Buying guide
Best Rimfire Magazines, Loaders & Speed Loading Tools
A rimfire magazine has a harder job than a centerfire magazine and gets a fraction of the engineering budget. That mismatch explains almost every feeding problem people blame on their rifle, their ammunition or their cleaning routine.
The short version
- The .22 LR case is rimmed, and that is the entire problem. Stack the rounds in the wrong order and one rim traps another. A rotary magazine makes that geometrically impossible; a stick magazine relies on you loading it correctly.
- Feed lips are the failure point. Polymer lips spread with age and with being left loaded. Steel-lipped magazines exist precisely because of this and are the single best reliability upgrade for a high-capacity rimfire.
- A loader is not a luxury. Thumb-loading a few hundred rounds of .22 is genuinely painful, and pushing rounds in against a stiff spring is also how feed lips get bent.
- Magazine capacity law applies to rimfire in most restricted jurisdictions. A .22 is not exempt just because it is a .22. Check before ordering anything over ten rounds.
Why rimfire magazines are a harder engineering problem
Almost every modern centerfire cartridge is rimless: the extractor groove is cut into the case body, so the case head is no wider than the case wall and rounds stack against each other flush. The .22 Long Rifle is rimmed, a design inherited from the 1880s, and its rim projects beyond the case on all sides.
Stack two rimmed cases so that the rim of the lower round sits in front of the rim of the round above it, and the upper round physically cannot move forward. This is rimlock, and it is the defining failure mode of rimfire feeding. It is not a symptom of a dirty rifle or bad ammunition. It is geometry.
Two design responses exist. A rotary magazine holds each cartridge in its own individual pocket on a rotating spool, so the rounds never touch and the condition cannot arise. A stick magazine stacks them conventionally but angles the body so that gravity and the follower encourage correct nesting — which works, provided the magazine was loaded properly in the first place and the feed lips are still the shape the factory intended.
Rotary vs. stick: which and when
| Rotary | Stick | |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity | Usually 10 rounds; flush-fit | Typically 15 to 33 rounds; protrudes |
| Rimlock risk | Effectively eliminated by design | Present if loaded carelessly or if lips are worn |
| Loading | Slow — one round at a time against the spool | Faster, and works with a loader |
| Carrying | Flush, nothing to snag, ideal in the field | Hangs below the receiver; awkward prone or in a pack |
| Best for | Hunting, benchrest, any position resting on the magazine well | Plinking volume, speed disciplines, training rifles |
The practical answer for most people is both. A flush rotary magazine is what lives in the rifle when you are hunting or shooting off a bag, because nothing protrudes to snag or to interfere with a rest. A pair of high-capacity stick magazines is what you take to the range when the plan is to shoot four hundred rounds at steel.
One thing rotary magazines do badly: they punish you at loading time. Filling a rotary is a deliberate, one-round-at-a-time job that no loader speeds up much. Filling three of them before a range trip is a chore you will do exactly once before deciding sticks have their place.
Magazines worth buying
Rimfire magazines are one of the most heavily counterfeited accessory categories, and the fakes look right in photographs. Buy from listings that show the factory packaging, and treat an unusually cheap ten-pack of a name-brand magazine as exactly what it appears to be.
Ruger BX-1 10-round rotary (10/22 pattern)
- TypeRotary
- Capacity10 rounds
- FitFlush with receiver
- Platform10/22 and 10/22-pattern rifles
The factory magazine, and the benchmark every other rimfire magazine is measured against. It is flush-fitting, close to immune to rimlock, and compatible with an enormous ecosystem of rifles beyond Ruger's own, because the 10/22 magazine well has become a de facto standard.
Buy several. They are inexpensive, they are the magazine you want for hunting and for shooting off a bag, and having three loaded in a pocket is the simplest answer to the rotary's slow loading.
Bottom lineOwn at least three regardless of what else you buy. This is the baseline.
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Ruger BX-25 25-round stick
- TypeStick
- Capacity25 rounds
- FitProtrudes below receiver
- NotesCoupled 50-round variant available
The factory high-capacity option and the one most likely to be genuine when you buy it, which in this category counts for a great deal. Twenty-five rounds is the sweet spot for range work: enough to stop reloading constantly, short enough that it does not interfere badly with a bipod or a front bag.
A coupled variant joins two bodies for fifty rounds in one unit. It is excellent for a steel session and genuinely unwieldy for anything else.
Bottom lineThe default high-capacity choice. If you only buy one stick magazine, buy this one.
