There are 454,523 active GMRS licences in the United States right now.
That number surprised me, and I’ve been licensed for a while. GMRS has a reputation as the quiet service — the one you get so the family can talk on a hike, no test, no fuss. The reputation is out of date. Since 2020 it has grown into one of the busiest personal radio services the FCC administers, and almost nobody who holds a licence has any idea what the shape of it looks like.
So I built something to find out. Every figure below comes from the FCC’s own Universal Licensing System bulk files — the same public data the Commission publishes daily — and they now live at stats.wsny332.com, updated every morning.
Here’s what stood out.
The growth is real, and it’s recent
New licence applications by year:
| Year | New Applications | YoY Growth | Volume vs Peak | Key Driver / Milestone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 15,207 | — | Pre-pandemic baseline intake | |
| 2020 | 34,030 | +123.8% | COVID-19 outdoor recreation surge begins | |
| 2021 | 49,984 | +46.9% | Continued family & overlanding comms adoption | |
| 2022 | 70,099 | +40.2% | FCC fee dropped from $70 to $35 (effective April 19) | |
| 2023 | 71,089 | +1.4% | First full calendar year under $35 fee structure | |
| 2024 | 108,322 | +52.4% | All-time record licensing intake | |
| 2025 | 68,961 | -36.3% | Federal shutdown data gap (ULS offline all October) | |
| 2026 (YTD) | 51,414 | — | Through August (~77k annualized intake pace) |
2019 to 2024 is a sevenfold increase. Two things drove it: the pandemic put a lot of people outdoors and looking for comms that work without cell service, and in April 2022 the FCC dropped the application fee from $70 to $35. Neither explains 2024 on its own — that year stands out even against the trend.
One honest note on that table: 2025 looks like a collapse and isn’t. The FCC’s licensing system went offline during the federal government shutdown that began 1 October 2025. October has no records at all, and November is only partly recovered. The dip is a gap in the data, not a gap in interest — which is exactly why the site shows outage months as blank rather than as zero.
Nothing expires until late 2027 — and then everything does
This is the finding I keep coming back to.
The 2017 Part 95 overhaul doubled GMRS licence terms from five years to ten. Every licence issued since 29 September 2017 is still inside its first term. In the next twelve months, exactly one licence is scheduled to expire.
Then the wall arrives:
| Cohort Year | Expiring Licenses | Share of Wave | Relative Cohort Size | Intake Origin & Milestone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2027 | 2,809 | 1.0% | Q4 2017 Part 95 reform grants (first 10-year terms) | |
| 2028 | 13,426 | 4.8% | First full calendar year under 10-year term rules | |
| 2029 | 16,055 | 5.7% | Pre-pandemic baseline intake maturing | |
| 2030 | 33,724 | 12.1% | 2020 pandemic outdoor recreation surge cohort | |
| 2032 | 64,581 | 23.2% | 2022 $35 fee reduction intake wave arrives | |
| 2034 | 99,851 | 35.8% | The Renewal Cliff: record 2024 cohort matures | |
| 2036 | 48,358 | 17.4% | Current active volume through 2026 |
The first real cohort matures in the last quarter of 2027. The peak lands in 2034, because that’s ten years after 2024 — the record intake year comes back around all at once.
Nobody knows what the renewal rate will be, because no ten-year GMRS licence has ever reached expiration. Not a low rate, not a high rate — an unmeasurable one. That figure sits on the site marked unavailable with the date it becomes knowable, and I’d rather show an honest blank than a guess.
What it means for you: if your call sign starts with WR or WS, your renewal is years out. Check your actual expiration date rather than assuming — the FCC lets you renew in the 90 days before it, and there’s no grace period worth relying on.
