5mm Remington Magnum Ammunition Pricing Trends: Market Analysis

The 5mm Remington Rimfire Magnum is the only cartridge on this site whose owners have already lived through the worst-case scenario. Between 1983 and 2007, nobody manufactured it. Not at a high price, not at a low price — not at all. Roughly 52,000 rifles and 30,000 Thompson/Center barrels sat idle for a quarter century, and some were converted to other chamberings because their owners concluded the ammunition was never coming back.

That history is not trivia. It is the single most important input into how a 5mm owner should read a price chart today, because it establishes what the real risk is. For most cartridges, the risk is overpaying. For this one, the risk is that the supply stops again.

BlackBasin.com tracks 5mm Remington Magnum pricing daily, and the current record is short but unusually clean. Today's price is the highest we have ever recorded. This analysis explains what that does and does not mean.

Understanding the 5mm Remington Magnum Price Chart

Key Pricing Statistics

• All-time low: $1.20 per round
• All-time high: $1.40 per round
• Average over time: $1.24 per round
• Today's best price: $1.40 per round
• Today vs. 3-month average: 12.9% higher
• Today vs. 12-month average: 12.9% higher
• Today vs. all-time average: 12.9% higher

Two things about this statistics block deserve immediate comment.

First, today's price is the all-time high. There is no way to soften that, and this analysis will not try. A shopper looking at 5mm Remington Magnum today is looking at the most expensive price in the tracked record.

Second, all three comparison figures are identical at 12.9%. When the three-month, twelve-month, and all-time averages agree exactly, the tracking history is shorter than three months. The record here begins in early May 2026, so roughly fourteen weeks of observation underlie every statistic on the page. These are honest numbers, but they are not a long-run baseline, and no conclusion about "normal" pricing for this cartridge can be drawn from them alone.

Recent Price Trends: One Step, No Retreat

May through Late July: $1.20, Every Single Day

From the beginning of the record in early May through approximately July 25, the daily average sat at $1.20 per round without a single deviation. Not a range around $1.20 — the number itself, recorded day after day for roughly eleven consecutive weeks.

For most cartridges this would be a boring stretch of chart. For this one it is the most encouraging data on the page, and it is worth pausing on why. A cartridge that was unavailable at any price for twenty-five years produced eleven straight weeks of continuous daily in-stock pricing. Someone had inventory on the shelf every day for nearly three months. Measured against this cartridge's own history, that is the headline.

Late July: A Single Step to $1.40

Around July 26 the daily average moved from $1.20 to $1.40 — a 16.7% increase completed in one step, with no intermediate values.

It has held at exactly $1.40 every day since, through August 13. Roughly two and a half weeks at the new level with the same zero-variance flatness the $1.20 plateau showed.

So the entire tracked history of this cartridge consists of two prices and one transition between them. There is no volatility to analyze, no cycle, no seasonality visible in fourteen weeks. There is a floor that held for eleven weeks, a step up, and a new flat line.

What a Step Like That Usually Means

Prices do not move 16.7% in a single day and then hold perfectly flat for weeks because demand shifted. They do that when the source changes.

The most plausible reading of this chart is a supplier or inventory transition: the stock that supported $1.20 pricing was exhausted, and what remains in the market is priced at $1.40. That interpretation fits both the shape of the move and what is known about how this cartridge is produced. Aguila manufactures 5mm Remington Magnum in limited, seasonal production runs rather than continuously (Wikipedia). Under batch production, the price a buyer sees is a function of which batch is still on shelves, not of any ongoing supply-and-demand negotiation.

If that reading is correct, the practical implication is uncomfortable but important: $1.20 is not a price the market will drift back toward. It is a price that will return when the next run arrives, or not at all.

A Note on Conflicting Retail Listings

Shoppers researching this cartridge will encounter per-round prices well below the tracked figures — catalog listings in the $0.45 to $0.56 range at various retailers (Sportsman's Outdoor Superstore, AmmoBuy). Those numbers deserve scrutiny rather than excitement.

Examine the availability status attached to them and a pattern emerges: bulk 1,000-round listings marked out of stock across multiple store locations (Bud's Gun Shop), and product pages offering "Notify Me When Available" in place of an add-to-cart button. Meanwhile, independent aggregation of actually-purchasable inventory has shown a current cost range of $1.20 to $1.20 (AmmoSeek) — matching this site's tracked floor rather than the catalog prices.

This is the defining characteristic of an orphan cartridge market: it is listed cheap and available expensive. A price attached to inventory that does not exist is not a price. The gap between the two figures is a measure of how thin real availability is, and it is the reason a tracker that follows in-stock pricing tells a different story than a search engine that indexes product pages.

