Silencer Saturday #413: eForms Situation Report

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to TFB’s Silencer Saturday, brought to you by Yankee Hill Machine, manufacturers of the new Victra-12 shotgun suppressor. It is now 2026, and tax stamps for most items are $0! But how is the infrastructure that creates those stamps holding up? Here are some collected data points that give us some ideas.

Silencer Saturday @ TFB:

• Silencer Saturday #412: Precision Armament TiTrex Suppressor
• Silencer Saturday #411: The CMP Allows (Some) Suppressors
• Silencer Saturday #410: What Does 2026 Hold?
• Silencer Saturday #409: Surefire's New SOCOM RC4
• Silencer Saturday #408: Beretta 71 Ammo Selection

We have talked about the coming changes to the US National Firearms Act (too?) many times this year, but it is a very big deal. Since 1934, every purchase of a silencer has cost an extra $200 in regulatory fees. The same tax applies even for restructuring transfers, like moving it from a personal, individual ownership into a trust.

This added expense is not just an annoyance. Resale of suppressors is very uncommon, thanks to the added $200 sunk cost for each transfer. No resale market means less competition among manufacturers because most buyers are “stuck” if they buy a can and decide it was not what they wanted. It also adds enough expense that there are very few truly inexpensive silencers. Most of the focus is on making the highest performance suppressors possible, because the burden of ownership and $200 stamp make even a simple suppressor a long-term commitment. But with that hurdle removed, very inexpensive silencers that provide good relative value start to make business sense (I predict some very affordable suppressors will be unveiled for SHOT Show in the coming weeks for that very reason).

Current Submission Situation

Understandably, there is a lot of excitement around these changes. It was clear around the gun industry that potential silencer purchasers were holding off on submitting paperwork until January 1st. The ATF took down eForm online paperwork submissions on December 26th to prepare for the influx. Everyone was holding their breath to see if the system would survive the onslaught. I submitted several Form 1s (authorization to build an NFA item) over the last two days to see how the system was working, and to take advantage of free tax stamps for a few pistols with arm braces that would be more fun with actual stocks on them.

I was busy wrestling my children into bed and watching the Stranger Things finale, so I started working on my tax stamp documents around 9:00 AM Mountain Standard Time (MST, 2 hours behind the ATF’s Eastern time used in eForms) on New Year’s Day. Uploading the various documents worked fine, and I was ready to submit my first on at about 10:00 AM. At the final step, you must enter your PIN number, then wait to see if the application goes through.

Rather than approval, I got the error message seen at the top of this article (and which many of you will have seen far too much this week). I resubmitted again, and again, and again, getting the same message each time. At one point, I was worried that I had the PIN number wrong and tried a different one. That returned a different error message before going to the processing screen of death, so I at least knew that was not the reason for my failed submissions. Eventually, at about 11:00 AM, after 18 (that I counted, there may have been more) submission attempts, it went through!

My next submission took until 11:45 AM, with 22 attempts. I took a long break from submissions and enjoyed some family time on the holiday, and got back to submissions later in the evening. I put in one more at 7:30 PM, which only took four attempts. The system was also running much faster while building out the submission documents than it was earlier in the day.

Because I love you all, I held off on filing one until January 2nd to gather more data. I tried getting onto eForms at 8 AM, and it took forever to even get into the system. I tried again after the close of business on the East Coast, and the system was running more smoothly. That submission took much longer to assemble in the system. There were noticeable upload delays for the larger files that must be submitted. I began trying to submit that paperwork around 4 PM, and it went through with only three tries. Based on that, my advice would be to submit at non-peak hours, in the early morning for the East Coast and after business hours for the West Coast, to maximize your odds of getting your submissions filed. Also, if you can reduce your file size, that will probably help!

The “confirmation” message in this cracks me up. “Your application is still in a state.” Yes, eForms, it definitely is. I wish that state had been submitted already, but I will keep trying until it is.

Submission Volumes

With that many people submitting paperwork, the traffic on the ATF site must have been enormous. I checked with some friends who were filing stamps to try and get some idea of the scope from application numbers. Each application is assigned an identification number when it successfully enters the system, with the first 4 digits being the year of submission. By watching that number climb we can get some rough ideas of how many eForms are going into the system.

My buddy Collin, whose interesting Form 1 projects have accounted for a few Silencer Saturdays, filed his first at 10:15 PM Mountain time. His application number was 20263318XX (I don’t know if these numbers need to be private, but I am erring on the side of caution). His last submission of the night, at 12:15 AM, was application number 20263378XX, almost exactly 6,000 higher. My first successful submission at 11:00 AM the next morning was number 20263757XX. I also gathered some numbers on Friday evening from another friend.

Here is a table of the approximate time each application number came back, with the number rounded down to end in two zeroes. I then divided the change in application numbers by the number of hours between each report to get a rough applications per hour number for each time window.

Current Approvals

Jim Cannon, owner of Next Shot Precision and MD for the NRL22 Hobble Creek matches, submitted 19 individual Form 4s for suppressors in the first 93 minutes of 2026. His first approval came back at 5:23 AM Mountain Time on January 2nd. That is a turnaround time of only 31 hours, 19 minutes!

So the applications are clearly moving through the system on the back end, and approvals are happening. But given the massive influx of submissions, what will wait times be like? Based on the application numbers above, there are at least 200,000 submissions filed since January 1st. An NSSF industry alert stated that 150,000 eForms were submitted on January 1 alone, compared to an average daily volume of 2,500.

Side note: the ATF deserves some credit for keeping eForms online with that activity volume. It has not run perfectly and has had a few hiccups, but the fact that it did not completely melt down and is still operating is a pleasant surprise. Old hands will remember when online applications were first available for Form 4s, and the system was swamped and closed for submissions after a few days or weeks. That closure lasted for years.

So, if the earliest applications are already coming back in less than 48 hours, as was happening before January, then it is a fairly safe assumption that the ATF can process around 2,500 per day. If they could not keep up with that rate, then wait times would have been increasing instead of remaining roughly constant. If those assumptions hold, the Day 1 applications should be through processing within 60 days or so, barring some unforeseen circumstance like a total system crash. That is still far better than the 12 to 18 months that used to be the norm.

We will all have to wait and see what the application numbers look like and what the time to approval ends up being. Drop a comment if you have a more recent application number so we can all continue to make our wild prognostications on how long these stamps will take. Also, let us know if you have gotten any approvals back.

Happy New Year!

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