Concealed Carry Reciprocity Map (2026) — See Where Your Permit Works

Where every row comes from

Each of the 51 rows now cites the body that actually issues or recognizes carry permits in that jurisdiction — a state police force, an attorney general, a department of public safety, or, where a state has no permit and no issuing agency, the statute itself on the legislature’s own server. Every one of those 51 links was fetched and checked on 1 September 2026, both that it loads and that the page it lands on really is about carry permits.

Five of the 51 refuse automated requests and were confirmed through a second route rather than taken on trust: Arkansas, Montana, New York, Vermont and Virginia. Three jurisdictions have no state agency page to cite because permits there are issued locally or not at all, so they cite the statute instead: Oregon, Vermont and Washington. Hawaii cites the statute for the same reason — its licenses are issued by county police chiefs.

The row-by-row re-read, and what it found. On 2 September 2026 we did the pass this note used to promise: all 51 sources reopened, and each of the 153 claims judged against the page cited beside it. It is worth telling you exactly how that came out, because the honest answer is mixed.

Three entries were wrong and are now fixed. West Virginia said carry without a license begins at 18. It begins at 21 — the 18-to-20 window is open only to West Virginia residents, so a nineteen-year-old visitor following our old row would have been carrying unlawfully. Vermont said it accepts all out-of-state permits; Vermont issues no permit and its weapons chapter contains no recognition provision at all, so the question does not apply there and the row now says so. South Dakota’s source link had gone dead and now points at the state’s live reciprocity page.

And the source column is doing less work than it looks like it is doing. Each link is the authority for that jurisdiction — not a citation for the particular sentence in that row. Read against the individual claims, roughly a third are directly confirmed by the page beside them. The rest are mostly unanswerable there rather than wrong: an agency’s permit page typically explains how to get a permit, not whether you must tell an officer you are armed. The duty-to-inform column is the thinnest — only a handful of states put that rule on the page we cite, and in several cases it sits in the statute instead.

Four specific faults worth naming, because they are the kind a reader should be able to see: Georgia, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Utah and Missouri cite pages that answer the opposite question — which states honor their permit, not whose permits they honor. Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey and New York cite pages that are navigation and forms with no substantive rule on them. Idaho’s state police page tells non-residents they must hold a permit, while the statute that page itself cites, Idaho Code 18-3302(4)(f), exempts anyone over eighteen without a residency condition. And Florida’s link is a landing page that carries neither the carry age nor the recognition rule.

The age audit, and the correction we owe you

Finding one bad age made us check all of them. On 2 September 2026 every one of the 29 permitless-carry ages in the first column was read against the state’s own statute — not its agency FAQ — asking one question above all: is this age open to a visitor, or only to a resident?

Tennessee was wrong and could have got someone arrested. We said 18. Tennessee is 21, or 18 only with qualifying military service (Tenn. Code Ann. 39-17-1307(g)). An eighteen-year-old from out of state, with no service record, cannot lawfully carry there at all — Tennessee’s permits are effectively closed to visitors. Corrected.

And we have to correct ourselves twice on West Virginia. Earlier the same day we changed West Virginia from 18 to 21 on the strength of the state Attorney General’s reciprocity FAQ, which still describes an 18-to-20 window open only to residents. That FAQ is out of date and our change was wrong. West Virginia House Bill 4106 repealed the under-21 offense outright, effective 12 June 2026: the code now reads “Any person may carry a concealed deadly weapon without a license therefor who is: (1) At least 18 years of age.” It is 18 for everyone, resident or not. The row is back to 18 and now says why. The lesson we are keeping: an agency page is not the law, and where the two disagree the statute wins.

Kansas turned out to be the residency trap we thought West Virginia was. Kansas is 21 for anyone, but an 18-to-20-year-old Kansas resident can hold a provisional license and a visitor of the same age cannot — leaving them nothing to carry on but a home-state permit Kansas recognizes. Four more states let 18-to-20-year-olds carry through military service and our flat “21+” hid it: Georgia, Maine, Nebraska and Oklahoma. Every one of those cells now says so.

Several ages also turn out not to be state law at all. Montana, New Hampshire, Vermont and Mississippi set no carry age of their own — the 18 in those rows is the federal floor, and Vermont’s own statute stops at 16. And four states gate carry on citizenship or lawful presence rather than age: Florida, Ohio, Idaho inside city limits, and Indiana, which bars non-citizens outright. A foreign visitor reading only the age column would have missed all four.

The nine bad citations, replaced

Those nine are now fixed. Georgia, Oklahoma, Utah, Missouri and Mississippi point at the provision that actually recognizes other states’ permits instead of the page listing who recognizes theirs. New Jersey and New York point at the rule that establishes there is no civilian out-of-state exemption — in New York that is an absence rather than a sentence, and we say so. Three of the nine were also citing a section number that has moved: Georgia’s recognition is subsection (d), not (e); Mississippi’s is (19), not (13); and Utah’s old 76-10-523 ceased to exist in a May 2025 renumbering, with the rule now living inside the offense section itself.

Two of the nine turned out to be wrong rows, not just weak citations. Nebraska was listed as honoring only permits on its published list. Nebraska has needed no permit from anybody since 2 September 2023, and that list exists to waive the 180-day residency wait for people applying for a Nebraska permit — the State Patrol says in terms that it “does not apply to those simply traveling through our state.” New Hampshire was listed as honoring all out-of-state permits; it has no recognition provision at all, and the reason a visitor may carry there is that the offense of carrying without a license was repealed in 2017. Both rows now say what is actually true.

Where a state publishes no free official code, the row cites the state guide or a labeled mirror and says which it is. Georgia and Mississippi are the two cases here: neither state puts its own code online for free, so the row points at a mirror and marks it as one rather than pretending otherwise.

The duty-to-inform column, read against the statutes

That column is done too, and it was the weakest thing on the page. Every state we listed as imposing a duty was checked against the section that creates it. Five rows were wrong, and four of them told you to do more than the law asks.

• North Dakota does not require you to volunteer anything. A permitless carrier must say so only “if the officer inquires.” We had it as a duty to tell.
• Indiana has no duty at all — not to inform, not to display. We had it as “only if asked.”
• Maryland requires only that you carry the permit. There is no duty to produce it on demand, in that section or any neighboring one. We said present it.
• Maine’s duty binds people carrying without a permit. A permit holder there has no duty to speak first.
• Nebraska’s duty is broader than we said: it runs to emergency services personnel as well as police.

Three distinctions now run through the column, because conflating them is how people get this wrong. A duty to inform means speaking first, unprompted. A duty to display means handing over the license when asked, and saying nothing otherwise. And a duty may bind everyone carrying, or only permit holders, or only permitless carriers — Maine and North Dakota bind the permitless, while nineteen states bind permit holders alone.

Two triggers are worth knowing because they are wider than the traffic stop everyone pictures. Alaska and Nebraska fire when you are “stopped, detained, questioned or addressed” for an official purpose, and North Carolina’s when an officer “approaches or addresses” you. Being spoken to on the street is enough. Connecticut runs the other way and is unusually narrow: only where the officer has reasonable suspicion of a crime and has actually seen the pistol.

Reciprocity moves without warning. A state can add or drop recognition of another state’s permit between our checks. The agency page linked in a row is authoritative over this page. Before you travel armed, open the destination state’s own link in that row and read it — that is exactly why the link is there.