The .17 HMR is the best rimfire ever made for shooting small things a long way, and it is on this site because a lot of people ask whether it will do for coyotes.
It will not, and the table below is the reason. Read the 200 yard energy column.
The loads
Note the shape of this table. It stops at 200 yards and it is zeroed at 100, because that is as far as the manufacturers publish — every centerfire page on this site runs to 500 off a 200 yard zero. Nobody prints a 500 yard .17 HMR figure because there is no useful bullet left out there.
| Brand | Load | Grain | Bullet | BC | Muzzle | 100 yd | 200 yd | Muzzle energy | 100 yd energy | 200 yd energy | Drop at 200 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hornady | Varmint Express | 15.5 | NTX® | 0.115 | 2,525 | 1,830 | 1,291 | 219 | 115 | 57 | -10.0” |
| Hornady | Varmint Express | 17 | V-MAX® | 0.125 | 2,550 | 1,902 | 1,379 | 245 | 137 | 72 | -8.5” |
| Hornady | Varmint Express | 20 | HP XTP® | 0.125 | 2,375 | 1,755 | 1,274 | 250 | 137 | 72 | -9.9” |
| CCI | — † | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Federal | — † | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Winchester | — † | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Remington | — † | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
The coyote question
A .17 HMR arrives at 200 yards with 57 to 72 foot-pounds of energy.
Put that next to the centerfires. The very worst load on the .223 page — the one I describe there as falling off a cliff — is carrying 105 foot-pounds at 500 yards. A .17 HMR at 200 has barely half the energy of the weakest .223 load at two and a half times the distance.
What that means in the field. A 17 grain bullet at close range, put exactly where it needs to go, will kill a coyote. It has done so many times. But the margin is nothing: a shoulder, a quartering angle, a few extra yards, a little wind, and you have wounded an animal that will run and not be found.
So the honest answer is that the .17 HMR is a 100 yard coyote cartridge in the hands of somebody who will not take any other shot, and most people cannot hold to that once a dog is standing there at 160.
Check your state as well as your conscience. Several states set a minimum caliber or prohibit rimfire for predators outright, and a few that permit it for coyotes prohibit it for anything larger. The state regulations have it state by state.
If you want a small, quiet, cheap-to-shoot cartridge that genuinely handles coyotes, the .22 Hornet is the honest version of what people hope the .17 HMR will be.
What it is genuinely good at
None of the above is a criticizm of the cartridge — only of using it for the wrong animal. Inside 150 yards on ground squirrels, prairie dogs, rock chucks and crows, the .17 HMR is superb: flat, accurate, cheap enough to practice with, and quiet enough not to clear a field.
It is also, for exactly the same reasons, the best rimfire for teaching somebody to shoot at distance before you hand them a centerfire.
Notes on the data
Every figure is Hornady’s published one. Source: Hornady rimfire and the product pages for 15.5 gr NTX, 17 gr V-MAX and 20 gr XTP.
† Four makers are named without figures. CCI, Federal, Winchester and Remington all load the .17 HMR and their published data is not yet on this table. The rows are here so the list is honest about being incomplete rather than looking finished.
Test barrels are 24 inches. A .17 HMR out of a 20 inch sporter will not make these numbers, and the shortfall matters more on a cartridge with this little energy to spare.
Know a load that should be here? Tell me and I will add it.