Cohabitant Affidavit for NYC Gun License

Every adult who lives in your home has to sign a notarized cohabitant affidavit as part of your NYC gun-license application — not just your spouse or partner, but roommates, adult children, and anyone else over 18 sharing the residence. Under 38 RCNY Chapter 5 (NYPD rules), a notarized affidavit is required from every adult living in your home. You collect and submit these yourself as part of your own application; the affidavit is an attestation each household member signs in front of a notary.

What the cohabitant affidavit actually is

The cohabitant affidavit is a signed, notarized statement from each adult who shares your residence. The License Division uses it as a way for the people who live alongside you to attest in their own words, on the record, with a notary confirming their identity and signature. It's a routine part of assembling the application file, not a hurdle designed to catch you out.

The key rule is simple and broad: 38 RCNY Chapter 5 (NYPD rules) requires a notarized affidavit from every adult living in your home. "Every adult" is the operative phrase. The requirement doesn't turn on whether someone is related to you, whether they're on the lease, or whether they've lived there for years or weeks. If they're 18 or older and your home is their home, they sign.

Because this is your application, you are the one gathering these affidavits and including them in the package you submit. That's worth internalizing early: no one collects them for you, and no one submits the application for you. As the NYPD License Division sets out, you submit your own application, and only a New York-licensed attorney may represent an applicant before the License Division.

Who counts as "your household"

The practical test is residence, not relationship. Ask yourself: who actually lives here — sleeps here, keeps their things here, gets mail here, treats this as home? Every adult who fits that description is a cohabitant for this purpose.

That means the affidavit list can include people you might not think of as "family":

• Your spouse, domestic partner, or a partner who lives with you
• Adult children (18+) who still live at home, including those home from college who genuinely reside there
• Parents or other relatives sharing the residence
• Roommates — even ones you found online and barely know
• Anyone else 18 or older whose primary residence is your address

Minors don't sign. The requirement is about adults in the home. But the moment a household member turns 18, they're in scope.

For the sourced rule itself, see our requirements overview, which lays out the affidavit alongside the rest of the application file.

The edge cases, worked through

Most confusion isn't about your spouse — it's about the messy middle. Here's how to think through the common ones.

A roommate who barely knows you. Feels awkward, but the rule doesn't have an exception for "we're not close." If they're an adult living in your home, they sign a notarized affidavit. Give them plenty of notice, be clear about what you're asking, and remember it's an ordinary attestation — you're not asking them to vouch for your life story. (That deeper vouching role belongs to your character references, which are a separate and different piece of the application.)

Multi-family buildings vs. your unit. This is where people over-collect out of anxiety. The affidavit is about the people who live in your home — your apartment or unit — not everyone in a brownstone or an apartment building. Your downstairs neighbors in a separate unit with their own entrance and lease are not your cohabitants. What matters is the residence you actually share: your unit, your household. If your living arrangement is genuinely blurry — a shared kitchen across "units," a converted two-family where the boundary between households isn't clean, a basement apartment that may or may not count as separate — that ambiguity is exactly the kind of thing worth a licensed attorney's read. See do I need a lawyer?.

Adult children. An 18-year-old who lives at home signs, full stop. The trickier version is the kid who's away at college. If your home is still genuinely their residence — they live there over breaks, their permanent address is yours, they haven't set up a separate household — the honest answer is usually that they're a household member. If they've truly moved out and established their own residence elsewhere, they haven't. When it's genuinely unclear, don't guess in the direction that's convenient; get an attorney's read.

A partner who just moved in. Recency doesn't exempt anyone. Someone who moved in last month and now lives with you is an adult in your home today. They sign. The affidavit reflects your household as it actually is at the time you assemble your application — not the household you had a year ago.

Someone who refuses. This is the hard one, and there's no clever workaround. The rule asks for an affidavit from every adult in the home, so a refusal is a real obstacle rather than something to route around. What you must not do is solve it by leaving that person off — the whole application posture is candor, and quietly omitting a household member runs directly against that. If a cohabitant won't cooperate, that's a genuine situation to talk through with a licensed attorney rather than a paperwork trick to engineer. Start that conversation at do I need a lawyer?.

The throughline across all of these: when in doubt, disclose and include, never omit. The affidavit requirement is broad on purpose, and honesty about who lives with you costs you nothing while an omission can undermine the credibility of your whole file.

The notarization step (and doing it online)

An affidavit isn't complete until it's notarized. Each cohabitant signs their affidavit in the presence of a notary, who verifies their identity and witnesses the signature. Only then is it a valid affidavit rather than an unsworn statement.

New York permits remote online notarization, which is often the most practical route when your household members have different schedules or aren't all in the same place. In an online notarization, the signer and a commissioned notary connect over a live audio-video session; the notary verifies identity on camera and notarizes the document electronically. For a roommate who works odd hours or an adult child who's temporarily elsewhere but still a household resident, doing it online can save a lot of coordination. In-person notarization — at a bank, a shipping store, or with a mobile notary — remains perfectly valid too. Requirements for fees are covered on our current fees page.

Whichever way each person notarizes, keep the finished, notarized affidavits together so nothing gets lost between collecting them and assembling your file.

How to plan for it early

The cohabitant affidavit is a classic "small task that becomes a bottleneck" if you leave it to the end. Front-load it:

• Make the list first. Write down every adult who lives in your home before you do anything else. Getting the list right early prevents scrambling later.
• Give people real notice. Some cohabitants — especially roommates — will need time to book a notary appointment or set up an online session. Ask early and explain plainly what you need.
• Batch the notarizations. If several adults live with you, coordinate so they're not all racing at the last minute. Online notarization makes batching easier across schedules.
• Keep everything together. Store the notarized affidavits with the rest of your application materials so the package is ready when the rest of your file is.
• Flag ambiguity now, not later. If any living situation feels genuinely unclear — a blurry multi-family boundary, a semi-moved-out adult child — sort that out early with an attorney rather than discovering the question the week you plan to file.

Different boroughs handle applicant logistics through their own License Division practices; if you're applying in Kings County, our Brooklyn gun license guide walks through the local picture. But the cohabitant affidavit rule itself is citywide: every adult in your home, notarized, included by you — no exceptions engineered, no one left off.