About & Methodology

Our sourcing standard

Every fact on this site traces to a primary government source — a state attorney general, state police or public-safety agency, legislature/statute, or county sheriff program. We do not cite secondary aggregators or commercial reciprocity maps as authority. This standard is enforced in code, not just by policy:

• A validator rejects any cited source whose host is not a .gov or .usdomain (with a short allow-list for official state sites that use another domain, such as a state AG's .com). Known aggregator domains are hard-blocked.
• Per-fact citations. Different facts about a state often come from different official pages — the permit fee from the licensing agency, the prohibited-place list from the criminal code, the reciprocity list from the AG. Each carries its own source link and verification date, rather than one blanket citation.
• Every reciprocity relationship is cited to the honoringstate's own official reciprocity page — the authority that actually decides whether your permit is honored there.

How we model reciprocity

Reciprocity is not a simple "these states honor each other" matrix. Real recognition is directional(State A may honor State B without the reverse being true), often resident-only (a state may honor only the resident permits of another state), and sometimes permit-class-specific(a state may recognize only another state's "enhanced" permit). Modeling it as a plain list of names would be wrong for roughly a fifth of the country.

Instead the site is built on a directional edge list of 2,503 relationships — each edge records the honoring state, the permit state, whether it is honored, any resident-only or permit-class qualifier, the legal basis, the primary source, and the verification date. Every reciprocity page, the pair lookups, and the aggregate guides are derived from that one audited data set.

How current the data is

Firearms law moves quickly — several states changed their carry laws in 2023–2026 alone. Every page displays the date its facts were last verified against the primary source, and the data is re-verified on a regular cycle. Where a rule rests on a recent or litigated development (for example an open-carry status that turns on a pending court decision, or a "sensitive places" law under active challenge), the page says so explicitly rather than presenting it as settled.

What we don't claim

• This is not legal advice. It is a reference. Your circumstances, local ordinances, and last-minute law changes can all matter — verify with the destination state before you carry.
• Some official lists aren't machine-readable.A few states publish their reciprocity list only by phone, email, or a non-fetchable document. Where we could not verify a specific relationship against a primary source, we mark it "not yet verified" rather than guess — a deliberately conservative gap.
• We describe the law, not exceptions. Prohibited-place lists are curated to the key categories, not the exhaustive statutory text; private-property and local rules can add restrictions.

Corrections

We welcome corrections. If a fact looks wrong, email corrections@carryreciprocity.com with the page and the official source that shows the correct information. Because every claim links to its primary source, corrections can be checked and applied quickly.