The license requirement doesn’t turn on a permit, a storefront, or a label you choose for yourself — it turns on a specific regulatory test. A person is “engaged in the business” as a dealer when they devote time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business, with the predominant intent to earn a profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms. That definition deliberately excludes the person selling off part of a personal collection, the occasional hobbyist trade, and an auctioneer who only provides commission-based auction services at an estate sale without ever buying the guns or taking them on consignment.

There’s no bright line hiding inside that definition, and the regulation says so directly: whether someone meets the test is a fact-specific inquiry decided on the totality of the circumstances, not a headcount. Selling a large number of firearms or making frequent offers can point strongly toward business activity, but there’s no minimum threshold number of firearms and no minimum number of transactions that flips the switch. Even one transaction can require a license if it comes bundled with other evidence — most tellingly, telling a buyer you can get them more. A single isolated sale with none of that surrounding evidence, by contrast, doesn’t require one.

Because the test is fact-specific, the regulation builds in rebuttable presumptions — meaning the conclusion is taken as true unless you produce reliable evidence otherwise — which shift the burden onto the seller in civil and administrative proceedings. Reselling firearms while representing a willingness to source more, and repetitively buying for resale through straw purchasers, are both treated as presumptive business activity. So is repetitive resale on the clock: within 30 days after purchase, or within one year after purchase where the firearms are either new or like new in their original packaging, or are the same make and model or variants of it. Those two one-year branches are alternatives, not a single combined test, and the repetition qualifier governs both. The regulation adds a set of profit-seeking markers that point the same way — advertising, a dedicated sales table or booth, business records tracking profit and loss, merchant payment services, or a state or local business license — which § 478.13(d)(2) sets out.