Dr. John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has released its latest annual report on the state of concealed carry in the United States. Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States: 2025, authored by Dr. Lott, Carlisle Moody and Rujun Wang, tracks trends in the number and characteristics of concealed carry permit holders and developments in constitutional carry (a.k.a. permitless carry) laws.
The report itself is well worth a read, but the highlights are:
Constitutional carry is now the law in 29 states, meaning almost half of Americans (46.8% or 157.6 million) now live in a jurisdiction that allows constitutional carry. In terms of physical land mass, constitutional carry is the law in 67.7% of the land in the country.
After peaking at 22 million in 2022, the number of concealed carry permit holders fell by 0.59 million last year to a current total of 20.88 million, with the primary reason for the drop being the expansion of constitutional carry. “[W]hile permits are increasing in the non-Constitutional Carry states, they fell in the Constitutional Carry ones even though more people are clearly carrying in those states.”
Five states now have over one million permit holders each. Florida tops the list at 2.38 million permits, followed by Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Texas. (With the exception of Pennsylvania, all of these states also have constitutional carry.) To place these numbers in a broader historical context, in 1999 there were only 2.7 million concealed carry permit holders across all of America.
In 15 states, more than 10% of adults have permits. Indiana has the highest permit rate at 22.7%, followed by Colorado at 19.0% and Pennsylvania at 16.2%. (Indiana, incidentally, has had a constitutional carry law in effect for the last three and a half years.) Nationwide, the percentage of adults with carry permits is 7.8%.
Permit-holders are racially diverse: “From 2015 to 2021/2024/2025, in the four states that provide data by race over that time period, the number of Asian people with permits increased 277.8% % faster than the number of whites with permits. Blacks appear to be the group that has experienced the largest increase in permitted concealed carry, growing 321.0% % faster than whites.”
Women are increasingly represented among permit-holders: data from seven states from 2012 to 2024/2025 indicates “permit numbers grew 106.1% faster for women than for men,” and in 2025, “women made up 28.5% of permit holders in the 14 states that provide data by gender.”
The CPRC commissioned a 2023 survey of general election voters for insights into carry patterns by adults. The results showed that 7.2% carry all the time, 8.4% carry some of the time, and another 13.8% carry not often. Compared with the results of polling by Pew in 2017, the survey indicates the percentage of people carrying all or most of the time has increased significantly from 5.4% in 2017 to 15.6% in 2023.
Concurrent with the exponential rise in the number of concealed carry permit-holders, “there has been a general linear decline in rates of violent crime offenses. Violent crime fell from 4.7 per 10 million people in 2007 to 3.6 per 10 million people in 2024, a 24% drop.” While the CPRC cautions against the conclusion that an increase in concealed handgun permits reduces violent crime rates, it does show “there doesn’t seem to be any obvious positive relationship between permits and crime.”
Overall, though, the report indicates that concealed handgun permit data “clearly underestimates the true number and growth of people who can legally carry concealed handguns” (emphasis added). Besides the expansion in, and popularity of, constitutional carry, many states don’t keep data on concealed carry permits. As examples, “New Hampshire only collects data on permits issued to non-residents. Alabama simply don’t collect this data at all on the state level.”
Other factors affecting permit numbers are the discouraging wait times, high fees and ramped up eligibility requirements in some states. The report discusses the effect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, in which the Court struck down “may issue” permitting regimes (where applicants had to demonstrate “good cause” or a special need for a permit) as unconstitutional. Some states – New York and California, for instance – responded to Bruen by increasing permit eligibility requirements and wait times. The San Jose Police Department sharply increased its fees: “As of July 1, 2025, the initial application fee is $1,443. That price is in addition to applicable State of California fees, and does not cover the costs of psychological exam/interview, CCW firearm training course,” and other necessary expenses. Another California jurisdiction, Los Angeles County, “effectively stopped issuing new permits.”
As good as the report’s numbers are, there are reasons to hope that next year’s report may be even better, at least as far as these jurisdictions are concerned.
President Trump’s Department of Justice has expressed its clear commitment to investigate and take enforcement actions against “states or localities that insist on unduly burdening, or effectively denying, the Second Amendment rights of their ordinary, law-abiding citizens” by, for instance, excessive delays in granting permits to eligible applicants. Attorney General Pamela Bondi has already placed Pennsylvania officials on notice regarding allegedly unlawful practices in carry license issuance, and the DOJ’s first such lawsuit, brought on behalf of the United States against the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, was launched this fall. Your NRA-ILA will keep you posted on these developments.
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