Annual Cost of Owning a Gun (2026): Calculator and Real Numbers

Last updated October 2026 · By Nick Hall, who keeps a spreadsheet of every box of ammo and every range receipt, and wishes he didn’t

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Quick Answer: Owning a gun costs about $270 a year if it lives in a safe by the bed and goes to the range four times a year. Shoot 200 rounds of 9mm every month and it’s about $1,180 a year. Carry it with a permit and carry insurance and it’s about $1,410. Ammo is the biggest line in every case, and it’s the one you control.

Those numbers come from the calculator below, run on real prices: the median price per round across 2,440 in-stock ammo listings on our retailer feeds in October 2026, range fees and safe prices we’ve already published, state permit fees from the statutes, and the carry insurance prices the providers list on their own sites. Put in your own gun and your own habits and it gives you your number.

Table of Contents

Annual Cost of Owning a Gun Calculator

Start with the gun you have or the one you’re about to buy. Pick the caliber you shoot, then tell it how often you go to the range and how many rounds you fire each time. Everything else is optional. The result splits the cost into a yearly number for budgeting and a year-one number for the cash you’ll actually hand over in the first twelve months.

What Five Kinds of Owners Pay a Year

Most guides give one big range, like "$500 to $2,000 a year", which tells you nothing. The honest answer depends on what you do with the gun, so here are five owners run through the same calculator. Each pistol owner has a $550 polymer 9mm kept for ten years. The safes, permits and insurance are the real prices covered further down.

Owner	What they do	Ammo a year	Everything else	Per year	Per month
Nightstand owner	4 range trips, 100 rounds each, walk-in lanes, $199.99 handgun safe	$128.00	$144.96	$272.96	$22.75
Monthly range shooter	12 trips, 200 rounds each, $360 range membership, handgun safe	$768.00	$416.28	$1,184.28	$98.69
Concealed carrier	Same as the monthly shooter, plus a North Carolina permit and CCW Safe Defender	$768.00	$641.28	$1,409.28	$117.44
AR-15 owner	$800 rifle, 6 trips, 150 rounds of .223 each, $300 outdoor club, $1,749 gun safe	$585.00	$506.30	$1,091.30	$90.94
.22 plinker	$349.99 Ruger 10/22, 12 trips, 300 rounds each, $300 outdoor club	$489.60	$327.80	$817.40	$68.12

Three things stand out. Ammo is the biggest line for every owner who shoots more than a few times a year: 65% of the monthly shooter's bill. Carrying adds $225 a year, and almost all of that is insurance, not the permit. And the .22 plinker fires four times as many rounds as the AR-15 owner (3,600 against 900) and still pays less for ammo.

Ammo Is the Biggest Bill

Your caliber sets your yearly cost more than any other choice you make. These are the median prices per round for practice ammo, meaning full metal jacket and target loads rather than defensive hollow points, across every in-stock listing on our retailer feeds on October 23, 2026:

• .22 LR: 13.6 cents a round, across 222 listings
• 9mm: 32 cents, across 329 listings
• .380 ACP: 42 cents, across 85 listings
• 12 gauge target loads: 56.8 cents a shell, across 1,219 listings
• .45 ACP: 57 cents, across 168 listings
• .223 and 5.56: 65 cents, across 316 listings
• .308 Winchester: 147.5 cents, across 101 listings

So 1,000 rounds a year costs about $136 in .22 LR, $320 in 9mm, $570 in .45 ACP and $1,475 in .308. That's why the small .380 pocket pistol, which sounds like the cheap option, costs about a third more to practice with than a full-size 9mm.

The median isn't the floor. A quarter of the 9mm listings were 29 cents a round or less, and the best 50-round boxes of brass-cased 9mm on the card here come in around that. Buying in bulk when a sale comes around is the single biggest saving most owners can make. If you shoot a lot, our breakdown of whether reloading is worth it runs the numbers on making your own.

One more ammo cost people forget: the defensive rounds in a carry gun or a nightstand gun. Hollow points cost more than range ammo, and it's worth swapping them out every year or two and shooting the old ones, so budget a box a year if your gun is loaded for defense.

Range Fees: Walk-In or Membership

The lane is the second-biggest bill for most shooters. In our range membership cost research, Top Gun Range in Houston charged $22.17 an hour for a walk-in lane, Best Shot Range in Friendswood, Texas sold a year's membership for $360, and Maynard Rod and Gun Club in Massachusetts charged $300 a year for a full outdoor club membership.

Here's the break-even. At $22.17 a visit, sixteen walk-in trips cost $354.72 and seventeen cost $376.89, so a $360 membership pays for itself on your seventeenth trip of the year. Go twice a month and the membership wins. Go four times a year, like the nightstand owner in the table, and $88.68 in walk-in fees beats any membership by a mile.

If you have access to free land, like public land open to shooting or a friend's back forty, put the range fee at zero in the calculator. Ammo still costs the same.

The Gun Loses Value Too

A gun is the rare purchase you can sell for most of what you paid, but not all of it. When we measured 32 popular models in our gun depreciation study, used polymer pistols listed at a median of 20.5% below new. Metal-frame pistols lost 13%, revolvers 11.5%, rifles 8% and shotguns 3%.

That's mostly a one-time hit that happens the day the gun becomes a used gun, so the longer you keep it, the less it costs you per year. A $550 polymer pistol loses about $112.75 if you sell it. Spread over ten years that's $11.28 a year, a rounding error next to ammo. Sell it after one year and the whole $112.75 lands on that year. The calculator spreads the loss over however many years you plan to keep the gun.

