North Dakota Concealed Carry Permit

North Dakota has no state law against building a firearm for one's own personal use, and no state statute requires serialization, marking, or registration of a self-manufactured firearm. This conclusion was re-verified on 2026-09-15 by re-downloading all five chapters of Title 62.1 from ndlegis.gov (62.1-06 again returns HTTP 404) and text-searching every one for 'manufactur', 'serial', 'assembl', 'homemade', 'personal use', 'untraceable' and 'undetectable'. The only hits were incidental or definitional: 'disassembled or disabled as to be rendered incapable of firing' and a reference to federally licensed 'firearms collectors, dealers, importers, or manufacturers' in ch. 62.1-01; antique-firearm definitions ('manufactured before 1899', ammunition 'no longer manufactured') and explosive-materials provisions in ch. 62.1-02; and in ch. 62.1-03 an exemption for 'an individual engaged in manufacturing, repairing, or dealing in handguns' plus the 'manufacturer's number' language of § 62.1-03-05. Chapters 62.1-04 and 62.1-05 contained no hits at all. It remains an assertion of a negative rather than an affirmative authorization: no ND statute expressly grants a right to self-manufacture either. Two important limits do apply. (1) N.D.C.C. § 62.1-03-05 makes it an offense to 'change, alter, remove, or obliterate any mark of identification on a firearm, including the name of the maker, model, or manufacturer's number' or to knowingly possess a firearm so altered; possession of such a firearm 'creates a rebuttable presumption that the possessor made the alterations.' Violation is a class A misdemeanor (§ 62.1-03-06). This restricts defacing an existing serial number but does not impose a marking duty on a firearm built without one. (2) Federal law is unaffected — the National Firearms Act, the Undetectable Firearms Act, the prohibition on manufacturing for sale or distribution without an FFL, and ATF's 2022 frame-and-receiver rule (27 C.F.R. pts. 447, 478, 479) all continue to apply independently of state law. N.D.C.C. § 62.1-01-03 preempts political subdivisions from enacting firearms ordinances more restrictive than state law, so no ND city or county may impose its own self-manufacture or serialization requirement.

No provision — N.D.C.C. tit. 62.1 (Weapons) consists only of chapters 62.1-01 through 62.1-05 (62.1-06 does not exist), and none of them prohibits or regulates the manufacture or assembly of a firearm for personal use, nor requires a serial number or state registration on a self-made firearm. Related provisions: N.D.C.C. § 62.1-03-05 (Prohibited alterations to firearms); N.D.C.C. § 62.1-01-03 (state preemption of local firearms ordinances); N.D.C.C. § 62.1-05-01 (machine guns, automatic rifles, silencers).

