Updated August 17, 2026. Quick answer: In Texas, no state permit, licence, card or certificate stands between an heir and an inherited firearm; on the dealer question, the question does not arise, because the state has no private-transfer mandate for an estate to be exempt from; and on inheritance itself, the code never mentions inheritance in the sections that govern this. Nothing has to be filed with anyone. Every answer below is quoted from Texas’s own code with the section named and linked, because this is a subject where being roughly right is not a category that exists.
What Texas law settles, in four lines
| Question | What the code says | Section |
|---|---|---|
| Does the heir need a state permit, licence or card? | No | Tex. Penal Code ch. 46 |
| Does the acquisition have to be reported? | No | Tex. Penal Code § 46.06 |
| Does it have to go through a licensed dealer? | No mandate exists | Tex. Penal Code § 46.06 |
| Does the statute name inheritance at all? | Not named | Tex. Penal Code ch. 46 (Weapons) and Tex. Gov’t Code ch. 411, subch. H, searched in full for an inheritance/bequest/devise/intestate carve-out |
What this covers. An ordinary estate transfer in Texas: the person who died and the person inheriting are in the same state, and the firearm is an ordinary rifle, shotgun, pistol or revolver. Machine guns, suppressors, short-barrelled rifles and anything else registered under the National Firearms Act run on a separate federal track that is not this page, and neither is moving a firearm across a state line. The federal layer is set out separately.
Does the heir need a permit, licence or card
No state permit, licence, card or certificate stands between an heir and an inherited firearm. In Texas that answer reads no. There is no section to quote for a rule that does not exist, so what is quoted here is the nearest thing the chapter has — read in full, and searched for the vocabulary of inheritance, before the answer was recorded:
A person is eligible for a license to carry a handgun if the person:
Does anyone have to be told, and by when
No. Texas has no report, registration or notification duty for an heir who acquires a firearm this way. That is an absence established by reading the chapters through, not an unanswered question — the sections searched are named in the sources below, and what is quoted here is the nearest provision they contain.
(a) A person commits an offense if the person: (1) sells, rents, leases, loans, or gives a handgun to any person knowing that the person to whom the handgun is to be delivered intends to use it unlawfully or in the commission of an unlawful act
Does it have to go through a licensed dealer
The question does not arise, because the state has no private-transfer mandate for an estate to be exempt from. The claim that an inherited firearm always has to be transferred through a licensed dealer is not true as a flat statement in any state in this table, and in Texas the nearest provision the chapter contains reads:
The sentence that answers this is the one already quoted above, under Does the acquisition have to be reported?. Tex. Penal Code § 46.06 settles both questions in the same breath, which is itself part of the answer — there is no separate inheritance provision to read.
What the code says about inheritance itself
The code never mentions inheritance in the sections that govern this. That is not the same as hostility, and it is not the same as safety either. Where nothing regulates the transfer, there is nothing for an heir to be exempted from — and nothing standing in the way if the legislature writes a rule next session.
There is no sentence to quote, and that is the finding. The chapters named in the sources below were read in full and the vocabulary of inheritance — bequest, devise, intestate, descent, operation of law — does not appear in them at all.
What is specific to Texas
- Texas is the clean version of the permissive case, and the evidence for it is an absence: the inheritance vocabulary returns nothing at all across both chapters that were read in full. Tex. Penal Code ch. 46 (Weapons) and Tex. Gov’t Code ch. 411, subch. H, searched in full for an inheritance/bequest/devise/intestate carve-out
- The Texas licence people think of is a licence to carry, and carrying is a different question from receiving. Nothing in either chapter conditions receipt on holding it. Tex. Penal Code ch. 46
- There is no state background-check law here for an estate to be exempt from. That is a different answer from being exempt, and it matters: a future statute would change it with no inheritance carve-out standing in the way. Tex. Penal Code § 46.06
- None of this touches who may possess. The felon-in-possession bar attaches to the person rather than to how the firearm was acquired, and it reaches an inherited one exactly as it reaches a bought one. Tex. Penal Code ch. 46 (Weapons) and Tex. Gov’t Code ch. 411, subch. H, searched in full for an inheritance/bequest/devise/intestate carve-out
- The one filing an estate does make is the probate inventory, and it is not a firearms document: it lists estate property generally, goes to the court rather than to police, and in many Texas estates is never filed at all. Tex. Penal Code § 46.06
What this page does not tell you
- No mandate is not the same as an exemption. Nothing here protects an heir if the state later writes a private-transfer rule; there is no inheritance carve-out to inherit the protection from.
- This is what the statute says, not what a court or a police department has done with it. No case law and no agency guidance was read. Where a code is silent, this page reports silence rather than filling it in.
- City and county rules sit on top and are not here. Several of these states let a city license or register firearms separately, and a local rule can add a step the state code does not mention.
- Who may possess is a separate question from how it transfers. A federal or state bar on possession — a felony conviction, a protective order, an involuntary commitment — attaches to the person and reaches an inherited firearm exactly as it reaches a bought one.
- A gun trust is a different mechanism and is covered separately. What a gun trust does and does not do is its own question, and it is mostly a federal one.
- This is general information, not legal advice. On this subject a wrong step is not a paperwork problem, so the sections are linked for you to read and a probate lawyer in the state is the right next call if anything here is close.
Sources
Every answer on this page comes out of a 51-jurisdiction table built from statute text: 204 cells, 201 of them read from a state’s own code and 3 from an official state publication, with 0 resting on a secondary source of any kind. 175 quotations were machine-checked against the bytes of the page each came from, with 0 failures. 22 of the 204 cells are flagged because the text is verbatim but the date of the copy it came from could not be confirmed at the state’s own site.
| What it supports | Section | Tier | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Does the heir need a state permit, licence or card? | Tex. Penal Code ch. 46 (Weapons), full chapter; Tex. Gov’t Code ch. 411, subch. H (License to Carry a Handgun), §§ 411.171-.208 | statute | 2026-08-17 |
| Does the acquisition have to be reported? | Tex. Penal Code § 46.06 (Unlawful Transfer of Certain Weapons), full chapter 46 read for a reporting/registration duty | statute | 2026-08-17 |
| Does it have to go through a licensed dealer? | Tex. Penal Code § 46.06 (Unlawful Transfer of Certain Weapons) | statute | 2026-08-17 |
| Does the statute name inheritance at all? | Tex. Penal Code ch. 46 (Weapons) and Tex. Gov’t Code ch. 411, subch. H, searched in full for an inheritance/bequest/devise/intestate carve-out | statute | 2026-08-17 |
The other states with their own page: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Hawaii, Connecticut, Maryland, Washington, Michigan. All 51 jurisdictions are in the by-state table.
General consumer information, not legal advice. State codes are as published by the cited source on 2026-08-17 and change without notice; the statute and a lawyer in the state govern.