.303 British Ammo (2026): Who Still Makes It, What It Costs and What’s Safe in Old Enfields

Last updated October 2026

Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning at no additional cost to you, we may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

Yes, 303 British ammo is still made. Prvi Partizan, Sellier & Bellot, Hornady, Federal, Remington, Winchester and HSM all load it, and on October 1, 2026, boxes of 20 started under $24 on our price cards.

That’s about $1.20 a round for the Serbian and Czech loads and about $2 and up for American hunting ammunition. You won’t see much of it on a local shelf, which is why so many owners think the round is dead.

The trap with 303 British ammo isn’t in the rifle. It’s in the cheapest box on the search results page: military surplus that’s sixty years old, corrosive, and known for hangfires. New 303 British ammo costs more per round and has none of those problems.

This guide covers who makes 303 British ammo, what it costs per round, what’s safe in which rifle, and what the headspace scare is really about. New to buying online? Our ammo buying guide covers the basics.

.303 British at a Glance

The .303 British is a rimmed, bottleneck rifle cartridge that Britain adopted in 1888 with the Lee-Metford, firing .311 to .312 inch bullets at a SAAMI limit of 49,000 psi. By the older crusher method that limit is 45,000 CUP.

303 British Ammo: The Good and the Bad

Prvi Partizan, Sellier & Bellot, Hornady, Federal, Remington, Winchester and HSM all load 303 British ammo in 2026, and new boxes of 20 start under $24. The bad news is mostly about old surplus and short brass life.

Table of Contents

Who Still Makes 303 British Ammo in 2026

Seven companies make 303 British ammo in 2026: Prvi Partizan and Sellier & Bellot in Europe, and Federal, Remington, Winchester, Hornady and HSM in the United States. Steinel sells two more loads direct.

So is 303 British ammo still made? Yes, on two continents. The table shows who makes 303 British ammo and what each maker’s own page or catalog listed when we checked in October 2026.

The American 180-grain 303 British ammo loads are triplets. Remington, Winchester and Federal all publish 2,460 fps and 2,418 foot-pounds. Hornady and Federal are just as close with their 150-grain loads.

The two European makers cover the range side. PPU loads a 174-grain full metal jacket that matches the weight of the old Mk VII service bullet, and Sellier & Bellot sells a 180-grain full metal jacket. Our dealers also carry a 174-grain Remington UMC range load.

HSM describes its 174-grain Sierra MatchKing load as made for target shooting and long-range accuracy. No maker’s page says which rifles its load is or isn’t for. Steinel comes closest, with a load it describes as made “for your Enfield or other classic rifle.” We couldn’t confirm current 303 British ammo from Norma, Wolf or Buffalo Bore.

Check the barrel length before you compare velocities. PPU’s own catalog lists all three of its loads as boat-tails, and it measures them from a 24-inch barrel. Most American makers don’t state a barrel length at all, so compare muzzle velocity within one maker’s column and not across them.

What 303 British Ammo Costs in 2026

The 303 British ammo price at our dealers ran from $1.18 a round for Sellier & Bellot full metal jacket to $3.92 a round for the priciest Federal box on October 1, 2026, with PPU soft points from $1.26.

Prices are for a box of 20, from the dealers in our catalog that day. The live cards search more dealers, so you may see a lower price there. Prices move, and so does availability.

Two things stand out in 303 British ammo prices. A PPU 180-grain soft point lists the same velocity as the Federal, Remington and Winchester 180-grain loads and costs about half as much. And the makers’ own sites listed far more than the street price when we checked, at $85.99 for Federal and $86.99 for Remington.

Watch for the false bargain too. The cheapest thing a search for 303 British ammo turns up may be a blank, a snap cap or old surplus. Our cards filter those out.

Against its neighbors, 303 British ammo costs a little more. On the same day .308 Winchester and .30-06 soft points started at about $1.10 a round on our cards, and .30-30 at $0.95. Our ammo price report tracks the common calibers.

Lee-Enfield Ammo: What’s Safe in Your Rifle

SAAMI caps the .303 British at 49,000 psi, well below the 60,000 psi of a .30-06, and we found no source that names a current factory load as unsafe in a sound Lee-Enfield. The rifle’s condition is what needs checking.

Lee-Enfield ammo is the same .303 British across every Mark from the 1890s on. Find your rifle in the table.

For the oldest rifles there’s one useful published remark. American Hunter notes that factory ammunition is, in many cases, loaded to lower pressures and velocities “in deference to the weaker metallurgy of the earliest rifles.” That’s a reason the loads are mild. It isn’t a clearance for any one Lee-Metford or Martini.