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Steel-lipped 25-round stick magazines
- TypeStick
- Feed lipsSteel
- Capacity25 rounds
- Best forHigh round count and training rifles
Polymer feed lips spread. It happens slowly, it happens faster if the magazine is stored loaded, and it happens fastest if rounds are shoved in hard against a full spring. Once the lips have opened up, the magazine releases rounds at the wrong angle and you get failures that look like a rifle problem.
A steel-lipped body puts metal at the one place that actually wears. For a rifle that shoots several hundred rounds a session — a training gun, a competition rimfire, a rifle that new shooters learn on — this is the single most cost-effective reliability upgrade available.
Bottom lineIf you have ever had an unexplained feeding failure with a high-capacity rimfire magazine, this is the fix.
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Kel-Tec CP33 33-round magazine
- TypeQuad-stack
- Capacity33 rounds
- PlatformKel-Tec CP33
- BodyTranslucent
A genuinely unusual design: four columns feeding down to two and then to one, which is how a magazine this capacious stays short enough to live inside a pistol grip. It is platform-specific rather than a universal upgrade, but it is the reason the CP33 exists as a competition and fun-gun proposition at all.
The translucent body is more useful than it sounds — with a rimfire you often genuinely cannot tell by weight how many rounds are left.
Bottom lineOnly relevant if you own the platform, but if you do, spares are the accessory to buy first.
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.22 WMR and .17 HMR magazines
- TypeRotary or stick, platform-specific
- CapacityCommonly 4 to 9 rounds
- InterchangeNone with .22 LR
- AvailabilityThinner than .22 LR
Magnum rimfire magazines are not interchangeable with .22 LR magazines — the case is longer and the geometry is different — and the aftermarket is far shallower. Capacities are lower, spares cost more, and for some discontinued platforms the factory magazine is the only magazine that has ever existed.
The practical consequence: if you own a magnum rimfire, buy spare magazines while they are available rather than when you need them.
Bottom lineBuy spares early. This is the one rimfire magazine category where waiting genuinely costs you.
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Loaders and speed loading tools
Two separate arguments for a loader, and the second one is the one people underestimate.
The obvious argument is comfort. Loading three hundred rounds of .22 by thumb against progressively stiffer springs is unpleasant and slow, and it is the reason a lot of range bags contain exactly one loaded magazine.
The less obvious argument is magazine longevity. Thumb-loading a nearly full stick magazine means forcing the round down and back past the feed lips under load, and that is precisely the action that spreads polymer lips over time. A loader that depresses the follower and lets the round drop in cleanly removes that stress entirely. The tool pays for itself in magazines you do not have to replace.
| Type | How it works | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Follower-depressing loader | A lever or slide pushes the follower down so rounds drop in without fighting the spring | Stick magazines, high round counts, protecting feed lips |
| Rotary-specific loader | Holds the magazine and indexes the spool as you feed rounds | People who run several rotary magazines and hate filling them |
| Bulk hopper loaders | Pour loose rounds into a hopper; the tool orients and feeds them | Volume plinking with bulk-pack ammunition |
| Handgun magazine loaders | Compact tools sized for .22 pistol magazines | Rimfire pistols, Steel Challenge pistol divisions |
One caution on hopper-style bulk loaders: they orient rounds mechanically, and bulk-pack rimfire ammunition is not dimensionally perfect. Deformed rims and out-of-spec rounds jam the tool. That is arguably a feature — a round that will not pass the loader was probably not going to feed well either — but it does mean the tool needs occasional clearing.
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Care, storage and the loaded-magazine myth
The old claim is that leaving a magazine loaded weakens the spring. For a well-made spring cycled within its design range, sustained compression is not the primary wear mechanism — repeated compression cycles are. But the rimfire caveat is real and specific: the stress on a fully loaded stick magazine is carried partly by the feed lips, and polymer under sustained load does creep. Steel does not.
- Polymer-lipped stick magazines: if one is going to sit loaded for months, download it by a couple of rounds. It costs nothing and takes the peak load off the lips.
- Steel-lipped and rotary magazines: store loaded without concern.
- Clean the inside occasionally. Rimfire ammunition is filthy and much of it is still lubricated with wax. Wax plus unburnt powder plus lint builds up under the follower and inside a rotary spool, and it will eventually slow the follower enough to cause failures to feed on the last few rounds.
- Do not oil the inside of a magazine. Oil collects exactly the residue you are trying to keep out. Clean dry, reassemble dry.
- Retire bent lips rather than bending them back. Once polymer has crept, it will creep again. A magazine is cheap; a match or a hunt is not.
