Data basis: the official wiki ballistics table, read 2026-08-17, against patch 1.1.0.0 of 3 August 2026. Every damage, penetration and armour-damage figure below is quoted from that table. Every rouble figure is yours to fill in, and the reason is in the pricing section.
“What is the cheapest round that reliably beats class 5?” is two questions wearing one coat. The ballistics half has a stable answer. The price half stopped being stable on 3 August 2026, when 1.1.0 raised trader prices by an average of 25%, cut what traders pay you by an average of 20%, and pushed the Flea Market fee from 3% to 5%. Every ammo chart written before that date answers the first half and silently gets the second half wrong.
So this page splits them. The matrix settles whether a round gets through. The arithmetic under it settles what getting through costs you now.
How to read PASS, RACE and FAIL
The wiki rates each round against each armour class on a 0-6 effectiveness scale defined by the average number of bullets the armour stops. We collapse that into three verdicts, because three is what you can hold in your head in a doorway:
- PASS — wiki rating 5 or 6. The armour stops fewer than three rounds on average; a rating of 6 means the first shot penetrates more than 80% of the time.
- RACE — rating 3 or 4. Between three and nine bullets stopped. You are not penetrating, you are chewing durability until you start penetrating, and you are doing it inside the window where the other player is shooting back.
- FAIL — rating 0 to 2. Nine or more bullets stopped. Change your aim point, not your patience.
The “thorax hits” column is ceil(85 / damage), then repeated at 80% damage. The second figure
is the one that matters: a round that penetrates loses between 0% and 40% of its damage on the
way through, with about 20% being typical when a round is just starting to penetrate. A round
whose raw arithmetic says two hits and whose penetrated arithmetic says three is a round that
gets you killed by a chest rig.
The 85 HP thorax pool is the one number here we could not source. The wiki documents a 440 HP total across seven body parts but does not print the per-part split; 85 is the figure the community uses universally and we have not verified it. If it is wrong, the hit counts scale with it and the PASS/RACE/FAIL columns do not move at all.
The matrix
| Caliber | Round | DMG | Pen | Armor dmg % | Cl 3 | Cl 4 | Cl 5 | Cl 6 | Thorax hits (raw / −20%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.45x39 | BT gs | 54 | 37 | 44 | PASS | PASS | RACE | FAIL | 2 / 2 |
| 5.45x39 | 7N40 | 55 | 42 | 45 | PASS | PASS | RACE | RACE | 2 / 2 |
| 5.45x39 | BP gs | 48 | 45 | 46 | PASS | PASS | PASS | RACE | 2 / 3 |
| 5.45x39 | BS gs | 45 | 54 | 57 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 3 |
| 5.45x39 | PPBS Igolnik | 37 | 62 | 59 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 3 / 3 |
| 5.56x45 | M855 | 54 | 31 | 37 | PASS | RACE | FAIL | FAIL | 2 / 2 |
| 5.56x45 | M856A1 | 52 | 38 | 44 | PASS | PASS | RACE | FAIL | 2 / 3 |
| 5.56x45 | M855A1 | 49 | 44 | 47 | PASS | PASS | PASS | RACE | 2 / 3 |
| 5.56x45 | M995 | 42 | 53 | 52 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 3 / 3 |
| 5.56x45 | SSA AP | 38 | 57 | 58 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 3 / 3 |
| 7.62x39 | PS gzh | 61 | 35 | 52 | PASS | PASS | RACE | FAIL | 2 / 2 |
| 7.62x39 | PP gzh | 59 | 41 | 57 | PASS | PASS | RACE | RACE | 2 / 2 |
| 7.62x39 | BP gzh | 58 | 47 | 63 | PASS | PASS | PASS | RACE | 2 / 2 |
| 7.62x39 | MAI AP | 53 | 58 | 76 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 3 |
| 7.62x51 | M80 | 80 | 43 | 67 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 2 |
| 7.62x51 | M80A1 | 75 | 55 | 74 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 2 |
| 7.62x51 | M61 | 73 | 60 | 79 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 2 |
| 7.62x51 | M993 | 70 | 65 | 85 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 2 |
| 7.62x54R | LPS gzh | 81 | 42 | 78 | PASS | PASS | RACE | RACE | 2 / 2 |
| 7.62x54R | PS gzh | 84 | 45 | 84 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 2 |
| 7.62x54R | BT gzh | 78 | 55 | 87 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 2 |
| 7.62x54R | BS gs | 72 | 70 | 88 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 2 |
| 9x39 | SPP gs | 68 | 35 | 48 | PASS | PASS | RACE | FAIL | 2 / 2 |
| 9x39 | PAB-9 gs | 62 | 43 | 57 | PASS | PASS | PASS | RACE | 2 / 2 |
| 9x39 | SP-6 gs | 60 | 48 | 64 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 2 |
| 9x39 | BP gs | 58 | 54 | 69 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 2 |
| 9x19 | AP 6.3 | 52 | 30 | 48 | PASS | RACE | FAIL | FAIL | 2 / 3 |
| 9x19 | PBP gzh | 44 | 39 | 55 | PASS | PASS | RACE | RACE | 2 / 3 |
| 12.7x55 | PS12B | 102 | 46 | 57 | PASS | PASS | PASS | RACE | 1 / 2 |
| .300 BLK | M62 Tracer | 54 | 36 | 40 | PASS | PASS | RACE | FAIL | 2 / 2 |
| .300 BLK | AP | 51 | 48 | 65 | PASS | PASS | PASS | RACE | 2 / 3 |
| 6.8x51 | SIG Hybrid | 72 | 47 | 58 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 2 / 2 |
| .338 LM | FMJ | 122 | 47 | 83 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 1 / 1 |
| .338 LM | AP | 115 | 79 | 89 | PASS | PASS | PASS | PASS | 1 / 1 |
The finding that older charts bury
Read the class 6 column against the penetration column and the ranking breaks. 7.62x51mm M80 rates PASS at class 6 on 43 penetration, while 5.45x39mm 7N40 with a higher 42-to-45-ish pen band only manages RACE, and 9x39mm SPP at 35 pen outright FAILs. M80’s advantage is not penetration. It is the 67% armour damage figure paired with 80 base damage: it destroys the plate fast enough that its own penetration threshold collapses inside two or three shots, and any shot that does get through only needs two thorax hits.