Two rows need a note. British ordnance declared the No. 5 obsolete in 1947 over a wandering zero, though modern owners haven’t reported a confirmed case of it. And wartime No. 4 Mk I* rifles were also made with two-groove barrels.

The Winchester Model 1895 is the American oddity. Winchester added .303 British to its box-magazine lever action in 1898, and Uberti sells a new single shot in the caliber today.

The Ishapore row catches people. India built .303 No. 1 rifles at Ishapore, then built the 2A and 2A1 in 7.62 NATO from 1963 with improved steel. Read the receiver, not the factory name.

Our Lee-Enfield buyer’s guide covers the rifles themselves, and the best military surplus rifles roundup compares them with the Mausers and Mosins. This card shows what our dealers have in .303 right now.

The Standards: 49,000 psi, 45,000 CUP and 3,650 bar

SAAMI lists the 303 British at a maximum average pressure of 49,000 psi by transducer and 45,000 CUP by copper crusher, and Europe’s C.I.P. sets 3,650 bar. Those are three numbers from three methods, and they don’t convert into each other.

That matters because “45,000 psi” is printed on more than one page that ranks for this cartridge. It’s the crusher figure with the wrong unit. You can read the row yourself in the SAAMI rifle standard, Z299.4, and the European figure on the C.I.P. sheet.

So the .303 sits between the .30-40 Krag and the .30-06, a long way under the .308. Old British figures in tons per square inch came from a different test again, and they can’t be set beside any of these.

The same documents settle an old argument about oversize bores. Both SAAMI and C.I.P. draw the groove at .314 inch against a bullet of .3125 inch at most. A bullet a little smaller than the groove is the design, not a defect in your rifle.

303 British Surplus Ammo, Hangfires and the Headspace Scare

Old 303 British surplus ammo is the trap with this cartridge: it’s Berdan primed, corrosive in most cases, and decades past its best, and one published test of a Pakistani lot found that nearly every shot hung fire.

The cheap box

British service ammunition was loaded with cordite from 1891 into the 1960s. A chuckhawks.com guest article says surplus rounds are corrosively primed as a rule, and that the bore has to be cleaned very thoroughly to save it from rust.

The lot to know by name is POF, from the Pakistan Ordnance Factory. GunsAmerica Digest tested one lot in 2016, got a hangfire on nearly every shot plus some duds, and called it “actually fairly dangerous.” That’s one test of one lot. Owners on the forums report the same thing from other crates.

Corrosive doesn’t mean the ammunition eats the barrel as you shoot. The primer leaves salts in the bore that attract water, and the rust comes later if you don’t flush them out. That’s a cleaning chore with every range trip.

A hangfire is a delay between the click and the shot. If a round clicks, keep the muzzle downrange and wait. The NRA’s range safety guidance says at least 60 seconds before opening the bolt.

New PPU or Sellier & Bellot costs about $1.20 to $1.60 a round. Surplus is cheaper per round, and the saving buys you the cleaning and the misfires.

303 British headspace: the scare and the numbers

The second half of the trap is the diagnosis. A new owner finds a stretched or split case, reads that Lee-Enfields have bad headspace, and starts shopping for bolt heads.

Here’s what the documents say. The .303 headspaces on its rim, so the gauge is a rim-thickness gauge.

The War Office Textbook of Small Arms of 1929 gives the British service limits as .064 inch minimum and .074 inch maximum. SAAMI’s gauge table is tighter, at .064 to .071. That gap is the whole 303 British headspace argument.

So a rifle that passes the military gauge can fail an American commercial one and still be serviceable. What the looser chamber costs you is brass. The Lee action locks at the rear of the bolt, and Shooting Times explains that the bolt body compresses under firing while the case stretches just ahead of the rim.

If you don’t reload, that stretch costs you nothing. The case is fired once and thrown away. Reloaders feel it, and most of the case separations owners describe on the forums involve reloaded brass.

The textbook is clear that there’s a real limit all the same. It warns that an unsupported case “may burst,” and that’s what the field gauge is there to prevent.

The check to ask for

1. Take the rifle to a gunsmith who has Lee-Enfield gauges, and ask for a headspace check against the .074 military field gauge.
2. Keep the rifle with its own bolt. A bolt from another rifle changes the headspace.
3. On a No. 4 or No. 5, bolt heads are numbered 0 to 3, and each step is about .003 inch longer. Fitting one is a gunsmith’s job, because the head has to be measured and gauged again.
4. Watch your fired cases. Sticky extraction or a bright ring just ahead of the rim means the brass is close to separating.

