Clip vs Magazine: What’s the Difference? (2026)

Last updated and checked October 28, 2026

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By Nick Hall

Quick answer: a magazine stores rounds and feeds them into the chamber, using a spring and a follower to push each round up in turn. A clip only holds rounds together so you can load them into a magazine or a revolver’s cylinder in one go. So the thing you slide into the grip of a Glock or the bottom of an AR-15 is a magazine, not a clip. Real clips are stripper clips, en bloc clips and moon clips, and each one works differently.

Table of Contents

Clip vs Magazine: The Short Answer

The easy test is the spring. A box, tube or rotary magazine has a spring that pushes rounds toward the chamber, so the gun can feed itself. A clip has no feeding spring: it is a strip, a frame or a ring of metal that keeps cartridges together until you load them. Wikipedia’s entry on firearm magazines puts it plainly: calling a detachable magazine a “clip” is a common habit, but it is “technically inaccurate since a clip is actually an accessory device used to help load ammunition into the magazine or cylinder of a firearm.”

Here is the whole difference at a glance:

What Is a Magazine?

A magazine is the ammunition storage and feeding device of a repeating firearm. It can be built into the gun or detachable, but either way it holds several cartridges and pushes each one into position so the action can load it into the chamber. That feeding job is what makes it a magazine. Our parts of a gun diagrams show where it sits on a pistol, rifle and shotgun.

Box magazines

Box magazines are the most common type in modern rifles and handguns. They stack cartridges in a single column or a double, staggered column, and a spring-loaded follower drives the rounds up to the feed lips. Most are detachable, like an AR-15 magazine or a pistol magazine, but some are built into the gun as an internal box, like a hunting rifle with a hinged floorplate.

For pistol magazines specifically, see our best Glock magazines guide, and our gun magazines page covers the rest.

Tube, rotary and drum magazines

A tube magazine stores cartridges nose to tail inside a spring-loaded tube, most often under the barrel of a lever-action rifle or pump shotgun. A rotary magazine uses a spool turned by a torsion spring; the Ruger 10/22’s 10-round BX-1 is the best-known example. Drum magazines hold far more rounds for their length and are mostly found on light machine guns and high-capacity accessories. All of them feed the gun, so all of them are magazines.

What Is a Clip?

A clip stores several rounds together as one unit so you can load them into a magazine or a revolver cylinder in one motion instead of one at a time. Most are cheap stamped sheet metal meant to be disposable, though shooters keep and reuse them. There are three kinds, and the difference between them is where the clip ends up.

Stripper clips

A stripper clip, called a charger in Commonwealth countries, holds 5 to 10 cartridges by their bases. You open the bolt, set the clip in a slot over the magazine, and press the rounds down, stripping them off the clip into the magazine. Then the clip comes out. The stripper clip never goes into the gun itself. Bolt-action military rifles like the Mosin-Nagant, Lee-Enfield, Mauser Gewehr 98 and M1903 Springfield used them, and so does the SKS.

Stripper clips are still useful today. With a loader that sits on top of a detachable magazine, you can push 10 rounds at a time into an AR-15 magazine, which is much easier on the thumbs than loading one round at a time. If you are shopping for a rifle that uses them, see our best SKS rifles and Mosin-Nagant buying guide.

En bloc clips

An en bloc clip goes into the rifle with the rounds. You press the loaded clip down into the rifle’s fixed magazine, and when the last round is fired or chambered, the clip is ejected or falls out. Ferdinand Mannlicher invented the design for his Model 1885, 1886 and 1888 rifles, and the best-known American example is the M1 Garand, which takes an 8-round en bloc clip. The catch is that you cannot top off an en bloc rifle with loose rounds the way you can with a stripper-clip rifle: it runs as a repeater only with a clip loaded.

If you own or want a Garand, our used M1 Garand buying guide covers what to look for.

Moon clips

A moon clip is a ring or star-shaped piece of spring steel that holds a full cylinder’s worth of cartridges (a full moon), half a cylinder (a half moon), or just two rounds. It lets a double-action revolver fire rimless cartridges like .45 ACP that would otherwise slip too far into the chambers. Unlike a speedloader, the moon clip stays in the cylinder while you shoot, then pulls all the empty cases out at once.

The modern moon clip was devised in 1908 and made famous by the M1917 revolvers, built by Smith & Wesson and Colt so the Army could use the M1911’s .45 ACP rounds in revolvers. Moon clips can make reloads very fast with training: Jerry Miculek has fired six rounds from a Smith & Wesson Model 625, reloaded with a moon clip and fired six more in 2.99 seconds. For revolvers that use them, see our best revolvers guide.

Which Guns Use Clips Today?

Clips are mostly a military-surplus and revolver story now, but they are far from dead. Here is where you still meet each type:

• Stripper clips: military bolt-action rifles such as the Mosin-Nagant, Lee-Enfield, Mauser Karabiner 98k and M1903 Springfield, plus the SKS. AR-15 owners also use 10-round 5.56 stripper clips with a loader to fill detachable magazines.
• En bloc clips: the M1 Garand is the one most American shooters meet, and clips for it are still made and sold cheaply.
• Moon clips: revolvers chambered for rimless rounds, from classic .45 ACP revolvers like the Smith & Wesson Model 625 to current guns such as the Ruger Redhawk in .45 ACP and the Ruger LCR and GP100 models in 9mm and 10mm, which ship for or sell moon clips.

A moon clip is not the same thing as a speedloader. A speedloader holds a cylinder’s worth of rounds and lets go of them once they drop into the chambers, so you set it aside before you shoot. A moon clip stays in the cylinder while you fire and comes out with the empty cases. That makes moon clips faster to unload, but loading and unloading the clips themselves is slow, and a bent clip can bind the cylinder, which is why many revolver shooters still prefer speedloaders for rimmed rounds.

Magazines, on the other hand, are everywhere. Every modern semi-automatic pistol, every AR-15 and AK, most bolt-action hunting rifles and every pump shotgun feeds from a magazine of some kind. If the gun can feed itself after you load it, there is a magazine involved, even if a clip helped you load it.

Why People Call Magazines Clips

The mix-up goes back to rifles that used clips to load fixed magazines. For decades a soldier or hunter really did load his rifle “with a clip”, so the word stuck to anything that held ammunition. Today, calling a detachable magazine a clip is colloquial. Most people will know what you mean, but at a gun counter or in a class, “magazine” is the correct word, and using it signals you know your gear.

The terms also matter in law. Magazine capacity limits are written about magazines, not clips, so read your state’s rules on the exact device. Our AR-15 magazine capacity laws guide covers the states that cap them.

How to Tell Which One You Have

1. Look for a spring and a follower. If the device has a spring that pushes rounds up, it is a magazine.
2. Ask where it goes. If it never goes into the gun and you push the rounds off it, it is a stripper clip.
3. Ask whether it comes out with the brass. If it goes into a rifle with the rounds and pops out empty, it is an en bloc clip.
4. Ask whether it fits a cylinder. If it is a ring that holds revolver rounds and stays in while you shoot, it is a moon clip.

For more on how guns load and fire, see our types of guns guide, which walks through every action type.

Frequently Asked Questions