Federal law, gunsmithing schools, and tools →

What we could not confirm

• training.liveFireRequired is set to null rather than a boolean because it genuinely differs by license class: live fire (an 'actual shooting or certified proficiency exercise' under § 62.1-04-03(2)(a), scored at a minimum of 70% of total rounds fired under N.D. Admin. Code § 10-12-01-05(3)) is required for Class 1 but NOT for Class 2, and a Class 2 license is a fully valid North Dakota concealed weapon license inside the state. Anyone consuming this field must branch on class.
• No training hour count exists. Neither N.D.C.C. § 62.1-04-03 nor the Attorney General's rules at N.D. Admin. Code ch. 10-12-01 nor any AG web page states a minimum number of classroom or range hours; the requirement is defined by content and by passing scores (70% overall and 100% on the North Dakota deadly force law questions on the written test; 70% of rounds fired on the shooting exercise). 'hours' is therefore left empty rather than guessed, and a consumer should not infer that the absence of a number means training is light.
• reciprocity.honors is INFERRED, not directly published, and this is the weakest element of the record. North Dakota does not publish a list of 'states whose permits ND honors.' Its reciprocity page publishes only two outbound lists (39 states recognizing the ND Class 1 license, 26 recognizing the Class 2) and states the mutual-recognition rule ('North Dakota will honor a valid concealed carry license/permit issued by a state that has agreed to recognize a North Dakota Concealed Weapon License'), consistent with the conditional statute § 62.1-04-03.1. The 39-state Class 1 list is therefore used as the honors set. A strict reading of § 62.1-04-03.1 requires the other state to let North Dakota residents carry WITHOUT a separate license issued by that state, which is a slightly different test from 'recognizes a ND license,' so edge cases may exist in either direction. In practice this matters little for visitors because North Dakota's permitless carry covers non-residents anyway, but it does matter for a non-resident applying for a ND license under § 62.1-04-03(1)(b).
• The ND reciprocity page still carries no 'last updated' date, so the currency of the 39-state and 26-state lists cannot be verified from the page itself. The footer reads '2023 © North Dakota Attorney General's Office,' which may or may not reflect the lists' revision date. Both lists were compared character-for-character against the 2026-08-10 baseline on 2026-09-15 and are unchanged, which is consistent with either a current list or a stale one.
• CONFLICT between the statute and the Attorney General's administrative rule on the maximum charge a certified test administrator may impose. N.D.C.C. § 62.1-04-03(1)(d), as amended by H.B. 1588, S.L. 2025, ch. 594 (effective August 1, 2025), permits a charge 'of up to one hundred dollars,' and the AG's Find a Test Administrator page says '$100 (plus range fees, if applicable).' But N.D. Admin. Code § 10-12-01-14(3), last amended effective August 1, 2013, still reads 'A certified test administrator may not charge a fee exceeding fifty dollars.' The rule has not been conformed to the 2025 statute. The record uses $100 because a statute controls over an inconsistent agency rule and because that is what the AG publishes, but an applicant may encounter an administrator who charges only $50, and the unamended rule is arguably still enforceable against administrators as a condition of certification. This should be re-checked when the AG next updates article 10-12.
• The AG's Constitutional Concealed Carry web page is out of date on the duty to inform and has not been corrected as of 2026-09-15. It states that an individual carrying under constitutional carry 'MUST inform law enforcement that they are in possession of the firearm upon any in-person contact by a law enforcement officer.' That was the statutory standard before H.B. 1588, S.L. 2025, ch. 594, which struck the words 'upon the initiation of a traffic stop or any other in-person contact initiated by a law enforcement [officer]' and replaced them, so that § 62.1-04-04(2) now requires informing an officer of the concealed firearm only 'if the officer inquires about the individual possession of a concealed firearm.' The record follows the statute, which is current and controlling. Practically, volunteering the information on any contact remains lawful and is the conservative course, and the penalty for getting it wrong is a $20 noncriminal fee under § 62.1-04-04(4) — but a reader should not be told the broader duty is the law when the legislature repealed it.
• homeManufacture is an assertion of a negative. On 2026-09-15 I re-confirmed that Title 62.1 comprises only chapters 62.1-01 through 62.1-05 (62.1-06 returns HTTP 404) and re-ran a full-text search of all five chapters for manufacture, serial, assembly, homemade, personal-use, untraceable and undetectable terms, with no substantive hits. I did not search outside Title 62.1 (for example Title 12.1, the criminal code) for any incidental provision, and North Dakota has no affirmative statute authorizing self-manufacture — the conclusion is 'no state prohibition found,' not 'expressly permitted.'
• Place restrictions (where carry is prohibited even with a license or under constitutional carry) are not enumerated in this record; they live mainly in N.D.C.C. § 62.1-02-05 and elsewhere in ch. 62.1-02 and were outside the requested fields. Note that H.B. 1588, S.L. 2025, ch. 594 amended § 62.1-02-05, changing the penalty for knowingly possessing a firearm or dangerous weapon at a listed public gathering from an infraction to a noncriminal offense punishable by a $100 fee, so any separately maintained place-restriction data for North Dakota should be re-checked against the post-August-2025 text.