And if you see that bright ring? Nick Harvey’s advice to an owner whose SMLE showed it was short: “Don’t shoot it again in its present condition.” Have the rifle gauged before the next round.

Rim Lock, Chargers and Boat-Tail Bullets

Rim lock is a feeding jam that happens when the rim of the top cartridge sits behind the rim of the one below it, so the bolt can’t push the round forward. It’s a nuisance in a Lee-Enfield’s 10-round magazine, and it’s avoidable.

The rule for any rimmed military cartridge is that each rim rests ahead of the rim beneath it. In a five-round charger that means rims down, up, down, up, down. Forgotten Weapons describes it as rounds 2 and 4 sitting on top of the rims of rounds 1, 3 and 5.

Load the magazine from two chargers of five, or single rounds with each rim placed ahead of the last. Military cases had beveled rims to help them slide past each other.

Boat-tails are an accuracy question. All three PPU loads are boat-tails, and some owners of rifles with cordite-worn throats report sideways holes from them. If yours does that, try another load before you blame the rifle.

7.7x56R, .303 Savage and the Names That Look Right but Aren’t

The .303 British and the 7.7x56R are the same cartridge under two names, and a military box marked Mk VII holds the 174-grain service load of 1910. The trouble starts with the other .303s and 7.7s on the shelf.

303 British vs 303 Savage is the naming trap we see most. The .303 Savage is a different, smaller case with a .308 inch bullet, and the two don’t interchange.

Headstamps on military rounds carry a maker’s code, the Mark and a year. The ones American buyers meet most are RG for Radway Green, POF for Pakistan, HXP for Greece and DI for a Canadian wartime plant. PPU’s older cases are stamped nny.

Old Stock: Cordite, Corrosive Primers and Mk VIIIz

Military Mark VII cases have two flash holes, which makes them Berdan primed and a poor bet for reloading, and the 1929 War Office textbook describes cap compositions of mercury fulminate and potassium chlorate. Treat any military round as corrosive.

The British Army’s own cleaning drill still works. Its 1937 rifle pamphlet orders 5 or 6 pints of boiling water poured through the bore from the breech with a funnel, then drying and oiling. After that, clean with bore solvent as normal, and look again the next day.

You’ll also see Mk VIIIz, a 175-grain boat-tail at about 2,550 fps that was approved in 1938 for the Vickers machine gun. The Vickers MG Association says it “was for sole use in the Vickers but could be used in other weapons in exceptional circumstances.”

None of our sources calls it unsafe in a rifle. The wartime finding was about wear: a barrel fed cordite Mk VII and then nitrocellulose Mk VIIIz eroded faster. It’s machine gun ammunition, so it’s a poor first choice for a collectible rifle.

Wartime rounds are also collectibles now. If a sealed can or a bandolier came with the rifle, it may be worth more on a shelf than at the range.

303 British Ballistics for Deer, Black Bear and Moose

Factory 303 British ballistics run from a 150-grain bullet at 2,690 fps and 2,410 foot-pounds to a 180-grain bullet at 2,460 fps and 2,418 foot-pounds, which puts it ahead of the .30-40 Krag and about 325 foot-pounds behind a .308.

Those 303 British ballistics are the makers’ own figures. Hornady adds a trajectory for its 150-grain load: zeroed at 200 yards it’s 2.2 inches high at 100 and 9.3 inches low at 300.

Is it enough for deer? Yes, with a soft point. If you’re buying 303 British ammo for deer, either the 150 or the 180 works. For black bear and moose we’d take a 180-grain soft point, and Federal says its Power-Shok loads suit a wide variety of medium and big game.

How far? With iron sights we treat it as a 200-yard rifle. Federal’s 180-grain load still carries 1,545 foot-pounds at 200 yards and 1,215 at 300, so the cartridge has more reach than most of us can use without a scope.

Canadians have hunted moose with it for a century, and there’s an old saying there that the .303 has taken more moose than everything else combined. It’s a saying and nobody has counted. Our best moose rifles and best bear hunting rifles roundups cover the modern options.

303 British vs 308

303 British vs 308 is the comparison people ask about most, and the .308 wins on paper. Winchester lists its 180-grain Power-Point at 2,460 fps in .303 British and 2,620 fps in .308, a gap of 160 fps and 325 foot-pounds.

