Updating Your NFA Tax Stamps After a Name Change

If you do a legal name change, for any of the various awesome reasons (including, because I felt like it) you will need to update lot of things in a long, excruciating, and sometimes humiliating process.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about what is possibly the easiest-to-deal-with thing on your name change list…

Updating the Tax Stamps for Your NFA Items

In order to update your tax stamps, you will need:

• Your existing tax stamp
• A picture (or scan) of the court order for your name change

You will then compose a letter which contains:

• The name on the tax stamp (your old name)
• The Dealer’s name
• The Serial number

Then SIGN IT BY HAND. I did it by just signing the PDF with MacOS, you may wish to use a different method, but it needs to have a signature on it.

Sample Email

This is the text of the email I sent to update the name on the tax stamp for my Dead Air Mask:

To whom it may concern,

My legal name has been changed, via court order (see attached),
from ‘[OLD NAME]’ to ‘[NEW NAME]’.

I have a tax stamp for [ITEM TYPE] with serial number [SERIAL],
a [MODEL] model, from manufacturer [MANUFACTURER NAME] in
[MANUFACTURER LOCATION], which was approved on [DATE OF TAX STAMP].

The transferor’s name and address (box 3a) on this form is:

[THE CONTENTS OF BOX 3a]

Please let me know if there’s any other information I need to provide.

Sincerely,
[SIGNATURE] [DATE]

[YOUR PRINTED NAME]

Then you will attach the picture or scan of the court order, and email it to nfafax@atf.gov

Following Up

In about a week or so, give them a call just to make sure it was received; this doesn’t take very long and it’s worth doing just to make sure.

Then in a little while you’ll get a letter, via the post office, from the ATF addressed to your new name, that is a printed-out copy of the letter you sent with a little stamp on it that says:

Requested Adjustments made to the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record.

And that’s it! You did the thing!

You will not get a new tax stamp, the record is now just updated and I opted to keep the paper copy from the ATF along with my tax stamp.