How the US ham radio statistics are counted

Where the numbers come from

Source: the FCC's Universal Licensing System public access files (the transaction and complete files the FCC publishes at data.fcc.gov). Names, addresses and other personal fields are discarded on arrival; we store and publish aggregates only.

Data through September 2026. Reports describe whole calendar months and are updated monthly; licensed counts are taken from the FCC files at the end of that month.

What counts as a licensed ham

A licensed ham is an active license held by an individual whose expiration date has not passed, in the Novice, Technician, General, Advanced or Extra class. ULS keeps an expired license active for a two-year renewal grace period; those 80,891 licenses are not counted. Club stations, government and military licenses are excluded. Someone holding two licenses counts twice, a small effect.

A new license is a first-time license: an application for a new license, filed by volunteer examiners, granted in the month, to someone with no earlier license on file. 57 grants in September went to people who had held a license before; they are counted separately. An upgrade is a volunteer-examiner-filed application, granted in the month, after which the license shows a higher class than before. Technician Plus conversions are excluded. Vanity call sign changes keep the same license and are not counted. We identify upgrades by the class change on the license, so a later class change can be attributed to an earlier application.

States, counties and ZIP codes

States use the licensee's mailing address as filed. Licenses outside the 50 states and DC (6,260, mostly territories and APO addresses) count in the national total only. Per-capita rates use the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 population estimates (July 1, 2025).

Counties are assigned from ZIP codes with the Census Bureau's 2020 ZIP code tabulation area to county relationship file: each ZIP goes to the county holding the largest share of its land area. 2.7% of licensed hams nationwide have a ZIP that does not appear in the file and are counted in the state total only. Counts below 10 are withheld.

Connecticut's county shapes and ZIP file use the eight historical counties while Census population estimates now use nine planning regions, so Connecticut counties show counts only, without per-capita rates.

Small counts are withheld

Any count below 10 people is withheld and shown as "<10" in tables or drawn hatched on maps. It is never shown as zero, and no rate or rank is computed from it. This keeps small areas from describing individuals.

The smallest published count is 10.

Call sign wait time

Receipt is the date the FCC records receiving the application. Payment is the date the FCC's history log records "Payment Confirmed". Grant is the date the log records "Application Granted". We include new-license applications filed by volunteer examiners for individuals, grouped by grant date.

Windows: the latest complete month, the last 3 months and the last 12 months, ending September 2026. Applications still waiting are not in these medians (they have no grant yet); counts of open applications are shown separately, as of the end of the period.

The exam date and the volunteer examiners' filing date are not in the FCC data, so the time from exam to receipt is not measured. The FCC data records that an application was dismissed but not why.

Commercial license processing

Days from the date the FCC receives the application to the grant date, for new commercial operator licenses, in rolling three-month windows by grant date. We report a license type only when it has at least 30 new grants in the window.

Completeness: 29,349 of 29,349 commercial grants in the last 12 months have both dates.

Processing by the commercial examination manager (COLEM) before the application reaches the FCC is not visible in the data.

Limits and what we do not publish

Licensed does not mean active on the air. Addresses are self-reported and can be years old. Counts below 10 are withheld and drawn hatched, never as zero.

We do not publish a 12-month change in the number of licensed hams. A single FCC file cannot reproduce the past: grant dates reset on renewal, and licenses renewed late inside the grace period look like departures. We tested a reconstruction against ARRL's published totals and it missed by more than the change it was measuring. The monthly history on the map therefore shows first-time licenses, which the application records support. A licensed-per-capita history will build from our own archived snapshots.

Our total matches ARRL's published FCC license counts to within 0.02% on the same date.

Credit

For many years the amateur radio community relied on Joe Speroni (AH0A)'s FCC licensing statistics. Our counting uses the same public data and a comparable approach, and we credit his long-running work.

Where each statistic is used

• US ham radio statistics
• Call sign wait time
• Commercial license processing time