Updated August 17, 2026. Educational information only — not legal advice. Fees change by jurisdiction and by month; confirm current amounts with your issuing authority before budgeting.
The short version
The City of Glendale has raised its concealed carry permit fees from $100 to $1,078 for a new license, and $828 for a renewal — an increase of roughly 1,000 percent. That is the local agency’s fee alone. Add the mandatory 16-hour training, Live Scan fingerprinting, and a psychological evaluation, and the realistic all-in cost of getting licensed in Glendale lands somewhere around $2,000.
Meanwhile, Riverside County charges about $20 for its application fee. San Bernardino County, roughly $90.
Same state. Same statute. Same constitutional right. A fifty-fold difference in what it costs to exercise it, determined entirely by which side of a county line you sleep on.
What Californians are actually paying
Local fees have been climbing statewide since Bruen turned California shall-issue and SB2 rewrote the process. A rough picture of the spread as of August 2026:
- Glendale (city): $1,078 new · $828 renewal — up from $100
- Sacramento County: total costs reported north of $950
- Santa Clara County: long-criticized “sky-high” fees, already the subject of a legal challenge — and now undercut by Glendale
- Fresno County: $297 new · $136 renewal (raised from $219 / $83, effective November 19, 2025)
- San Bernardino County: about $90
- Riverside County: about $20
And remember the local fee is only one line item. Our CCW course walks the full budget, but the recurring costs look like this almost everywhere: 16-hour training at roughly $150–$435, Live Scan around $100–$150, the DOJ fee, and where a county requires it, a psychological evaluation that can run $500. In a low-fee county you might be all-in around $500. In Glendale you’re looking at four figures before you’ve bought a holster.
Is this even legal?
Here’s the part that surprises people: under current law, probably yes — with an asterisk the size of a courthouse.
Penal Code § 26190 lets a licensing authority charge “reasonable costs for processing the application for a new license or a license renewal, issuing the license, and enforcing the license.” Half is collected when you apply, the balance when the license issues. There is no flat dollar cap written into the statute. Psychological assessments may be billed at actual cost, and renewals only require a new assessment where there’s “compelling evidence of a public safety concern.” The section was most recently amended by AB 1078, effective January 1, 2026 — the same bill we covered in our AB 1078 survival guide.
So the legal question isn’t whether an agency may recover its costs. It’s whether $1,078 in a city of 200,000 people is genuinely a reasonable cost of processing one application — or whether it’s a number that quietly does what “good cause” used to do.
Why fees are climbing everywhere
The charitable explanation is real and worth stating: SB2 made permits genuinely more expensive to process. Agencies that once issued a handful of licenses a year are now handling volume, with 16-hour training verification, more thorough background investigations, interviews, and appeals. Fresno County, raising fees for the first time since 2007, framed it exactly that way — “the volume and complexity of permit processing has increased as California laws have changed,” and called the change cost-neutral rather than profit-making.
That explanation covers Fresno’s $78 increase comfortably. It has considerably more work to do explaining a jump from $100 to $1,078.
The legal fight this is headed for
Bruen anticipated this. The Supreme Court blessed objective shall-issue licensing, but explicitly flagged that such regimes remain open to challenge where “lengthy wait times” or “exorbitant fees” deny ordinary citizens their rights. That sentence is the hook for every fee case now working through California courts.
Santa Clara County’s fees are already being litigated. Los Angeles County has settled over processing delays. Second Amendment groups reacted to Glendale’s move within days — the Second Amendment Foundation’s Kostas Moros noted the city’s all-in cost now exceeds Santa Clara’s, and the consistent framing from advocates is that a four-figure fee functions as a modern poll tax on a constitutional right.
Expect a lawsuit. Whether it succeeds is a genuinely open question — courts have been more receptive to arguments about delay than about price so far — but Glendale has volunteered itself as an unusually clean test case, precisely because the before-and-after is so stark.
What to do about it
- Check your actual issuing authority, not the county next door. If you live in an incorporated city, your police chief may be your licensing authority instead of the sheriff — and as Glendale shows, city and county fees can differ wildly.
- Ask for the fee schedule in writing before you start. Get the split: what’s due at application, what’s due at issuance, and what’s non-refundable if you’re denied.
- Time your renewal. Renewal fees are rising too, and permits issued after January 1, 2027 can run three years instead of two — the math on when you renew may matter more than it used to.
- Push back locally where it’s warranted. Fee schedules are set in public meetings by councils and boards of supervisors. Cost-recovery studies are public records. A fee that can’t be justified line-by-line is a fee worth challenging — in the comment period first, and in court after.
- Budget honestly. Don’t start the process on the assumption it’s a $200 exercise. Our How to Get Your CCW course covers the full sequence — eligibility, training, fees, interview, and timelines — so nothing arrives as a surprise.
The bottom line
California is nominally shall-issue. But a right you can only afford in Riverside and not in Glendale isn’t uniformly available — it’s means-tested by geography. Whether the courts see it that way is the story to watch, and we’ll track it here as the challenges get filed.
Sources: Glendale fee increase coverage • Litigation risk analysis • Fresno County Sheriff — CCW fee increase • Penal Code § 26190 • Orange County CCW fee schedule
This article is educational content from CAGUNS Resource Hub and is not legal advice. Consult a qualified attorney about your specific situation.