Every price here comes off a product page, never a listing, and every number names the source it came from so the work can be checked.
Most ammunition pages tell you what something costs and never tell you where the number came from. That is backwards. A price with no source behind it is a rumor with a dollar sign on it, and this site is built on the opposite habit.
I am James Nicholas. I hold an FFL and an 07/02 manufacturing license and I have run a gun store for twenty years. Everything below is how the numbers on this site actually get made, so you can check my work instead of taking my word for it.
Prices come off product pages. Never off a listing.
Every price on this site was read from the individual product page for that exact item, on the date printed beside it. I use a retailer’s category and search pages only to find out which case lots exist. The price itself always comes from the product’s own page.
There is a reason for that. On one retailer a category page showed $234.80 for a case of 9mm whose own product page priced the same case at $269.80. That is a 35 dollar gap on a single line, and if I had trusted the listing I would have published a number that was never true. Listing pages lie. Product pages do not.
When the listing and the product page disagree, the product page wins and the disagreement gets written down.
What I leave out, and why it matters more than what I put in
The cheapest thing on a shelf is not always ammunition. Sort a .308 catalog by price and the top of the list is a short-range training round with a ten grain plastic bullet at about 21 cents. Print that as the price of .308 and you have just reported a price crash that never happened.
So these are excluded from the benchmark every time: short-range training rounds, plastic and frangible bullets, blanks, marking and simulation rounds, primers, powder, brass and bullets sold as components, and anything sold once-fired for reloading.
Steel and aluminum cases are a different question. They are real ammunition and they are genuinely cheaper, so I track them, but on their own line. The benchmark is always a brass case. If I let the benchmark hop from brass to steel in a month when steel happened to be cheaper, the chart would show a price drop that is really just a change of product. On 12 September the cheapest 9mm case lot on the shelf was steel at 23.5 cents while the brass benchmark sat at 27. Those are not the same number and they never get mixed.
The date stamp means the figures were re-checked
The defensive 9mm table pulls its own prices twice a day, at five in the morning and five in the evening, Central time, reading each load’s own product page. The case-lot prices on the ammo price history page and the ammo shortage tracker are read the same way, by the site itself several times a day, from SGAmmo’s own product pages. That is one retailer, and both pages say so. Every other price on this site is read by hand and carries the date it was checked. The date at the top of a page changes when the numbers underneath it were actually pulled again, and not otherwise. If a month goes by and nothing was re-checked, the old date stays there and you will know.
This matters because the two dates on a page are frequently not the same. Prices move weekly. Background-check totals come out monthly. A tariff proclamation lands when it lands. So a page will tell you that prices were re-checked on one date and that the demand and policy figures were last verified on another. One date standing in for work done on two different days is the small dishonesty that makes everything else on a page suspect.
Nothing is estimated. Ever.
If a page could not be read, or a product went away, or a figure could not be confirmed, that goes in the “what I could not verify” section in plain words. It does not get filled in from last month, averaged, or quietly dropped so the table looks complete.
That section is the most useful paragraph on any of these pages, and it is the one nobody else prints.
Where the rest of the numbers come from
Demand figures come from the FBI’s own published background check table. I pull the monthly figures out of the FBI document itself and then check that my monthly numbers add up exactly to the FBI’s own printed year-to-date and annual totals. If they do not sum, the extraction is wrong and I start over. That check is how I caught a widely republished July figure that does not match the FBI’s table at all.
Pressure, case dimensions and test barrel lengths come from the published SAAMI standard, cited by its number, and the European figure is given alongside the American one when they differ. Policy claims are tied to the actual document, cited by proclamation or docket number, with what it does and does not cover said plainly. Company statements come from the earnings release or the call, quoted and attributed to the person who said it.
What this site will not do
No sponsored rankings. Nobody pays to be at the top of a table here, and no manufacturer sees a page before it goes up. The reference pages carry no affiliate links, because a page that tells you what a cartridge costs should not also be earning a cut of your purchase.
Corrections
If a number here is wrong, tell me. I will fix it, and I will say what changed and when rather than quietly editing it and pretending it always read that way. Every month gets frozen at its own permanent address on The Ammo Record, so the figure you cite today is still sitting at that address a year from now.
Every figure on this site may be quoted with attribution and a link to Popular Ammo. Take it and use it. That is what it is for.