22 LR Ammo Price Index

Updated monthly. Latest reading: June 2026.

This index tracks the cheapest 22 LR ammo on the market, month by month, and what makes the price move.

We pull the lowest in-stock price per round for new, standard-velocity bulk 22 Long Rifle across the major price-comparison sites, going back to 2009. That is the best deal available each month, not our price.

22 LR Cost Per Round Over Time

We build this series ourselves, aggregating the lowest in-stock price per round listed each month across the major public ammunition price-comparison sites, AmmoEngine, AmmoGrab, Gun.Deals, and AmmoPricesNow among them. It prices the same kind of round throughout: new production, standard-velocity plinking ammo in real bulk quantities, with no subsonic, no hyper-velocity, and no match loads.

The series runs from 2009 through June 2026 and is refreshed monthly. Months with no reliable data are left blank rather than estimated, and on this caliber the blanks are part of the story.

The spikes on this line are demand, not costs. Here is what moved it:

• 2009 to 2012. The line opens at three to five cents a round, drifting up through President Obama's first term as the post-2008 buying wave worked through the market.
• 2013 to 2016, the great rimfire drought. After Sandy Hook and President Obama's assault-weapons push, panic buying emptied the rimfire shelf and kept it empty. Listings dry up through the first half of 2013, and when the floor can be priced again it has nearly doubled, to about 15 cents, staying inflated into 2016. Rimfire production lines are the hardest in the industry to expand, so the shortage outlasted every other caliber's by years.
• 2017 to 2019, the Trump Slump. With President Obama out of office and the political threat gone, panic demand evaporated and 22LR fell all the way back to three cents.
• 2020 to 2021, the big one. COVID lockdowns, the BLM riots and the defund-the-police summer, then a contested election. The floor ran from about four cents in mid-2020 to 31 cents in January 2021, more than seven times over, the largest panic multiple of any caliber on this site.
• 2022 to 2026. The long unwind ran two straight years, bottoming at 2.7 cents in January 2024, the cheapest 22LR in the history of the series and cheaper than 2009. It has since drifted back to about nine cents by mid-2026, still among the lowest floors on this site and far below the panic peaks, with no sign of a fresh scramble.

■ Price rose   ■ Price fell   ■ No change

22 LR Search Interest Over Time

Search interest is the demand signal: it measures how many people are looking for 22LR, not what it costs. For most calibers the spikes track politics.

For 22LR, search is a scarcity meter: its all-time peak came in March 2013, when the question was not what a brick of 22 cost but whether any store in the county had one. Rimfire attention rises when supply disappears and fades when the shelves refill, which is why this caliber's search line outlasted every other caliber's after Sandy Hook.

• March 2013, the all-time peak, and it isn't close. Sandy Hook panic-buying emptied the rimfire shelf, and for months Americans searched for 22LR the way people search for anything that has vanished. No caliber's search interest peaked on scarcity itself the way rimfire's did.
• January 2021, the COVID-era secondary peak, less than half of 2013's, even though the price multiple was far larger. In 2013 you couldn't find it; in 2021 you could, at five times the price.
• 2022 and 2026, the dogs that didn't bark: Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the surprise U.S. airstrikes on Iran moved centerfire calibers and left 22LR flat. Wars don't reach the training caliber.

Factory Cost vs. Retail Price

This chart tracks what ammunition costs to make: the federal Producer Price Index for small arms ammunition (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), the price manufacturers charge at the factory door, with the retail scramble stripped out. The index's one big move came in late 2007, when lead hit an all-time high and military orders for Iraq and Afghanistan ran the industry's plants at capacity, a genuine cost increase, visible because it impacted the factory's cost of goods directly.

The demand surges read the opposite way: through the 2020 to 2021 spike this index rose less than 7 percent while the cheapest retail 22LR more than quintupled. That surge was a scarcity premium paid at the shelf, not a jump in the material costs required to build a round, and nowhere is the gap between the two wider than in rimfire, the cheapest round to make and the easiest to hoard.

Demand sets the price of 22 LR, not the cost to build a round.

Background Checks vs. Ammo Demand

This chart adds another piece to the puzzle: how many Americans actually bought a gun, not ammo. Every retail firearm purchase runs through an FBI background check, and the National Shooting Sports Foundation strips out the permit checks and rechecks which states run against existing license holders, leaving the closest public measure of guns actually sold, month by month, back to 2000. This is a look at the buyers of firearms, not ammunition.

That difference is what makes it worth reading against the price and search lines for ammo above: when all three climb together, new buyers are entering the market; when ammo demand surges and NICS background checks barely move, Americans who already own guns are stocking up. Background checks count how many Americans joined the ranks of gun owners; ammunition prices measure how worried the ranks already are. One gauge counts the crowd growing, the other reads its pulse.

For 22LR the background-check line explains the least, deliberately. Nobody's first gun is a rimfire trainer bought in a panic, no legislation has ever named the caliber, and wars don't call it up: neither the 2022 invasion of Ukraine nor the 2026 U.S. airstrikes on Iran put a ripple in the 22LR line.

What moves this caliber is the oldest force in the market: hoarding. When Steve Hornady's customers cleared his shelves during the great rimfire drought, he explained it in one sentence, people walk into the store, don't see as much as they want, and take everything.

Background checks normalized by mid-2013; the 22LR shortage ran three more years on that psychology alone.

New buyers move the background-check line; nervous owners move the price line.

How much does a box of 22LR cost right now?

The latest point on the index above is the cheapest advertised price per round this month. A 50-round box runs about 50 times that number, a 500-round brick about 500 times it, before shipping. Typical shelf prices run higher, and match or specialty rimfire costs several times more than the bulk plinking ammo this index tracks.

What is a good price per round for 22LR?

Judge it against the line above. A price at or below where the index has sat for most of the past year is a solid buy, and a price near the series' recent lows is worth stocking up on. Rimfire's history says one more thing: when 22LR disappears, it stays gone longer than any other caliber, so the stack you buy in the calm is the stack you shoot through the panic.

Why did 22LR disappear for three years after 2013?

Because rimfire is the hardest ammunition to make more of. The case is the primer, priming compound is spun into the rim itself, and the machinery that does it is slow, specialized, and expensive to expand, so the industry can't surge rimfire output the way it can centerfire.

When panic buying after Sandy Hook and President Obama's assault-weapons push emptied the shelves, production couldn't catch the hoarding: stores rationed bricks per customer into 2016. Prices only fully normalized once the political threat left office.

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Writing about ammo prices? Drop the live 22 LR cost-per-round chart onto your site. It refreshes on its own as we publish each month and links back to this index. Free to use with attribution.

<div class="infogram-embed" data-id="_/W50ByZEWaoffSjjSQcQy" data-type="interactive" data-title="22 LR Cost Per Round Over Time"></div><script src="https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js" async></script><p>Chart: <a href="https://ammo.com/ammo-prices/22-lr">22 LR Ammo Price Index</a> by Ammo.com</p>