The .303 kicks a little less for it. Chuck Hawks’ recoil table puts a 180-grain .303 load in an eight-pound rifle at 15.4 foot-pounds, against 17.5 for a .308 and 20.3 for a .30-06. Our .308 vs .30-06 comparison and the best deer hunting cartridges guide put those numbers in context.

303 British Myths vs. the Truth

The first 303 British ammo myth to drop is that nobody makes it: Prvi Partizan, Sellier & Bellot, Hornady, Federal, Remington, Winchester and HSM all list a current load. Is 303 British ammo still made? Yes, by all seven. Here are the other claims that come up on the forums.

Our Range Notes: Four Loads in a No. 4 and an SMLE

We shot four factory 303 British ammo loads through a 1943 No. 4 Mk I and a 1917 SMLE over two mornings in September, 160 rounds in all over a chronograph. Both rifles had passed a gunsmith’s check with a .074 field gauge.

Groups were five shots at 100 yards from a rest, with the aperture sight on the No. 4 and the open sight on the SMLE. Every load ran a little under its listed speed in both rifles. The Hornady shot tightest and the PPU full metal jacket was close behind at about two-thirds the price.

The PPU boat-tails printed round holes from both barrels. That’s two rifles, so test your own before you buy a case.

We watched the brass. Fired cases came out longer than new ones from both rifles, as expected with a rear-locking action. None showed a bright ring ahead of the rim and none stuck in the chamber.

Rim lock showed up once. We filled ten chargers with the rims stacked down, up, down, up, down and they stripped cleanly. One charger filled in a hurry jammed on the third round, and a firm push on the bolt cleared it.

A Short History of the .303 British

Britain adopted the .303 in 1888 with the Lee-Metford, firing a 215-grain round-nose bullet over 70 grains of compressed black powder at about 1,850 fps until cordite replaced it in 1891. Some references date the cartridge’s introduction to February 1889.

The Lee-Enfield arrived in 1895 with deeper rifling to stand up to cordite, and the short rifle, the SMLE, followed in the early 1900s. In 1910 the Mark VII load brought a 174-grain pointed bullet at 2,440 fps, and it stayed the standard ball round for the rest of the cartridge’s service.

The No. 4 was adopted on November 15, 1939, and Savage built them in the United States from 1941. The No. 5 Jungle Carbine followed in 1944. British ordnance declared it obsolete in 1947 for a fault it called “inherent in the design.”

The 7.62 NATO replaced the .303 in British service in 1957. More than 17 million Lee-Enfields were built in all, and the Canadian Rangers were still carrying the No. 4 when its replacement began in 2015.

American factories built for it too. Winchester, Remington and Eddystone made the Pattern 1914 Enfield for Britain during World War I, and the first rifles were accepted in February 1916.

A Note on Reloading

The .303 British takes .311 or .312 inch bullets, with bullet weights from 123 to 215 grains, and PPU catalogs new Boxer-primed brass for it. Case life is the catch, and Shooting Times warns not to expect more than about two full-power firings from a case in a Lee-Enfield.

Writers recommend neck sizing only. Service bores ran large as well. Stephen Redgwell puts the drawing tolerance at .313 to .316 inch across the grooves, so slugging the bore of a surplus rifle is worth the trouble.

We do not publish load data on this page. Use a current manual from a bullet or powder maker, stay inside the SAAMI limit, and start with our beginner’s guide to reloading if you’re new to it.

Bottom Line: Which 303 British Ammo to Buy

For most owners the 303 British ammo to buy is new PPU or Sellier & Bellot, which cost $1.18 to $1.60 a round at our dealers on October 1, 2026. The job decides the rest.

• For the range with a wartime Lee-Enfield: PPU 174-grain or Sellier & Bellot 180-grain full metal jacket, after one headspace check.
• 303 British ammo for deer, black bear and moose: a 180-grain soft point. PPU’s costs about half what the American loads do, and Federal, Remington and Winchester are the easy ones to find in a store.
• For a Lee-Metford or a Martini: a gunsmith first. No maker rates its load for those rifles.
• For the surplus that came with the rifle: keep it as a collectible and shoot new 303 British ammo.

If you shoot other old military rifles, our 8mm Mauser ammo guide does the same job for the Mauser, and the .32-20 ammo guide covers an older Winchester round. A curio and relic license makes buying the rifles simpler.

We’ve done the same job for other old calibers: the 7.62×25 Tokarev ammo guide, the .44-40 ammo guide and the .45 Colt ammo guide.

Lead image: composite based on a CC0 photo by Lograsset. The round-nose bullets are an early mark of .303.

303 British Ammo FAQ