What’s The Cheapest Rifle Caliber To Shoot?

(Most Bangs For Your Bucks)

By Andrew Jackson Outdoor Empire www.outdoorempire.com

My least favorite part of the shooting hobby has to be dealing with ever-inflating ammo prices.

Unfortunately, unless you’re collecting vintage firearms, you’ll almost never shoot or are one of those hunters who shoots three shots a box the day before hunting season to make sure you’re still on paper. Your main shooting expense will be ammo.

Even if you’re a slow shooter and only put one box of ammo through your rifle every month, you’ll still go through hundreds of rounds per year. This will exceed your rifle’s cost within a few years.

And who only shoots a single box of ammo per trip?

My minimum shooting averages one magazine’s worth of ammo per week...

At the current cheapest prices, .223 or 7.62x39m plinking ammo, both would cost me $550 per year.

The cheapest hunting cartridge is generally .308 Winchester, costing $800 per year. Both lose dramatically to .22 Long Rifle at less than $150 for a year’s supply!

The cheapest rifle caliber to shoot, by far, is .22 Long Rifle. This venerable rimfire round is light and weak, so there’s little cost by way of raw materials. It’s also popular. Very popular. Which gives it an excellent economy of scale, further driving prices down.

$0.10 per round is my upper limit for plinking .22 lr, though it can be found down to about $0.08.

However, since it’s such a light, low-velocity cartridge, you can’t replace most rifles with a .22 lr version. Don’t go bear hunting or try to win a 1,000 shoot with .22!

This means we need to focus on other rounds to truly answer the question of what’s the cheapest rifle caliber to shoot. Right now, it’s either .223/5.56×45, 7.62x39mm, or .308/7.62×51.

All of these benefits from a large supply and guaranteed consumption base. A round such as .30-30 Winchester will have a lower material cost than .308, but it can’t approach the same price levels because it’s not manufactured on such a large scale.

Note that this advantage dissolves when reloading enters the picture. The cost, for you, is basically just the materials cost. So, you can reload even the rare cartridges for about as much as the common ones.

What Disciplines Can You Shoot Cheaply?

Certain shooting disciplines cannot be done “cheaply.”

You need to shoot match-grade ammo any time you want to maximize your rifle’s precision.

There’s no way around it. Cheaper ammo is just less accurate than more expensive ammo.

This makes Benchrest shooting, Precision Rifle Series, Bullseye/Precision Pistol, and other such competitions expensive to shoot no matter what.

Even your practice for these events should involve higher quality ammo.

You can get away with mid-grade ammo for hunting, 3-gun competition, and many other disciplines. If “hits” are what’s essential, not minute-of-angle, then you don’t need to use the best stuff possible.

And, when practicing these disciplines, you can get by with cheap ammo, as long as it’s not too inconsistent. For casual plinking, short-range target shooting, and drills where you’re focusing on speed rather than precision? Use the cheapest ammo you can get for your gun that’ll still let it run.