either. The whole cost is $12.95 of IDEMIA fingerprinting and about a dollar of portal fee.

Pennsylvania charges $20 and cannot agree with itself about it. 18 Pa.C.S. § 6109(h) sets a $19 license fee and adds $1 for the Firearms License Validation System Account; § 6109(h)(4) forbids the sheriff from adding a background-check fee on top. The State Police page nonetheless words the total as $19. We use the figure the statute produces.

A permit that costs nothing for five years and one that can cost $938 for two are not the same policy instrument with a different price tag. They are different policies.

The number nobody publishes

Twenty-four states could not be totalled from published figures alone, and nineteen of them failed on the same line: what it costs to have your fingerprints taken.

The pattern is consistent enough to be a finding in itself. Almost every state we can total either takes the prints itself at a fixed or capped fee — Kansas $32.50, North Carolina $10, Oklahoma up to $25, Montana $5 — or folds them into the published fee, as Utah, Florida and Mississippi do, or does not require them at all, as the seven states in the $115–310 band do not. The states we could not total are the ones that handed capture to a private vendor (IdentoGO, IDEMIA, Live Scan, Ohio’s WebCheck) or to a sheriff authorised to recover “actual cost”, and in doing so stopped setting a price. Texas is the clearest case: $40 is a real and complete state fee, and the fingerprint charge sitting beside it appears on no schedule DPS publishes. The state did not raise the cost of a permit by outsourcing this. It made the cost unknowable.

Nor will the vendors say. IdentoGO and IDEMIA between them handle firearm fingerprinting for most of these states, and neither publishes a rate card — their own state pages quote a price only once you have booked an appointment.

So we estimated it, and marked every row where we did. The estimate is $15–45, and it comes from the thirteen jurisdictions that do publish a fingerprint charge, each sourced on its own state page:

$5 in Georgia, Montana and South Carolina (statutory caps on what a law enforcement agency may charge) · $10 in North Carolina, and $10 in Texas for ink-rolled prints under Human Resource Code 80.001 · $12.95 in Indiana · $15 in Michigan · $25 in Oklahoma · $32 in Mississippi · $32.50 in Kansas · $35 in the District of Columbia · $39 in Nevada · $42 in Florida

Those thirteen run $5 to $42, median $15, and they split cleanly in two: a $5–15 cluster where a sheriff takes the prints under a statutory cap, and a $25–42 cluster for electronic submission that carries the state or FBI record check with it. The eighteen states we applied the estimate to are all in the second group — a private vendor doing electronic capture — so the range runs from the overall median to just past the highest published figure. California, Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey were costed before we settled on this and now use the same figure as the rest.

Two rules keep this honest. The estimate is used only where fingerprinting is the sole unpriced charge, so that no total rests on more than one guess; and where a state publishes a floor, that floor is used instead, which is why South Carolina’s range starts at its statutory $5 and Texas’s at $10.

That leaves ten states still without a total.

Five have a second unpriced charge the estimate cannot reach. Connecticut and Washington add an open-ended FBI record-check pass-through on top of the prints — the statute asks for “sufficient funds” and fixes no amount. Rhode Island wants a range qualification, notarisations and photographs, none of them priced. North Dakota adds range fees and two passport photographs set in the Attorney General’s rules. Idaho lets the sheriff recover “license materials” at actual cost alongside the prints.

Four publish a cap rather than a price, and a ceiling is not a cost. Minnesota’s $100 is the purest example — the sheriff may charge “the actual and reasonable direct cost of processing the application or $100, whichever is less”, and Scott County charges $80 — and it is the most frustrating, because Minnesota requires no fingerprints and would otherwise be among the easiest states in the country to cost. Missouri caps at $100 and Boone County charges $95. Nevada caps the sheriff’s own fee at $60 and then passes the background-check charge through at whatever the Central Repository and the FBI are charging that year. New York does not have a statewide fee to cap: Penal Law § 400.00(14) holds the county license fee between three and ten dollars upstate, while New York City and Nassau County set their own by local law in the hundreds. The same license, in the same state, differs by two orders of magnitude.

