Ohio Concealed Carry Permit

Ohio law affirmatively protects private manufacture and imposes no state serialization or registration requirement on a self-made firearm. ORC 9.68 was amended by SB 58 of the 135th G.A. effective April 9, 2025 (re-read in full on 2026-09-15); the amendment broadened the section — it added knives to its scope and added bans on requiring firearm liability insurance or a possession fee — and the manufacturing protection survives intact. ORC 9.68(A) now provides that, except as specifically provided by the U.S. or Ohio Constitution or state or federal law, "a person, without further license, permission, restriction, delay, or process, including by any ordinance, rule, regulation, resolution, practice, or other action or any threat of citation, prosecution, or other legal process, may own, possess, purchase, acquire, transport, store, carry, sell, transfer, MANUFACTURE, or keep any firearm, part of a firearm, its components, and its ammunition, and any knife," and the same section preempts, supersedes and declares null and void any local ordinance, rule or resolution to the contrary. There is no Ohio statute requiring a serial number on, or registration of, a privately made firearm. Ohio's serial-number statute, ORC 2923.201 (possessing a defaced firearm; still the September 28, 2006 version, its only version), only punishes changing, altering, removing, or obliterating a manufacturer's identification mark, and possessing a firearm known to be so defaced; it expressly provides that division (A) "does not apply to any firearm on which no manufacturer's serial number was inscribed at the time of its manufacture" — so a never-serialized homemade gun is not a defaced firearm. TWO REAL LIMITS. (1) ZIP-GUN / DANGEROUS ORDNANCE, A FELONY: ORC 2923.11(G)(1) defines a "zip-gun" to include "any firearm of crude and extemporized manufacture," and also any non-firearm device (e.g., a starter's pistol) specially adapted for use as a firearm, and any industrial/signalling/safety tool capable of use as a firearm when possessed, carried, or used as one. ORC 2923.11(K)(1) classifies a zip-gun as "dangerous ordnance," and ORC 2923.17(A) makes it an offense to knowingly acquire, have, carry, or use dangerous ordnance — unlawful possession of dangerous ordnance is a felony of the fifth degree. A cleanly built firearm made from a commercial receiver blank or from quality parts is generally not "of crude and extemporized manufacture," but the line is fact-specific and prosecutors have charged crude builds. A homemade suppressor is separately dangerous ordnance under ORC 2923.11(K)(5). Note also that a concealed handgun that is a "restricted firearm" (i.e., dangerous ordnance) may never be carried under ORC 2923.111. (2) FEDERAL LAW STILL APPLIES: ORC 9.68 is expressly subject to federal law. Under federal law a non-prohibited person may build a firearm for personal use without a license, but may not manufacture for sale or distribution without an FFL, may not build an NFA item without prior ATF approval, and — under ATF Final Rule 2021R-05F (effective Aug. 24, 2022) — a privately made firearm must be serialized by a licensee before any transfer, and before a gunsmith/dealer may take it into inventory.

Ohio Rev. Code § 9.68(A) (as amended by SB 58, 135th G.A., eff. April 9, 2025); see also §§ 2923.11(G) & (K)(1), 2923.17(A), 2923.201

Federal law, gunsmithing schools, and tools →

What we could not confirm

• AG CCW MANUAL EDITION DATE: the manual posted at the AG's CCWManual link is still the June 2022 edition, confirmed on 2026-09-15 from the PDF itself (its embedded source file is CCWHandbook_2022_WEB.indd and its creation timestamp is 2022-06-29). It postdates SB 215 and correctly describes permitless carry, but it predates SB 288/HB 281 (effective April 6, 2023, amending ORC 2923.125) and the April 9, 2025 amendments to ORC 2923.126 (forbidden-carry zones) and ORC 9.68. Wherever the manual and the current ORC text could differ, this record follows the current statutory text from codes.ohio.gov. Treat the manual's place-restriction chapter in particular as possibly out of date.
• FEE FOR SHORT-TERM RESIDENTS AND NON-RESIDENTS: ORC 2923.125(B)(1)(a) and (F)(4) set the surcharge as "the actual cost of having a background check performed by the federal bureau of investigation" rather than a fixed dollar figure. On 2026-09-15 I checked the AG's background-check landing page, the WebCheck program page, and the BCI FBI fingerprint-card form (the last is an image-only PDF with no extractable text) and none of them publishes a current dollar amount for that FBI cost. fees.initial and fees.renewal therefore reflect only the statutory $67 and $50 bases. An applicant who has been an Ohio resident under five years, or who is a non-resident employed in Ohio, should expect to pay more than the listed figure and should ask their sheriff for the current amount.
• PROCESSING TIME: 45 days is the statutory ceiling in ORC 2923.125(D)(1). Actual per-county turnaround is set by each of Ohio's 88 sheriffs and I did not verify any individual county's real-world timeline against an official source. County practice also varies on fingerprinting logistics (whether the sheriff's office has an electronic reader on site under ORC 2923.125(B)(5)) and on which WebCheck vendor, if any, an applicant is sent to — so the out-of-pocket cost and the wait can both differ materially from county to county even though the statewide legal requirements do not.
• HOME MANUFACTURE / "CRUDE AND EXTEMPORIZED": ORC 2923.11(G)(1) makes "any firearm of crude and extemporized manufacture" a zip-gun and therefore dangerous ordnance, a fifth-degree felony to possess under ORC 2923.17(A). I could not locate a controlling Ohio Supreme Court definition of where "crude and extemporized" ends and a lawful home build begins. My conclusion that a well-made privately manufactured firearm (e.g., a finished 80% receiver build) falls outside that definition is a reading of the text, not a confirmed holding. Anyone building a firearm in Ohio should treat build quality as legally material and consult counsel.
• NO STATE SERIALIZATION MANDATE: I verified this by reading ORC 9.68 (including its April 9, 2025 SB 58 amendment), ORC 2923.201, and the Chapter 2923 section index, and finding no serialization or registration requirement for privately made firearms. This is a negative finding — proving absence — and I cannot rule out a provision elsewhere in the Revised Code that I did not review. Note that federal ATF Rule 2021R-05F still requires serialization by a licensee before transfer.
• AG PUBLISHES NO ENUMERATED INBOUND LIST: the reciprocity.honors array is derived from the statutory text of ORC 109.69(B)(3) and (D)(2) plus the AG's own prose statement that Ohio recognizes any non-resident's valid out-of-state CHL, not from an official enumerated list of honored permits. The AG publishes no inbound list, because ORC 109.69(B)(3) makes one unnecessary. The state-by-state data on the AG's reciprocity page is an embedded JavaScript object describing only the OUTBOUND direction (which states honor an Ohio CHL); I read that object directly on 2026-09-15 to confirm its direction and that it contains 51 keys including DC. Any reader comparing this record to the AG's map should expect the map to be shorter and to mean the opposite thing.
• U.S. TERRITORIES NOT ENUMERATED: ORC 1.59(G) read with ORC 109.69(D)(2) indicates that a U.S. territory, commonwealth or insular possession that issues a carry license would also be a "license-issuing state" whose license Ohio recognizes, but neither the statute nor the AG says so expressly, and I did not verify the current licensing systems of Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands or American Samoa. Territories are absent from reciprocity.honors because this dataset covers the 50 states plus DC. In practice the point is close to academic: any non-prohibited person 21 or older may carry concealed in Ohio permitlessly under ORC 2923.111 regardless of what permit they hold.