Varmint Ammo Ballistics, by Caliber

How to read it

Everything here is the manufacturer’s published figure, not something measured in my back yard and not something computed from a ballistic calculator. Where a maker does not publish a number, the cell is empty rather than filled in from somewhere else. That is why HSM and Remington rows stop at the muzzle: those two publish a muzzle figure and nothing downrange.

The sources, so you can check any row against the people who made it: Hornady, Nosler, Winchester, Federal, Remington and Browning. If a figure here disagrees with theirs, theirs is right and I want to know.

Two hundred yard zero, with one exception that is shown rather than converted. Most manufacturers publish at 200 and it is the sensible zero for a varmint rifle anyway. Exactly one load on this site — the 22 ARC 80 grain ELD-X — is published at a 100 yard zero, and its drop column is left empty rather than recomputed. Velocity and energy do not depend on the zero, so those are still directly comparable; a converted trajectory would be a number the manufacturer never published, which is the thing these tables exist not to do.

The columns. BC is the G1 ballistic coefficient, which is the number that decides how well a bullet holds its speed. Test barrel is the barrel length the maker used, which is worth knowing before you wonder why your 16-inch AR is 200 feet per second slower than the chart. Muzzle energy is in foot-pounds. Drop at 500 is inches below the line of sight, off that 200 yard zero.

A high BC beats a high muzzle velocity past about 300 yards, and the tables show it repeatedly. The fastest load out of the barrel is almost never the fastest load at 500.

The calibers

The small six, and why they are listed apart

These six are not in the count above and their tables are a different shape, because the cartridges are. Rimfire ballistics are published to 200 yards off a 100 yard zero, not to 500 off a 200 — nobody prints a 500 yard .17 HMR figure because there is no useful bullet left out there.

Three of the six are rimfires and none of those is an honest coyote cartridge. A .17 HMR arrives at 200 yards with 57 to 72 foot-pounds and a .22 WMR with 70; the weakest load on the .223 page carries 105 at 500. If you came here looking for permission to shoot coyotes with a rimfire, those pages will not give it to you, and that is deliberate.

The three small centerfires are real but short-ranged. The .22 Hornet and .218 Bee are hundred-and-fifty yard propositions; the .17 Hornet shoots much flatter than either and carries the least energy of the three. Their pages carry the two clearest ballistic-coefficient demonstrations on the site: the .218 Bee drops fifteen feet at 500 yards on a 0.108 BC, and the .17 Hornet beats the .22 Hornet at every distance past the muzzle on shape alone.

A caliber gets its own page when there is something to say beyond the table — bullet-weight bands, a wind note, a rifle pairing. The two newest are here for the opposite reason: the 22 ARC and the 22 Creedmoor have five factory loads each and exactly one varmint load each, and that is worth a page on its own.

The 6.5 Creedmoor is the one exception to “every factory load”. It has dozens of offerings and almost all of them are match or deer bullets, so that page carries a predator hunter’s shortlist rather than a catalog, and says so at the top. It is here because the cartridge is everywhere and the question keeps being asked — and because there is one genuine varmint load in it that most owners have never heard of.

The six modern cartridges carry an Application column the older tables do not, marking each load Varmint, Hunting or Match from the manufacturer’s own product line. On a cartridge with thirty years of catalog behind it you can assume a varmint load exists; on one launched since 2017 you cannot, and the count is stark:

Twenty-eight factory loads across five modern cartridges, and seven of them were built for predators. Every one of these is a capable coyote cartridge being served by a catalog aimed at target shooters and deer hunters.

What is missing, and what is wrong

Not all of this data has been re-checked. Here is the state of it.

Eleven loads were added in a September 2026 catalog check and are marked ★ where they appear: three in the big calibers — the .204 Ruger 24 grain NTX, the .22-250 35 grain NTX and the .243 87 grain V-MAX — and eight more found when the three small cartridges got their own pages, including six .220 Swift loads that had never been listed at all. All are in the makers’ current line-ups and none had ever been in this table. If you know of others, the tables are only as complete as the last time somebody read the catalogs.

Discontinued loads stay, labeled. Every other site drops a load the day it leaves the catalog, which is exactly when you most want to know what it did — you have half a box on the shelf and no idea what it was doing at 300 yards. Nothing here has been removed for being out of production. Where a load is known to be discontinued it will say so.

Three ballistic coefficients elsewhere in this data contradict their own trajectories and are marked where they appear. They are all on the .243 and .22-250 tables, not on the pages published so far, and they are being checked with the manufacturer before those pages go up.

Missing a load? Several makers publish loads that never made it into this table, and the smaller outfits are the likeliest gap. Tell me what is missing and I will add it.