Ammo-Price Increases

From our May/June 2025 issue

If you haven’t yet bought your year’s supply of factory loads or shot for reloading, brace yourself. Big price increases are happening.

In 2024 there were numerous articles, both in print and online, about the price increases coming in ’25 for most of the metals that are used in finished shotshell loads or components manufacture. These include antimony, bismuth, copper, lead, nickel, tungsten and zinc. Three or more of these metals are used in every factory load and several shot types.

The bad news concerning this year’s price increases and supply-chain-availability problems with these metals began for me with an April 24, 2024, Epoch Times article by James Gorrie entitled “U.S. Remains Hostage to China’s Rare Earth Metals Monopoly.” In this piece Gorrie, the Southern California author of The China Crisis, outlined the forthcoming problems related to using these metals generally in modern society, which for us include, by association, in shotshells. For example, he stated that “. . . electric vehicles in the United States need ten times the amount of rare earth metals that [the country] currently has or can produce to meet that commitment—and that’s just for EVs.” He explained the why and causes of the shortfall in the national supply of rare-earth metals, which has become untenable.

His excellent article stated that currently China, in effect, holds a near monopoly on the supply and processing of rare-earth metals worldwide. This makes the US fully dependent on China for the rare-earth metals needed to maintain and build strategic weapons plus the many different nontoxic shot types now being loaded in target and hunting shotshell loads. Those metals include in particular antimony, bismuth, copper, nickel and tungsten.

The bismuth/tin and tungsten required in the various tungsten-composite nontoxic pellet types currently being loaded are self-evident. The shortage/price increases for copper have a lot to do with the demand for copper wire and other electrical uses. Copper in shotshells is used in brass, as a plating on pellets and as a mix in some tungsten-composite pellet types. The longstanding use of pure brass (a mixture of copper plus zinc) has been the mainstay for metal heads on shotshell hulls. But now increasing cost is the principal reason we have seen pure brass heads virtually disappear from hunting loads and all but the most expensive of target loads. The principal metal being used worldwide for metal heads is now steel with at most a very thin brass plate and ever more commonly a simple brass-appearing paint job. For this same reason brass and copper have mostly disappeared from primers and been replaced by steel. Nickel is used as a plating on shot and as a coating on some metal shotshell heads. Both copper and nickel are destined to become ever rarer as a “plating” on shot or metal heads.

But as Gorrie said, “It wasn’t always this way. In 1980 [and until the mid-’90s] the United States produced virtually all of the earth’s rare earth metals . . . all through the Mountain Pass mining operation in California’s Mojave Desert. The Americans then gave it to the Chinese.” This happened because American business interests that were going bankrupt allowed China to buy out various metal-mining companies and technologies from bankruptcy. Besides American companies selling their rare-earth-metal technologies to China, the Biden Administration denied a roadbuilding project called the Ambler Access Road in Alaska that would have given the US a reliable domestic source of copper, zinc, lead, gold, silver and cobalt.

Now that China has control, here are some examples of how that country is paying us back. According to a December 2024 New York Times article entitled “China Announces a Ban on Rare Minerals to the U.S.”: “China said Tuesday [Dec. 3] that it would begin banning the export of several rare minerals to the United States: an escalation war between the world’s two biggest powers. The ban signals Beijing’s willingness to engage in supply chain warfare by blocking the export of important components to make weaponry and semi-conductors. Sales of antimony, bismuth, and tungsten would be halted immediately on the grounds they have dual military and civilian uses.”

Then a December 24 online article by Carolyn Osario in Money Digest entitled “5 Goods We Buy From China That May Be Affected by Trump’s Tariffs” pointed out that any tariff increases “. . . inevitably end up being paid for by consumers via price increases on imported products.” So any tariff increases by the Trump Administration on imported Chinese goods are going to increase costs of Chinese goods. And that certainly includes the above-mentioned metals used in shotshell manufacturing and reloading ifChina even elects to continue exporting them to the US.

Early this year there were several “warning postings” on certain shot-importer/manufacturer websites about stocking up on bismuth, tungsten-composite and TSS shot types to beat the “big price increases” coming for these pellet types in 2025. Certainly there will be more bad-news articles and postings on metals and shot-price increases as the year continues.

Which brings me to lead and steel shot. When I first started shotgunning in the 1960s, one could buy a 25-shell box of Winchester or Remington top-of-the-line lead target loads for $5 or less and a case (20 boxes then) for about $85, or about $4.25 a box. A 25-pound bag of 6% antimony reloading lead shot commonly sold for $12, or about 48 cents a pound. As I write this, 25 pounds of quality reloading lead shot with only 5% antimony sells for about $60 (about $2.40 a pound). That is a 400% price increase! Lead-shot cost is the principal expense in a lead shotshell load, and it has continued to steadily and markedly rise. That’s the main reason US-made top-quality lead target loads like Winchester AAs now sell for about $13 a box—about a 206% increase from the 1960s. Clearly a marked increase in price point for factory lead shotshell ammunition has been taking place, but interestingly it has not been nearly as steep as the price increase for reloading lead shot. The only late-breaking (mid-February) mitigating development has been that Idaho’s Perpetua antimony/gold mine has received go-ahead approval. It is poised to meet more than 35% of the US’s annual antimony demand by 2028.

Looking again at reloading as an index, the only shotshell component that has remained relatively low in cost is steel shot. In the ’60s steel sold for about $2 a pound. Quality, unplated steel shot to the reloading market in 2025 currently goes for about $2.30 a pound, a mere 15% increase in 65 years. So the price has held quite steady, because iron is mined in abundance in the US and there is lots available to recycle; plus most steel shot loaded in factory loads and for reloading is also manufactured in the US. As a result, steel will always remain the least-expensive shot type to reload or load in factory shotshells in the US.

So I think the handwriting is clearly on the wall. Make your move to purchase various shot types for reloading and to stock up on factory loads now. If you can find any loads or shot at prices close to those that were being charged in 2024, you’re looking at disappearing older stocks and prices that will be substantially increased.