The same pattern shows up in 7.62x54R PS gzh (45 pen, 84% armour damage, PASS at class 6) and .338 Lapua FMJ (47 pen, 83%, PASS at class 6). Against class 5 and 6, armour damage percentage is doing at least as much work as penetration power, and the conventional “sort by pen” ammo chart hides that completely because it sorts by the wrong column.
Read the other direction and the cheap end firms up too. Class 4 falls to 5.45x39mm BT (37 pen) and 5.56x45mm M856A1 (38 pen) — both well below the “pen must be 10 above class times 10” rule of thumb that gets repeated in threads. Class 5 falls to 9x39mm PAB-9 (43) and 5.56x45mm M855A1 (44). Class 6 does not fall to anything under 43 pen in this set.
Pricing it after 1.1.0
Here is the arithmetic, and here is why the rouble column is blank.
Ammunition prices in Tarkov move hourly on the Flea Market and were shifted wholesale at the trader by 1.1.0 — up an average of 25% to buy — while several popular ammunition types moved down a Loyalty Level, so the round you could not reach last season may be a trader purchase now. Any number we print today is wrong by the time you read it. What does not move is the formula:
cost per penetration = price per round x expected rounds to first penetrationUse the verdict column for the multiplier. PASS is roughly 1 to 3 rounds, RACE is 3 to 9, FAIL is 9 or more, straight off the wiki’s own bullets-stopped definition. Take the midpoint if you want one number: PASS 2, RACE 6, FAIL 15.
Then apply the 1.1.0 correction depending on where the ammo comes from:
| Source | Per-round cost you actually pay | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Trader purchase | listed price | already includes the average 25% rise; check your Loyalty Level first, several types dropped a tier |
| Flea purchase | listed price | fee is paid by the seller, not you |
| Ammo you sell instead of shoot | listed price x 0.95 | the fee went 3% to 5% |
| Trader sale of looted ammo | listed price | this is the offer after the average 20% cut |
The practical consequence: the gap between a RACE round and a PASS round has to be more than three times the price to be worth taking, because RACE costs you three times as many rounds before the first penetration — before counting the raid you lose while chewing through the plate. At the old 3% fee a marginal round was easier to justify by reselling the surplus; at 5% the resale side of that argument lost a third of its value.
What this does not tell you
Three limits worth naming, because ammo charts usually do not.
Distance. Penetration power decays over range, and the wiki table is a single-value chart. Every verdict here is a close-to-medium range verdict. At long range the RACE rows drift toward FAIL and some PASS rows drift toward RACE; we have not verified the decay curve per round and so we do not model it.
Durability state. Penetration chance is computed from the armour’s class and its remaining durability percent. A 40%-durability plate is a materially easier target than the same plate at 100%, which is why the second, third and fourth shot are all easier than the first, and why the RACE band exists at all rather than being a hard FAIL.
Armour material. Durability damage is multiplied by a hidden destructibility stat that ranges from 0.1875 for aramid to 0.6 for ceramic. The same round breaks a ceramic plate more than three times faster than an aramid one. Two players in nominally identical class 5 are not equally hard to kill, and no ammo chart that keys only on class can show you that.
If you are early in a season and deciding whether ammo is even the right thing to spend on yet, the early wipe priority guide frames that against your actual goal, and the season time planner prices progression in raids rather than roubles.
Sources
- Escape from Tarkov Wiki, Ballistics — damage, penetration power and armour damage % for every round in the matrix; the 0-6 bullet-effectiveness ratings per armour class and their bullets-stopped definitions; the 0-40% damage reduction on penetration; the destructibility table (aramid 0.1875 to ceramic 0.6); durability-dependent penetration chance
- Escape from Tarkov Wiki, Health system — body part health model, blacked thorax means instant death on further damage
- Escape from Tarkov Wiki, How to Play Guide — 440 total health points across seven body parts; per-part split not stated
- Patch 1.1.0.0 changelog, 3 August 2026 — Flea Market fee raised from 3% to 5%; trader prices up an average of 25%; prices traders pay players down an average of 20%; several ammunition types moved down one Loyalty Level