If you're still deciding what to buy, the purchase price itself is covered in our guide to how much guns cost by type.

A Safe, Spread Over the Years

A safe is a big check once and nothing after that, so the fair way to count it is to spread it over the years you'll use it. A Vaultek Barikade Series 2 biometric handgun safe sells for $199.99, which is $20 a year over ten years. A full-size Browning Sporter 33 lists at $1,749, or $174.90 a year over the same ten years. For the AR-15 owner in the table, that safe is 16% of the yearly bill.

A safe outlives the gun, and the next gun goes in the same box, so the real yearly cost is lower still. If you're shopping, our Vaultek vs Hornady comparison covers handgun safes and Liberty vs Browning covers the big ones. Budget for delivery and installation on a full-size safe too, and ask your insurer, because some homeowners policies cost less with one.

Carry Permit Fees, State by State

A carry permit is cheap once you spread it over the years it's valid. Three examples, from each state's own fee schedule:

• North Carolina: state law sets an $80 application fee and a $75 renewal fee, plus up to $10 for fingerprints. A permit is valid for five years, so it costs $16 a year.
• Florida: a first license costs $97 for a Florida resident, made up of a $55 license fee and a $42 fingerprint fee, and renewal costs $45, per the state's fee schedule. Apply through a county tax collector and it adds a convenience fee of up to $22 for a new license or $12 for a renewal. A license is valid for seven years, so the first one runs $13.86 a year.
• Texas: a License to Carry costs $40 to get and $40 to renew on the standard fee. Honorably discharged veterans pay $25, and active military pay nothing.

The fee is rarely the expensive part. Many states require a training class before they issue a permit, and that class can cost more than the permit itself. Put it in the classes box in the calculator for the year you take it. Texas and Florida no longer require a permit to carry inside the state, but many owners there still get one to carry in other states that honor it.

Carry Insurance: What It Adds

For anyone who carries, self-defense legal coverage is the line that grows the most with the plan you pick. These are the prices the two biggest providers list on their own sites in October 2026:

• USCCA: Gold at $39 a month or $399 a year, Platinum at $49 a month or $499 a year, and Elite at $59 a month or $599 a year.
• CCW Safe: Defender at $19 a month or $209 a year, Liberty at $37 or $399, and Ultimate at $47 or $519. There's also a Home Defense plan at $27 a month or $299 a year for people who don't carry.

Pay once a year if you can. USCCA Gold costs $468 paid monthly against $399 paid annually, a $69 difference. CCW Safe Defender costs $228 paid monthly against $209 a year. For the concealed carrier in the table, the $209 plan is 15% of the yearly bill, and the $599 USCCA Elite would be close to a third of it. Our USCCA vs CCW Safe vs US LawShield comparison covers what each plan actually pays out.

Cleaning and Upkeep

Cleaning is the cheapest part of owning a gun. A Real Avid Gun Boss Pro Universal cleaning kit is $37.99 at Guns.com, and the card below finds it for less at some retailers. A 4-ounce can of Break-Free CLP is $11.99 at Palmetto State Armory. The kit lasts for years. Patches, solvent and a new brush now and then come to about $25 a year for most owners, which is the default in the calculator. Add targets, a replacement set of ear plugs and the odd magazine, and a busy shooter might spend double that.

Springs and small parts wear out with round count, not with time. A pistol that shoots a few hundred rounds a year will go many years without a new part. One that shoots 2,400 a year will want new recoil and magazine springs on the schedule its maker publishes, and that's still a small bill next to the ammo it took to wear them out.

Costs That Only Show Up Once

The year-one number in the calculator includes the gun, the full safe price and the full permit fee, which is why it's so much bigger than the yearly number. The monthly range shooter pays $1,902.99 in year one against $1,184.28 a year after that. A few one-time costs aren't in the calculator because they change too much from buyer to buyer:

• Sales tax on the gun, at your state and local rate.
• The FFL transfer fee if you buy online and ship to a dealer. Our FFL transfer fees guide lists what dealers charge.
• A holster, spare magazines and a light if you carry or keep the gun for home defense.
• Eye and ear protection, which every range requires.

How to Cut the Yearly Cost

• Buy ammo in bulk, on sale. Getting 9mm at 29 cents a round instead of 32 saves the monthly shooter $72 a year.
• Do the range math. Under seventeen trips a year, skip the membership.
• Practice with a .22. A Ruger 10/22 or a .22 pistol lets you put 1,000 rounds downrange for about $136.
• Dry fire at home. It costs nothing, and it makes every round you pay for count.
• Pay insurance once a year instead of monthly.
• Keep the gun. The resale hit comes the day it becomes a used gun, so trading guns every year or two is the fastest way to spend money without shooting.

How I Worked These Numbers

Ammo prices are the median price per round of in-stock practice ammo across every retailer on our price feeds on October 23, 2026, 2,440 listings in all. I counted full metal jacket, ball and target loads, and left out hollow points, match ammo, buckshot and slugs, since those aren't what you practice with. Range fees come from the ranges' own websites, gathered for our range membership guide. Resale losses come from our own depreciation study of 32 models. Safe prices are what the makers and retailers charged in October 2026. Permit fees come from North Carolina's statute, Florida's fee schedule and Texas DPS's fee table. Insurance prices come from the USCCA and CCW Safe sites. Nothing here is sponsored.

FAQ: Annual Cost of Owning a Gun