And the tenth, Delaware, requires you to buy advertising. 11 Del. C. § 1441 makes publication of the application in a newspaper a condition of the license. The State sets no rate for it, because the State is not the one charging. It is the only requirement of its kind we have found, and on its own it puts a total out of reach.

The reasons overlap — Missouri, Nevada and New York have unpriced fingerprinting on top of their caps, and Delaware has it too — but each state is listed under the reason that would still block a total if everything else resolved. That is also why the fingerprint estimate does not rescue them: it fills one hole, and these states have two.

What we are less sure about

Five limits, because this is the sort of article where the numbers get quoted back at you.

Training prices are estimates. We used $75–250 for a typical course and $150–350 where 16 hours are required. Those are reasonable market figures, not a survey of instructors, and they are the softest numbers in the table. The state fees, statutory fingerprint charges and capped local fees are hard.

So is the fingerprint figure in eighteen rows. The $15–45 we use where no price is published is derived from the thirteen states that do publish one, not from a vendor quote, because the vendors do not give quotes. Those rows are marked with an asterisk, and on each state’s page the row says so in terms. It is the only estimated component we allow into a total, and never more than one per state.

County variation is real and large. In California and Colorado, what you pay depends on which county you live in. The ranges reflect that, and your own bill may sit outside them.

Some applicants pay nothing for training. Iowa, Maine, Montana, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin all let the requirement be met by something a person may already hold — a hunter-education certificate, prior military service, a course completed years ago. We add a course price to every row for comparability, but in those six states an applicant who already qualifies pays the bare fee and nothing else. Arizona, Oregon and Wyoming belong on that list too, which is why their real low ends are softer than the table suggests.

Forty-one states of fifty-one. These are the ones we can total, either because the components are all published or because fingerprinting is the single missing number and we have estimated it. The other ten are covered in the section above, with the missing number named in each case. Washington is the nearest miss, and the one figure in this article with a known expiry date: $36 and no training required today, but on 1 May 2027 a certified course with fifty rounds of live fire becomes a condition of the license, which will add the largest line in this table to a permit that currently has almost none.

Every total is the sum of the figures shown beside it. That was not true when this piece was first drafted. Illinois and Maryland carried a Livescan estimate their component lists did not name — precisely the practice this article complains about — while California and New Jersey did the opposite and left the fingerprint charge out of the total altogether, understating the two most expensive permits in the country. All four now use the same $15–45 as every other estimated row, and all four are marked. California’s figure moved from $550–900 to $414.50–938, and New Jersey’s from $301–476 to $316–521. The California floor moved down as well as up: the psychological assessment it once carried is conditional, and a charge most applicants never pay does not belong in the cheapest case.

Where each number comes from

Every state name in the table is a link to that state’s own page, and that is deliberate. A cost table without row-level provenance is an assertion, and this article’s whole complaint is about published figures nobody can trace. Each state page carries the statutory citation for the fee, the issuing authority’s own application page, and the source list behind every component — so any single row above can be checked back to a statute without taking our word for the total.

The underlying dataset was last verified on 10 August 2026, and every figure here is drawn from it rather than typed in alongside it. That matters more than it sounds: the totals in this table are generated from the same records that build the state pages, so the article and the pages cannot silently drift apart. If a fee changes, it changes in one place.

Two caveats we would rather state than bury. Fingerprint charges are an estimate of $15–45 in the eighteen rows marked with an asterisk, derived from the thirteen jurisdictions that actually publish a figure — it is a median, not a quote, and your county may not match it. And a permit fee is the most volatile number in American gun law: legislatures change them mid-session and agencies change them without announcement. Confirm with the issuing authority before you budget.

The California page has the fullest breakdown if you want to see the format.