Silencer Saturday #442: An ATF Numbers Update

By Daniel Y • Published July 25, 2026

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to TFB’s Silencer Saturday, brought to you by Yankee Hill Machine, manufacturers of the new Victra 20-gauge shotgun suppressor. This week we are looking at the latest set of processing times and transfer data from the ATF, posted on July 1. We are now six months into the era of free tax stamps, so let’s see what information we can glean from the data.

Silencer Saturday @ TFB:

Processing Times

Now that we are six months into this brave new world, we have seen times start to stabilize at the new normal. Form 1 applications to make a new NFA item are sitting at 59 days for an eForm submission, and 29 days for paper. So if you want to chop the barrel on a new host gun or do something silly like make a silencer out of a soda can (which is the kind of thing happening now), it will be faster to get an approval via a mailed application.

Over on the Form 4 front, the trend is reversed. Paper submissions are slower for both trusts and individual applications, currently sitting at 31 days for the former and 28 days for the latter. EForms submissions for trusts are currently at 26 days, and just six days for an individual!

It is important to note that these times are averages, not guarantees. I recently submitted stamps for three BOE IncoLite silencers in one visit to Gallenson’s Guns in Salt Lake City, Utah. Those were eForms submissions with a trust, filed on June 10th. Two came back on July 10th (30 days), and one was approved on July 17th (37 days), a full week later than the others.

Why was that one approval so much slower? I have no idea. All three were for the same brand and type of silencer, submitted within a 10-minute window, all with the same trust and responsible person information. The inner workings of bureaucracies can be curious indeed. Averaging those results is 32.3 days, not far from the 28 days currently listed. Keep in mind that a submission with problems will take longer to get approved than a clean one.

One very bright spot in the data is the speed of Form 3 approvals. Form 3s are used to move NFA items between manufacturers and dealers. So when you order a silencer through your local gun store, that generates a Form 3 to ship the silencer from the distributor or manufacturer to the dealer. Through the eForm system, those are coming back in just one day. This is a major improvement from the old days when I recall waiting as much as a month for a Form 3 to come back.

Transfer Volume

Free tax stamps mean more transfers, but how many? 231,502 NFA applications were submitted to the ATF in the month of May. 121,117 of those were for Form 4 transfers of silencers. This means that a little more than half of the NFA action right now is just silencers. 233,843 NFA applications were finalized, which exceeds the number submitted. That is another very good signal because it means wait times will likely continue to drop.

In May 2026, the NSSF adjusted NICS background check figure was 1,105,758. That is not an exact representation of the number of guns sold in that month, but it is the best proxy figure. Compared to the 231k number of NFA forms submitted, that makes NFA action around a fifth of the size of the total gun sales volume. Comparing this to the days when it was hard to find a dealer with an SOT is hard to believe.

Year-to-date numbers are also truly impressive. 134,498 Form 1s have been approved. 894,938 Form 4s have been finalized in the first half of this year. Adding to this, the eForm has almost totally supplanted paper applications. Of the 1,623,526 total NFA forms submitted in 2026, 1,598,790 of them were through the eForms system. That is 98.47% of the total volume being handled electronically. The system has clearly been improved compared to the early versions, which were perpetually crashing or becoming overloaded.

The total number of guns in the NFRTR is a telling breakdown. There are 6.5 million silencers in the registry, but only 206,800 short-barreled shotguns. There are 1.1 million SBRs. I would guess that both SBR and SBS numbers continue to rise as people realize that the gun they have in the back of their safe would actually get used if it was chopped.

These numbers show that the uptick in NFA excitement was not just a flash in the pan. This is a sustained trend, and NFA items including silencers are making up an increasing portion of the gun market. It is a great time to be a suppressor enjoyer. We’ll see you back here next week for more silencer talk.

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