Your call sign says when you were licensed
Modern GMRS call signs are issued in strict alphabetical blocks. The current block is WSO, and at present volume a block lasts about two months before the FCC rolls to the next one.
| Prefix | Era Name | Term | Timeline | Still Active | Share | Historical Significance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
KA* | Original Class A | 5-year | Pre-1988 | 525 | 0.1% | Earliest continuous grandfathered renewals |
WP* | Early ULS Transition | 5-year | 1999–2004 | 1,334 | 0.3% | Initial Universal Licensing System rollout |
WQ* | Pre-Reform Era | 5-year | 2004–2017 | 13,620 | 3.0% | Final 5-year series before major Part 95 overhaul |
WR* | Part 95 Reform Era | 10-year | 2017–2023 | 227,045 | 49.9% | 10-year terms begin; none expired yet |
WS* | Current Active Series | 10-year | 2023–present | 211,999 | 46.6% | Currently issuing within the WSO block |
96.6% of all active GMRS licences were issued after the 2017 reform. The service as it exists today is less than a decade old.
The oldest record in the database is KAE5138, granted 22 November 1988 and still active — thirty-seven years of continuous renewal.
File on the weekend, get your call sign Tuesday
This one is genuinely useful, and it’s the sort of thing you only see with the whole dataset in front of you.
The FCC accepts applications around the clock, but the paperwork moves on a weekday rhythm:
- Monday is the heaviest intake day by far — 174,050 applications, about 36% of the total. Anything filed over the weekend gets stamped with a Monday receipt date.
- Tuesday is the heaviest grant day — 161,558 grants, roughly a third of all of them. Monday, by contrast, accounts for barely 1,400.
Following individual applications from receipt to grant confirms the pattern rather than just implying it: 81% of Monday’s applications are granted on Tuesday, and the median wait from receipt to grant is one day.
So the folk wisdom is right. File Saturday, and you’ll very likely have your call sign by Tuesday morning.
If your application is “dismissed,” you probably just didn’t pay
Between 6% and 12% of applications are dismissed each year. That sounds alarming until you look at the timing: the median dismissal comes 19 days after filing, with 90% inside 21 days.
That is not the FCC reviewing your application and turning you down. That is the fee-payment window closing on an application nobody paid for. GMRS has no test and essentially no eligibility screening beyond being 18 or older and not representing a foreign government — there is very little to reject you for.
If you start an application, finish paying it. That’s the whole failure mode.
Odds and ends
- 99.71% of licensees hold exactly one call sign. Multi-licence holders are rare — 1,241 licensees hold two, and just 13 hold six or more.
- Paper filing is effectively extinct. Mailed Form 605 applications fell from 107 in 2020 to one so far in 2026.
- California leads with 54,890 active licences, then Texas (36,674), Florida (25,885) and Washington (21,498). Washington’s showing is notable given it sits fourth on a population base well below Florida’s.
- Las Vegas is the top city at 3,048, ahead of Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and Houston.
- Only individuals can get a new GMRS licence. A handful of pre-1987 businesses, clubs and municipal agencies still hold grandfathered ones — 62 in the entire country.
What the site does, and what it won’t do
stats.wsny332.com pulls the FCC’s daily transaction files every morning, applies them to a full copy of the licence database, and republishes the figures above. Weekly, it reconciles the whole thing against the FCC’s complete snapshot to catch anything that arrived late.
A few rules I set for it, because statistics about half a million people deserve some care:
- No names, no addresses. The published files contain counts and nothing else. Nothing that could identify a licensee ever leaves the processing server.
- Location means mailing address, not where anyone operates. GMRS licences carry no station coordinates, so a map of licensees is a map of where mail goes. The site says so on every geographic page rather than letting you assume otherwise.
- Small numbers are suppressed. Any jurisdiction with fewer than 25 licensees is withheld — and the site tells you how many were withheld, because a map that silently drops three territories looks identical to one that has no data for them.
- A gap is shown as a gap. October 2025 is blank, not zero. Every figure declares whether it’s measured, projected, or not yet knowable.
The FCC publishes all of this. It just publishes it as pipe-delimited bulk files with a 59-column layout and no documentation to speak of, which is a high bar for “what’s my renewal date.” Now it’s a web page.
Questions, corrections, or a statistic you’d like to see? Get in touch — the underlying data is richer than what’s on the site today.