Ammo Shortage Tracker: The Real State of the 2026 Ammunition Market
Last updated 22 August 2026 Updated monthly. Prices are live spot-checks, not estimates.
Quick answer: there is no ammunition shortage in August 2026. There is an ammunition price problem, and the two are not the same thing. Every commodity load we checked is in deep stock at major retailers — 9mm bulk at 27¢ a round, .22 LR at 7¢, 5.56 M193 at 47¢. FBI background checks are down 2.1% year to date. The largest US ammunition maker’s parent company describes commercial demand as improving and is guiding to higher earnings. Prices are elevated because copper and brass cost more and imports carry tariffs “20 percent or more in some cases” — that phrasing is Olin’s CEO, on the record — not because ammunition is scarce. The one genuine hole on the shelf is Lake City–produced Federal XM193, out of stock after a 32-day strike at the plant, while imported M193 equivalents sit in stock at 45–47¢. On “when will prices come down”: no published forecast we could find predicts a decline in 2026.
What this page is
Most “ammo shortage” pages are written once and left to rot, which is why you can still find articles telling you .22 LR is unobtainable. This one gets re-checked and re-dated every month. When the market changes, the numbers here change. When it doesn’t, we say so instead of manufacturing drama.
Every price below was pulled from a live retailer product page on the date stamped at the top. Every claim about demand or policy is tied to a primary document — FBI data, a company’s own earnings release, a Federal Register notice.
The shelf: what things actually cost right now
| Load | Product checked | Price | Per round | Stock |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9mm 115gr FMJ, 1,000 rd | Magtech 9A, SGAmmo | $269.80 $264.80 for two or more |
27.0¢ | “25+ in stock” |
| 5.56 M193 55gr, 1,000 rd | PMC X-TAC XP193, SGAmmo | $469.50 | 47.0¢ | “25+ in stock” |
| .22 LR, 5,000 rd | Winchester Target & Plinking, SGAmmo | $329.50 | 7¢ | “12+ In Stock” |
| .22 LR, 5,000 rd | CCI Blazer, SGAmmo | $399.50 | 8¢ | “12+ In Stock” |
| .22 LR, 5,000 rd | Remington Thunderbolt, SGAmmo | $379.50 | 8¢ | 5 in stock |
| 5.56 XM193, 500 rd | Federal XM193, Lucky Gunner | No price shown | “Out of stock” | |
All rows verified on individual product pages, 22 August 2026. We deliberately do not quote category-listing prices: on one retailer we found a category page showing $234.80 for a case whose own product page said $269.80. Listing pages lie; product pages don’t.
.308 Winchester, 12-gauge birdshot, and .223 Remington were also checked at multiple retailers and were broadly in stock across dozens of SKUs. We are not printing per-round figures for those three because we only confirmed them on category pages, and per the note above we don’t publish those.
Demand is not spiking. It is slightly down.
The tell for a real shortage is a demand surge. There isn’t one. Here are the FBI’s own NICS firearm background check totals, extracted from the FBI’s published month/year table:
| Month | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 2,401,324 | 2,387,031 | −0.6% |
| February | 2,322,106 | 2,151,807 | −7.3% |
| March | 2,575,550 | 2,450,414 | −4.9% |
| April | 2,284,806 | 2,131,861 | −6.7% |
| May | 2,079,232 | 1,942,981 | −6.6% |
| June | 1,976,635 | 2,060,462 | +4.2% |
| July | 2,006,292 | 2,194,363 | +9.4% |
| Jan–Jul total | 15,645,945 | 15,318,919 | −2.1% |
Two things to take from that. First, 2026 is running below 2025 overall — the fifth consecutive annual decline from the 2020 peak of 39,695,315. Second, the trend inflected: after five straight down months, June and July both came in ahead of last year. That is worth watching, and it is the number we will re-check first next month. It is not, yet, a surge.
Figures extracted directly from the FBI’s NICS Firearm Background Checks: Month/Year, January 1, 2020 – July 31, 2026 table. Our monthly numbers sum exactly to the FBI’s own printed year-to-date and annual totals, which is how we caught a widely republished July figure (2,057,967) that does not match the FBI’s table. The correct July 2026 unadjusted figure is 2,194,363.
So why is it expensive? Copper, brass, and tariffs.
This is the part the shortage framing gets wrong. The cost pressure is on inputs, and the people paying it say so out loud.
Olin Corporation owns Winchester. In its Q2 2026 results, released 30 July 2026, Winchester segment sales rose to $500.3 million from $447.6 million a year earlier, and segment earnings to $28.1 million from $25.0 million. Olin attributes the increase “primarily due to higher commercial ammunition sales and higher military project revenue,” offset by “higher raw material costs, primarily commodity metal costs, and higher operating costs.”
Olin’s president and CEO Kenneth Lane has been blunter in interviews: Winchester “continues to increase prices to offset rising raw material costs, particularly copper and brass,” and on imports, “the lower imports are related to tariffs” — tariffs that have “fluctuated a little bit, but it’s now 20 percent or more in some cases.”
A company raising prices into improving demand is not a company rationing scarce goods. Olin’s own outlook language is “seasonally improving commercial demand is expected to support sequential earnings growth.”
