The American firearms industry is still going great guns after a minor slump in 2025, with the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) adjusted NICS numbers showing more than a million guns sold in the U.S. in May of 2026, as well as an increase over May’s numbers in 2025.
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Why NICS numbers matter
When you buy a firearm at a gun dealer, the business sends a query to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for a background check. The reply from NICS lets the seller know whether the prospective buyer has a criminal record or can’t own a firearm for other reasons.
Obviously, NICS queries are not a straight one-to-one relation to firearms sales, because some NICS queries come back denied. Other NICS queries are for explosives, for CCW licenses or other reasons than a gun purchase, and some NICS queries are for multiple guns. As well, some states have no NICS queries at all, but instead use an alternative method for background checks. So, while an increase in NICS numbers generally means more people buying guns and a decrease means the inverse, you can only trust the figures so far.
The NSSF obviously has its own data from businesses that are members of the organization, and uses that to come up with an adjusted formula that gives a clearer estimate of how many firearms were sold in a month, or at least, how many NICS queries were related to a gun sale.
May’s NICS numbers
For May 2026, that number is 1,105,758 sales, says the NSSF. That’s well over the magic one-million mark again (the U.S. dipped below that number briefly in 2025). And it’s also another month of significant increase over the year before, since May of 2025, only 1,071,685 NICS queries were related to gun sales, says the NSSF. That’s a 3.2 percent increase, and a sign that through 2026, the trend of increased gun sales seems to be holding solid.
