How Many Bullets Are in a Clip?

Most clips hold between 3 and 10 rounds. A stripper clip usually holds 5. The M1 Garand’s en bloc clip holds 8. A moon clip for a revolver holds 6. You can load and fire an M1 Garand, en bloc clip and all, at our shooting range in Las Vegas.

But there’s a good chance the thing you’re picturing isn’t a clip at all. If you’re imagining the rectangular piece that slides into the grip of a pistol or the well of an AR-15, that’s a magazine, and magazines hold anywhere from 6 to 100 rounds depending on the gun.

Both answers are below, along with the reason almost everyone mixes up the two words.

Clip vs. Magazine: The Quick Version

A clip holds rounds together as a bundle so you can load them into a firearm quickly. It has no moving parts. It’s usually a stamped piece of sheet metal, it’s cheap, and on most guns it gets ejected or tossed once the rounds are in.

A magazine feeds rounds into the chamber. It has a spring and a follower that push each cartridge up into position as the gun cycles. That spring is the whole difference. No spring, no magazine.

So a clip loads a magazine. A magazine loads the gun. We cover the mechanics in more depth in our guide to what a gun clip actually is, but that one sentence covers 90% of it.

One more piece of vocabulary while we’re here: a bullet is just the metal projectile at the front. The whole unit you load is a cartridge or a round. If you want to go deeper on what’s inside one, our breakdown of the different types of bullets walks through the components.

Nobody at our range is going to correct you for saying “clip.” Plenty of people who shoot every week still say it. But knowing the difference makes it a lot easier to understand what you’re holding.

Clip Capacities: The Actual Numbers

If someone hands you a clip and doesn’t tell you what it’s for, 5 is the safest guess. That was far and away the most common size across the bolt-action rifles that dominated the first half of the twentieth century.

Stripper Clips

The most common type. Rounds sit in a single row along a metal strip. You seat the clip in a guide slot on top of the receiver, press down with your thumb, and the rounds strip off into the magazine below. Then you throw the clip away and close the bolt.

The British call these chargers. Same thing.

En Bloc Clips

These go into the gun along with the ammunition, and the rifle can’t be fired from the magazine without one. The M1 Garand is the famous example: an 8-round en bloc clip of .30-06 drops into the fixed magazine, the rounds feed off the clip itself, and when the last one fires the empty clip launches out of the action with a metallic ping that anyone who has watched a WWII film knows by ear.

That ping is one of the most recognizable sounds in firearms history, and it’s the reason “clip” stuck in the American vocabulary. Millions of GIs spent years asking for clips because that’s genuinely what their rifle took.

If you want to hear it in person, the Garand is part of our World War 2 package, alongside the other rifles that defined the era.

Moon Clips

A flat ring of metal that holds a full cylinder of revolver ammunition. Drop the whole thing in, and you’ve loaded six rounds at once instead of six rounds one at a time. Half-moon clips do the same job in two halves of three.

These exist mostly so revolvers can shoot rimless pistol cartridges like .45 ACP, which the extractor would otherwise have nothing to grab.

Magazine Capacities: What People Usually Mean

If your question was really about the part that goes into a modern pistol or rifle, here’s the range you’ll actually encounter.

Handguns

Capacity tracks caliber and grip size more than anything else. A double-stack 9mm frame holds more than a single-stack .45 because the cartridges are narrower and they can sit in a staggered column. Our guide to the types of pistols covers how those frame designs differ.

Rifles and submachine guns

• AR-15 / M16 (STANAG): 20, 30, or 40 rounds, with 30 as the standard
• AK-47 and variants: 30 rounds in the classic curved magazine
• Thompson submachine gun: 20 or 30-round stick, 50 or 100-round drum
• FN P90: 50 rounds, lying flat along the top of the receiver
• Drum magazines generally: 50 to 100

Magazines come in far stranger shapes than most people expect: tubular magazines running under a shotgun barrel, rotary magazines spinning inside a .22 rifle, helical magazines coiling rounds around an auger. We get into more of that hardware variety in our overview of the different types of guns.

Where “Clip” Came From

Three sources, roughly in order of blame.

The M1 Garand: For a generation of American soldiers, the correct word for the thing you loaded really was “clip.” When the military switched to magazine-fed rifles, journalists and screenwriters didn’t switch with them.

The banana clip: Reporters covering conflicts in the 1980s started calling the AK-47’s curved 30-round magazine a “banana clip.” It’s a magazine, and the curve exists because the 7.62x39mm cartridge is tapered, so a stack of them naturally arcs. But “banana magazine” doesn’t have the same ring, and the phrase stuck. The AK-47’s cultural footprint did the rest.

Video games: This is probably the real source for many. Games have used “clip size” in their interfaces for decades, and they generally model reloading the way clips work rather than the way magazines work, discarding whatever rounds were left over. Millions of people learned the word from a HUD before they ever learned it from a gun.

Magazine Capacity Limits by State

Federal law placed a 10-round cap on new magazines between 1994 and 2004. That ban expired, and there is no nationwide limit today.

Some states set their own. California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Washington, and a handful of others restrict magazines above 10 rounds; Colorado uses 15.

See It in Person

Reading about an 8-round en bloc clip is one thing. Feeling a Garand eject one across the lane is another.

At Strip Gun Club, you can shoot historic clip-fed rifles, modern magazine-fed pistols, and full-auto firearms in the same session. No experience needed, and no license or permit required to shoot as a visitor. Every lane runs with a certified range safety officer beside you.

Browse our shooting packages and find out what the difference feels like.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many bullets are in a 9mm clip?

Almost certainly you mean a 9mm magazine. Full-size 9mm pistols typically hold 15 to 17 rounds, compacts hold 10 to 15, and subcompacts hold 6 to 10. Actual 9mm clips are rare; the Mauser C96 used a 10-round stripper clip, and that’s about the extent of it.

How many bullets are in a Glock clip?

Glocks use magazines, not clips. A Glock 19 holds 15 rounds, a Glock 17 holds 17, subcompact models like the Glock 43 hold 6, and the extended 33-round magazine designed for the Glock 18 fits most 9mm Glocks.

How many bullets does an AR-15 clip have?

The AR-15 feeds from STANAG magazines. Standard capacity is 30 rounds, with 20 and 40-round versions common. Stripper clips do exist for the platform in 10-round strips, but they load the magazine rather than the rifle.

How many bullets are in an extended clip?

“Extended clip” almost always means an extended magazine, which is any magazine holding more than the factory standard for that gun. For handguns that usually means 20 to 33 rounds. For rifles, drums of 50 to 100 exist but are heavy and awkward to shoot with.

Is a clip the same as a magazine?

No. A clip holds rounds together for loading and has no moving parts. A magazine has a spring and follower that feed rounds into the chamber. Clips load magazines; magazines feed guns.

Do revolvers have clips?

Some do. Moon clips and half-moon clips let a revolver load a full cylinder at once, and they’re required for revolvers chambered in rimless cartridges like .45 ACP. Revolvers never have magazines, though. They have cylinders.