What is not driving prices, despite what you’ll read
There is no US tariff on ammunition itself. The 50% copper tariff proclamation of 2025 and the 2026 proclamation strengthening steel, aluminum and copper duties both contain zero mentions of cartridges or brass cartridge cases; “ammunition” appears once in the copper proclamation, and only as an example of a defense system that consumes copper. The August 2026 request for comment on adding 14 more derivative articles does not include ammunition either. Copper and brass tariffs raise the cost of what ammunition is made of. That is an indirect effect, and it is worth explaining honestly rather than compressing into “tariffs on ammo.”
Russian ammunition is still banned, and the import list is getting shorter, not longer. ATF’s proposed rule of 6 May 2026 would remove Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan from the proscribed-countries list, retaining only the Russian Federation. That is a supply-positive deregulatory action. It is a proposed rule and is not yet final.
The one real hole: Lake City XM193
Federal’s XM193 — the commercial version of M193 produced at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant — was out of stock in both 500-round SKUs at Lucky Gunner when we checked. Meanwhile imported and commercial M193-equivalent loads (PMC X-TAC, Igman, Hornady Frontier) were in stock at 45–47¢ a round.
The context: Lake City, operated by Olin’s Winchester division, was struck for 32 days — from 12:01 a.m. on 4 April 2026 until ratification on 6 May 2026 — by more than 1,300 IAM Local 778 members. The settlement was a four-year agreement with front-loaded wage increases and, per the union’s directing business representative, “some relief from forced overtime.”
We are stating that as correlation, not causation. No source we found quantifies lost output, and Olin’s Q2 release does not mention the strike in its results at all — it appears only as a forward-looking risk factor. What we can say is that the one caliber-and-brand combination that is hard to find right now is the one produced at the plant that shut down for a month, and that the shortage is brand-specific, not caliber-specific. If you need M193, buy an import and move on.
Is the industry saying anything different?
We looked. As of this update we could not find a 2026 NSSF statement on ammunition shortage or supply conditions — the most recent NSSF material we located on adjacent topics is from 2024 and 2025 and does not speak to current supply.
Manufacturer-side data points to the same picture. Czechoslovak Group, which owns Federal, CCI, Speer and Remington through The Kinetic Group, reported first-half 2026 ammunition segment sales down 11.5% to €631 million with operating profit down 26.7% — while describing the US commercial channel as “recovering steadily since late Q1.” Falling revenue with recovering volumes is the signature of a market normalizing after a boom, not one running dry.
On the price side, an April 2026 round of increases of roughly 2–10% was announced across B&P, Blazer, CCI, Federal, Fiocchi, HEVI-Shot, Remington and Speer, attributed to sustained cost pressure in copper, lead, zinc, antimony, propellants, tungsten and bismuth.
When will prices come down?
Not this year, on the evidence. Every forward-looking statement we located points flat to higher:
- Olin guides Winchester to “modest earnings improvement” in Q3 on “higher commercial volumes and pricing, partially offset by higher metals costs.”
- CSG reaffirmed full-year 2026 group guidance of €7.4–7.6 billion on improving US conditions.
- A major retailer’s 2026 outlook called for “price stabilization with periodic adjustments,” explicitly stating that “large price drops are unlikely in the near term.”
The honest answer to “when will ammo prices come down” is that the cost of copper and brass would have to come down first, and nobody publishing a forecast expects that inside 2026.
What we could not verify this month
- A current producer price index for ammunition. The BLS/FRED series for small arms ammunition (WPS151302) shows a last observation of June 2025. Whether it is discontinued or simply stale is unclear. We will not print a 2026 ammunition PPI figure until we can source one.
- Whether ammunition falls inside the scope of the 40% Brazil duty. The rate is documented; whether HTS Chapter 93 is covered is not. This matters because CBC/Magtech is Brazilian — and Magtech is the cheapest 9mm on our own table.
- Country-by-country ammunition tariff rates. The only figure we will stand behind is Lane’s “20 percent or more in some cases.”
- A retail smokeless powder shortage. One industry blog reports powder is tight. Our live check of a major reloading retailer found every displayed rifle powder in stock. We checked rifle powders only.
- Any 2025–2026 excise tax, EPA, or state lead-ammunition action affecting supply. We searched and found none; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
How we will update this page
Monthly, in this order: re-pull FBI NICS when the new month posts, re-check the same six product pages in the price table, re-read the most recent Olin and CSG disclosures, and re-search the Federal Register for ammunition-relevant actions. The date stamp at the top changes only when we have actually re-checked. If a month goes by with nothing material, the page will say that.
Sources
- FBI, NICS Firearm Background Checks: Month/Year — fbi.gov
- Olin Corporation, second quarter 2026 results, 30 July 2026
- ATF, “Update to Proscribed Countries for Import Restrictions,” proposed rule, 6 May 2026 — Federal Register
- “Adjusting Imports of Copper Into the United States,” 90 FR 37727, 5 August 2025 — Federal Register
- “Strengthening Actions Taken To Adjust Imports of Aluminum, Steel, and Copper Into the United States,” 91 FR 18201, 9 April 2026 — Federal Register
- Live retail spot-checks at SGAmmo and Lucky Gunner, 22 August 2026
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