Factors Influencing 5mm Remington Magnum Ammunition Pricing

1. A Single Manufacturer, Producing in Batches

Remington never had company in this cartridge. No other ammunition maker offered it during the original production era (Chuck Hawks), and today Aguila is effectively the sole source, having reintroduced the round in 2008 in collaboration with Centurion Ordnance and marketed it under the Centurion brand in the United States until 2019 (Wikipedia).

One manufacturer running seasonal batches produces exactly the chart shape observed here: long flat stretches punctuated by instantaneous steps. There is no second producer whose pricing could compete the number down, and no continuous production line whose output could smooth the curve.

2. The 25-Year Blackout Is the Governing Precedent

Remington discontinued the rifles in 1974 and continued limited and seasonal ammunition runs only through 1982. Between 1983 and 2007, no ammunition was manufactured, and some firearms manufacturers produced conversion kits so existing 5mm rifles could shoot more common cartridges (Wikipedia).

Accounts from that period describe ammunition becoming so scarce and expensive — around $2 per shot on average — that the shooters who loved the cartridge were forced to shelve their rifles because continued use could not be justified (Hunt Shoot Live). Owners spent decades searching out and hoarding whatever remained (Varminter).

Adjusted for nothing at all, $2 per shot in the 1990s makes today's $1.40 look like a bargain. But the more important point is not the price comparison. It is that availability, not cost, was the binding constraint — and it was binding for twenty-five years.

3. Why It Failed Commercially, and Why That Still Matters

The 5mm was not killed by poor performance. It launched a 38-grain Power-Lokt hollow point at 2,100 fps for 372 ft-lbs, making it the fastest rimfire in the world at the time and, by multiple accounts, more accurate and ballistically superior to the .22 WMR it was built to challenge (Safari Club International).

It was killed by adoption economics. Its rim diameter was larger than the .22 WMR's, which meant existing rimfire rifle designs required major redesign to chamber it. No other gun maker took it up, and the ammunition cost considerably more than .22 WMR fodder (Safari Club International). Remington offered it in only two rifles, the Model 591 with a detachable clip and the Model 592 with a tubular magazine, plus a brief run of Thompson/Center Contender barrels (Gun Digest).

The relevance to pricing today is direct: the installed base never grew, and it cannot grow, because essentially no new firearms are being chambered for the cartridge. Demand is capped by a fixed population of surviving guns, which caps the production volume any manufacturer can justify, which keeps unit costs high permanently.

4. A Fixed and Slowly Shrinking Installed Base

Approximately 51,743 Model 591 and 592 rifles were produced, along with roughly 30,000 Thompson/Center Contender barrels in the chambering (Varminter).

That is the entire market, and it has been shrinking for fifty years through ordinary attrition and through the conversion kits that turned some of those rifles into something else. No manufacturer sizing a production run is looking at a growth market. They are looking at a collector and enthusiast base of known, finite size — which is why runs are limited and seasonal rather than continuous.

5. An Unusual Case That Complicates Manufacturing

The 5mm RFM was the first bottlenecked rimfire case to launch a semi-jacketed bullet, and it was derived by necking down a .22 caliber blank case Remington produced for the power-tool manufacturer Hilti (Safari Club International). Its dimensions are unique: a .325" rim diameter, .259" base, 1.02" case length, and an actual bullet diameter of .2045" (Chuck Hawks).

It also runs at pressures far above other rimfires — originally 37,000 psi, subsequently reduced to 33,000 psi for current production, against roughly half that for the .22 WMR and .22 LR (Wikipedia, Varminter).

Nothing about this cartridge shares tooling or components with a high-volume rimfire line. Bottlenecked rimfire cases, a nonstandard bullet diameter, and pressures at the top of the rimfire envelope all mean dedicated setup for every run. That fixed setup cost, spread across a small batch, is a permanent floor under the price.

6. Current Production Is Narrow by Design

Aguila offers two loads, both 30-grain: a semi-jacketed hollow point and a full jacketed hollow point, at approximately 2,300 fps and 352 ft-lbs (Wikipedia, Hunt Shoot Live).

Two loads means the tracked price is close to the whole story — there is no cheap bulk tier to fall back on and no premium tier to trade down from. When the tracked price steps up, there is nowhere else in the product line to go.

What This Means for 5mm Remington Magnum Shooters

The Right Denominator Is Years of Rifle Use, Not Cost Per Round

Every other cartridge analysis reasonably asks whether today's price is a good price. For the 5mm, that question is secondary, and treating it as primary has historically been how owners ended up with unusable rifles.

