Alabama Concealed Carry Permit

Alabama law does not prohibit a non-prohibited person from building a firearm for personal use, does not require a serial number on a self-made firearm, and has no state firearm registration of any kind. § 13A-11-64 punishes DEFACING an identification that already exists — it does not obligate you to add one to a firearm that never had one, though a build using a part whose serial was removed would fall squarely within it. Local ordinances cannot fill the gap because § 13A-11-61.3 preempts them and voids any contrary ordinance. FEDERAL LAW IS THE REAL CONSTRAINT: a prohibited person may not make or possess a firearm at all; manufacturing for sale or distribution requires an FFL; commercially sold frames, receivers and parts kits are "firearms" under ATF's 2022 frames-and-receivers rule (upheld in Bondi v. VanDerStok, 2025) and arrive already serialized with a background check; NFA items (short-barreled rifles and shotguns, suppressors, machine guns) require prior federal approval and marking; and 18 U.S.C. § 922(p) bars undetectable firearms. I found no Alabama Attorney General opinion or ALEA guidance interpreting state law on self-manufacture — this conclusion rests on the absence of any such provision in the Code of Alabama.

No Alabama statute addresses privately made or self-manufactured firearms. A full-text search of the official Code of Alabama returns zero hits for "privately made firearm," "unfinished frame," "unserialized" and "undetectable firearm." Adjacent provisions: Ala. Code § 13A-11-64 (Class C felony to change, alter, remove or obliterate the maker, model, manufacturer's number or other identification of any firearm, or to possess, obtain, receive, sell or use a firearm after such identification has been altered or removed); Ala. Code § 13A-11-61.3 (the Legislature preempts the entire field of firearm regulation, voiding any city or county ordinance on the subject); Ala. Code § 13A-11-63 (Class C felony to possess a short-barreled rifle or shotgun in violation of federal law).

