Powder Checks · Bullet Checks · Mark 7 reloading sensors

Tools

What does a round actually cost?

Every other reloading cost calculator asks you to type in what you paid. This one already knows: the powder, bullet, primer and brass prices below are live listings from the Component Search, collected September 20 at 7:16 AM Mountain time. Pick your cartridge, type the charge weight you load, and the rest fills itself in — cheapest in stock first, with a link to every listing used.

per round
for 1,000 rounds

Type the charge weight you load and the rest fills in. We don't publish charge weights — that number comes from your powder maker's current data.

How the numbers are built

Powder is priced in hand per pound — the retailer's hazmat fee and shipping spread over a single container — then divided by 7,000 grains and multiplied by your charge. The cheapest listing is usually an 8 lb jug, because spreading one hazmat fee across eight pounds is most of what makes bulk cheaper.

Bullets and brass are per 100, primers per 1,000, all from the retailer's own stated box count — a listing that doesn't state one has no per-unit price and never appears here. Bullets are filtered to the diameter your cartridge takes, primers to the size SAAMI specifies for it.

Brass is the one line that isn't a simple purchase. A case gets loaded more than once, so its cost is split over however many loads you get out of it. Five is a conservative default for a pistol case in a normal-pressure load; rifle brass worked near maximum will be fewer, and range pickup you didn't pay for is zero — tick the box.

What this leaves out: your time, press and die wear, tumbling media, gas checks, lube, and the powder and primers lost to setup. It also can't see a deal you already have on the shelf. Treat it as the floor, not the whole bill.

No charge weights here

You type the charge; we never suggest one. The site publishes no load data at all — for the charge weight, go to your powder maker's current published data, linked from every powder page. If you want the acceptance window your powder check should hold around that charge, the charge window calculator does that math.

Related

Set a Component Watch and we'll email you when a component on this page comes back in stock, or under a price you name. For what each powder is and where its maker publishes data, start at the Powder Desk.