Capacity limits and rimfire
Several states and a number of cities restrict magazine capacity, and in most of those jurisdictions the restriction is written around round count rather than around caliber — which means a 25-round .22 magazine is treated the same way as a 25-round centerfire magazine. Some jurisdictions also restrict sale or transfer separately from possession, and retailers block shipments by destination at checkout. Rules change and litigation is ongoing in several states. Confirm current requirements for your own state and city before ordering anything over ten rounds, and do not rely on a product page to do it for you.
Ammunition shipping is restricted or banned outright in several states and many municipalities, and some jurisdictions require a licensed FFL or a permit as the delivery point. Rules change often and retailers enforce them at checkout, not before. Confirm your own state and city requirements with the retailer and your state attorney general's office before you place an order.
Diagnosing a feeding problem
Work through this in order before you conclude the rifle is at fault. The magazine is the cause far more often than anything else.
- Swap magazines. If a second magazine runs clean, you have your answer and everything below is academic.
- Look at the feed lips from the front. Compare against a known-good magazine. Spread lips are visible once you know what to compare against.
- Check the follower moves freely. Press it down through its full travel. Any hesitation, grit or stickiness means it needs stripping and cleaning.
- Check the ammunition. Bulk packs contain the occasional round with a deformed rim or a bulged case. A magazine loaded from the bottom of a bulk tub is a different proposition from one loaded from a fresh box.
- Check how it was loaded. With a stick magazine, every round should have been seated fully rearward before the next one went in. Rimlock is almost always a loading error rather than a magazine defect.
- Only then look at the rifle. Extractor, chamber condition and buffer or recoil spring wear are real causes, but they are further down the list than most people assume.
One more habit worth building: number your magazines with a paint pen. When one starts misbehaving intermittently you will know which one it was, instead of rediscovering the problem three range trips later.
Frequently asked questions
What is rimlock and how do I stop it?
Rimlock happens when the rim of one .22 LR round sits ahead of the rim of the round beneath it inside the magazine, physically blocking it from feeding. The fix at loading time is to seat every round fully rearward before adding the next, so each rim nests behind the one above. Rotary magazines prevent it structurally by giving each round its own pocket, which is why they are the safer choice for hunting where a stoppage costs you the shot.
Are aftermarket 10/22 magazines as good as factory ones?
The good ones are, and some steel-lipped designs are more durable than factory polymer for high-volume use. The problem is that the 10/22 magazine market is heavily counterfeited, and fakes photograph identically to the real thing. Buy from listings showing factory packaging, be suspicious of multi-packs priced far below the going rate, and treat a magazine that arrives with a loose or gritty follower as a return rather than a project.
Does leaving a rimfire magazine loaded ruin it?
Not the spring, in normal use — springs wear from being cycled far more than from being held compressed. The specific rimfire concern is the feed lips: polymer under sustained load can creep and spread over months. If a polymer stick magazine is going to sit loaded long term, download it a couple of rounds. Rotary and steel-lipped magazines can be stored loaded without worry.
Do I really need a magazine loader for .22?
For rotary magazines and light use, no. For high-capacity stick magazines and any serious round count, it is worth it for two reasons: your thumbs, and your feed lips. Forcing rounds past the lips against a stiff spring is exactly the action that spreads them. A loader that depresses the follower removes that stress and extends the life of every magazine you own.
Can I use .22 LR magazines in a .22 WMR or .17 HMR rifle?
No. The magnum rimfire cases are longer and the magazine geometry differs, so the magazines are not interchangeable even between rifles that otherwise look identical. Buy magazines specified for your exact chambering and platform, and buy spares early — the magnum rimfire aftermarket is much thinner than the .22 LR one and discontinued platforms can become genuinely difficult to supply.
How should I clean the inside of a magazine?
Strip it if the design allows, wipe the body interior and the follower with a dry cloth or a patch, and reassemble dry. Rimfire ammunition leaves wax and unburnt powder that combines with lint into a paste under the follower. Do not oil the interior — oil holds the residue you are trying to remove and makes the problem worse over time. A rotary spool benefits from an occasional clean of the same kind.
Are high-capacity .22 magazines legal where I live?
That depends entirely on your state and often your city, and rimfire is generally not exempt — restrictions are typically written around round count rather than caliber. Some jurisdictions restrict sale or transfer separately from possession, and litigation has changed the position in several states in recent years. Confirm current requirements with your state attorney general's office before ordering anything over ten rounds. Nothing here is legal advice.