Federal law, gunsmithing schools, and tools →

What we could not confirm

• The exact permit fee is county-specific. Ala. Code § 13A-11-75(f)(1)a defers to local law where one exists, and confirmed county fees range from $7.50/year (Jefferson) to the $25/year statutory default. I verified only four of Alabama's 67 counties directly; the $125 five-year figure recorded here is the statutory default, not a guarantee for any given county.
• Whether Alabama is cleanly "shall-issue" is arguable. § 13A-11-75(c)(11) lets a sheriff deny an applicant who "causes justifiable concern for public safety" — real discretion. It is heavily constrained (written articulated reasons, 30-day deadline, and a clear-and-convincing burden on the sheriff on appeal under § 13A-11-75(j)), so shall-issue is the fair label, but it is not a purely ministerial standard.
• No statute sets an explicit minimum age for PERMITLESS carry. I derived 19 from § 13A-11-72(b)(1) (minors may not possess a pistol) plus § 26-1-1 (majority = 19), corroborated by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office. I found no Attorney General opinion or ALEA rule stating the permitless-carry age directly.
• The interaction between § 13A-11-75(a)(2) (an 18-year-old service member or honorably discharged veteran MAY hold a permit) and § 13A-11-72(b)(1) (minors, i.e. under 19, may not possess a pistol) is not expressly reconciled anywhere in the Code. An 18-year-old veteran's permit appears to authorize carry, but I could not confirm that reading from a primary interpretive source.
• Fingerprints: § 13A-11-75(b) requires only NICS plus database checks and mentions no fingerprinting, and none of the four county sheriff pages I read mention it, so I recorded false. I did not review all 67 county procedures; § 13A-11-75(e) arguably bars a sheriff from adding conditions, but a local practice cannot be entirely ruled out.
• There is no single statewide application form or portal, re-confirmed today: the Alabama Sheriffs Association's own "Pistol Permits" page loads with no substantive content, and ALEA's gun-laws page says only that "a person may apply for a concealed handgun permit to the Sheriff of the county in which they reside." officialApplicationUrl therefore points to ALEA's gun-laws page because ALEA is the state-level firearms authority, not because ALEA accepts applications — applicants must go to their own county sheriff. Madison County's sheriff site previously returned HTTP 403 and was not re-checked this round.
• Whether § 13A-11-85(a)'s phrase "any state" reaches the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam or the U.S. Virgin Islands is not addressed by the statute or by any AG guidance I could locate. Of little practical consequence given permitless carry.
• The Alabama Attorney General's reciprocity PDF is current as of May 1, 2026, but it is the outbound list only. Alabama publishes no inbound list because § 13A-11-85(a) recognizes all of them by operation of law.
• homeManufacture rests on the ABSENCE of any Alabama statute (verified by full-text search of the official Code), not on an affirmative authorization. No Alabama AG opinion or ALEA guidance on privately made firearms was located, and my attempt to cross-check ATF's "State Laws and Published Ordinances – Alabama" compilation failed because atf.gov blocked the download.
• I still could not retrieve the enrolled text of Act 2022-133 itself (the Legislature's document URLs return 404 or do not render). The repeal of § 13A-11-73 and the addition of § 13A-11-74.1 are nonetheless confirmed by two Legislature-published documents: the Code of Alabama entry for § 13A-11-73 reciting the repeal, the act number and the January 1, 2023 effective date, and Section 4 of SB267 (2026), which repeals § 13A-11-74.1 and describes it as "relating to carrying a pistol without a permit."
• Permitless carry survived a repeal attempt this session and the margin of safety is thinner than the record alone suggests. SB267 (2026 Reg. Sess.) would have restored a permit requirement effective October 1, 2026 — two weeks after this verification date. It died in the Senate Judiciary Committee (last action 05-Feb-2026; session adjourned sine die in April 2026), so it has no legal effect, but a similar bill in the 2027 session would make this the first field to re-check.
• The official Code of Alabama site (alison.legislature.state.al.us/code-of-alabama) is a JavaScript application that does not render section text to a non-browser fetch: every section URL in statuteCitations returns HTTP 200 but serves only the portal's navigation shell. I could not work around it — web.archive.org is blocked to this tool and law.justia.com returned HTTP 403. I therefore verified current statutory text from the Legislature's own bill PDFs, which reproduce the sections as current law: SB267 (2026) for §§ 13A-11-74, 13A-11-75, 13A-11-85 and 13A-11-90, and enrolled SB119 (2025) for § 13A-11-72. The statuteCitations URLs are the correct official ones and resolve in a browser, but a reader using an automated fetcher will see the same shell I did.
• Methodological caveat on the statutory text I read: a bill PDF marks deletions with strikethrough and additions with underline, and the text extractor strips both, so amended passages come through with the old and new wording interleaved (e.g. § 13A-11-85(a) extracted as "licensed to carry a handgun pistol in any state shall be authorized to may carry"). Where a figure or phrase appeared with no competing alternative — the $25 / $125 / $300 / $150 fees, "19 years of age or more", "valid for one year or five years" — it is untouched current law and I relied on it. Where wording was interleaved I relied on the un-struck reading plus independent corroboration, not on the extraction alone.
• Two issuing-agency pages currently contradict the statute, and the statute controls. (1) Tuscaloosa County's pistol-permit page states that Alabama residents 18 and older may carry without a permit; the 19 floor recorded here rests on § 13A-11-72(b)(1) (minors may not possess a pistol) plus § 26-1-1 (majority = 19), and the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office states 19, or 18 only for active, retired or honorably discharged military and law enforcement. An 18-year-old relying on the Tuscaloosa page would be committing a Class A misdemeanour. (2) Jefferson County's permit page still advertises 2-, 3- and 4-year permit terms ($15.00, $22.50, $30.00) although § 13A-11-75(a)(1) now authorizes only one-year, five-year and lifetime permits. Neither discrepancy changes what the statute requires.
• There is still no Attorney General opinion or ALEA rule stating the permitless-carry minimum age directly. The 19 figure is a derivation, corroborated by an issuing agency (Jefferson County) but not by a state-level interpretive source, and Tuscaloosa County's contrary statement shows the derivation is not universally applied at the counter.