Consider what a 591, 592, or Contender barrel actually is: an irreplaceable firearm that no manufacturer supports, in a chambering nobody is building new guns for, dependent on seasonal runs from one company. The ammunition purchase is not really a consumable expense. It is a maintenance expense on an asset that goes to zero utility the moment supply stops.

Framed as cost per round, $1.40 is 16.7% worse than $1.20 and the worst price on record. Framed as cost per year of keeping the rifle functional, a 500-round purchase at $1.40 costs $700 and represents several seasons of small-game and varmint shooting for a rifle that spent 1983 through 2007 as a wall hanger. The 20-cent difference from the all-time low amounts to $100 on that purchase — real money, and also not remotely the deciding factor.

Buy the Run, Not the Dip

Under seasonal batch production, the meaningful signal is availability, not price level. A shooter waiting for $1.20 to return is making an implicit bet that the next batch will be priced at or below the last one, and that they will notice it in time.

The chart offers no support for that bet. It shows a floor that held eleven weeks and then vanished in a day, with no partial retreat since. When a run is on the shelf and the price is within reach, that is the buying opportunity — the price is a detail, the availability is the event.

Buy More Than You Think You Need

This recommendation would be irresponsible for most cartridges. Here it follows directly from the historical record.

The 5mm has a documented precedent of going from purchasable to unobtainable and staying there for twenty-five years, long enough that gunsmiths built a small business converting the rifles to other chamberings. Anyone who bought a generous supply in 1982 shot their rifle through the 1990s. Anyone who bought a box shelved it.

Current production has now run since 2008, which is genuinely reassuring and does not constitute a guarantee. A single manufacturer serving a fixed, shrinking installed base with seasonal runs can stop for the same reasons Remington stopped.

Know What You Have Ballistically

The cartridge earns the effort. It delivers more retained energy downrange than either the .22 WMR or the later .17 HMR (Chuck Hawks), and field accounts describe decisive terminal performance on varmints well past 150 yards where the .17 HMR tended to pass through cleanly (The Stalking Directory).

Set against that, the honest counterpoint: published guidance from the original era put effective killing range on varmint-sized animals at a conservative 25 to 50 yards (Gun Digest), and a shooter can buy .22 WMR or .17 HMR at a fraction of $1.40 per round with universal availability. If the goal is volume rimfire shooting, those cartridges are the rational choice and no analysis should pretend otherwise.

The case for 5mm is not that it is the efficient way to shoot a rimfire. It is that if you own one of the roughly 52,000 rifles, this is the only ammunition that makes it a rifle.

Verify the Load Before You Order

Because current production comes in two 30-grain variants, semi-jacketed and full-jacketed hollow point (Aguila), and because original Remington ammunition was a 38-grain Power-Lokt, point of impact and downrange behavior will differ from any zero established with vintage ammunition. Shooters returning to a rifle that has been stored for years should expect to re-zero rather than assume old data carries over.

Conclusion: The Cartridge Where Availability Is the Only Real Metric

The tracked price record for 5mm Remington Magnum is fourteen weeks long and contains two prices. Eleven weeks at $1.20, a single step, and two and a half weeks at $1.40, where it sits today as the all-time high, 12.9% above every average on the page.

Read as a pricing signal, that is unwelcome news, and this analysis has not tried to dress it up. Read in the context of the cartridge's actual history, it is close to irrelevant. This is a round that could not be bought at any price for twenty-five years, that ran roughly $2 per shot on the collector market when it could be found at all, and that owes its current existence to one manufacturer's willingness to schedule seasonal runs for a market of fewer than 52,000 guns.

Fourteen straight weeks of daily in-stock pricing is the story. The 20 cents is a footnote.

BlackBasin.com tracks 5mm Remington Magnum daily because for this cartridge the tracker answers a question no product page can: is it actually available right now, at a price attached to real inventory. Catalog listings in the $0.45 range that cannot be added to a cart are not a market. A continuous daily record is.

For the owner of a Model 591, a Model 592, or a Contender barrel in 5mm, the calculus is simpler than it looks. The rifle is irreplaceable, the ammunition is not guaranteed, and the historical penalty for waiting has been measured in decades rather than dollars. When a run is in stock and the price is within reach, that is the moment — and buying deeper than a single box is not stockpiling, it is the accumulated lesson of everyone who shelved a perfectly good rifle in 1983.

Visit our website regularly to monitor 5mm Remington Magnum pricing and availability. With this cartridge, the most valuable thing the chart can tell you is not what it costs. It is that there is still a price to report at all.