Written by HLRBO Staff|
Last updated
Nonlead ammunition and tackle requirements at nine national wildlife refuges were scheduled to begin on September 1, 2026, and the Fish and Wildlife Service rescinded them effective August 31, 2026. The rescission rode inside the agency's 2026-2027 station-specific hunting and sport fishing rule, FR Doc. 2026-17895, published September 1 at 91 FR 56290 under docket FWS-HQ-NWRS-2026-1223 and RIN 1018-BI71.
What is in force right now
If you are standing on one of these nine refuges this season, no refuge-wide federal nonlead requirement applies to you. The final rule's Table 1 names them: Patoka River in Indiana, Great Thicket and Rachel Carson in Maine, Blackwater, Eastern Neck and Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland, Erie in Pennsylvania, and Chincoteague and Wallops Island in Virginia. The Service separately rescinded the lead-free requirement that already applied on the Big Cove unit of Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge in West Virginia.
Three things still bind you. Federal nontoxic shot rules for migratory game birds have not changed, and under 50 CFR 20.21(j) it remains unlawful to take migratory game birds while possessing shot other than an approved nontoxic type. The rule itself says the Service "has no broad requirements for lead-free ammunition outside of the longstanding nontoxic requirements for waterfowl hunting." Second, some individual refuges keep their own station-specific restrictions, which survive this rule and live in 50 CFR part 32. Third, state law still governs. California, for example, has required nonlead ammunition for taking any wildlife with a firearm statewide since July 1, 2019, on public and private ground alike, and a federal rescission does nothing to that.
How the requirements got there, and how they came off
The trail runs through four documents. The Patoka River requirement came from the 2022 station-specific rule at 87 FR 57108, published September 16, 2022. The other eight came from the 2023 rule at 88 FR 74050, published October 30, 2023, which stated that "Blackwater, Chincoteague, Eastern Neck, Erie, Great Thicket, Patuxent Research Refuge, Rachel Carson, and Wallops Island NWRs each adopt a non-lead requirement, which will take effect on September 1, 2026." That rule went into force on October 27, 2023, except for the four amendatory instructions carrying the nonlead language, which were written to take effect September 1, 2026. The delay was deliberate, giving hunters most of three seasons to switch.
The reversal began with a proposed rule published May 27, 2026, with comments closing June 26. The final rule followed on September 1 and was made effective August 31. The Service received 19,679 comments and reported that about 91 percent were form letters or duplicates.
The agency's stated reason is alignment and deregulation. The final rule says many nonlead restrictions "are reversed or removed in accordance with S.O. 3447 and D.O. 233," the Interior and Service orders on expanding hunting and fishing access, and that federal alignment with state law "reduces confusion for the public" and "reinforces the role of States as primary managers of fish and wildlife resources."
The availability and cost case, in the agency's own numbers
The strongest version of the argument for rescission is not ideological, it is a supply problem, and the Service documented it. In November 2025 the agency surveyed one urban and one rural retailer in each of its eight regions, sixteen stores, checking in-stock availability and price per round for five popular calibers. It found that "only 3 of 16 retail locations offered lead-free 12 gage slugs, 4 of 16 had .308 Winchester, and only 4 of 16 had 270 Winchester ammunition in stock."
Run those three together and you get 11 stocked combinations out of 48 store-and-caliber pairings, about 23 percent. That arithmetic is not in the rule; the three counts are, and the denominator of sixteen stores is, so a reader can check it. It is a small sample and the Service says so by describing exactly how it was drawn.
On price, the rule states the cost per round "remains 37 percent to 245 percent higher for 5 popular caliber types," and notes that when the previous administration wrote the requirements it expected that gap to close and it has not. Among hunters in the Service's 2025-2026 voluntary lead-free program, 58 percent cited cost as a barrier and 58 percent cited difficulty finding product.
The same program is also the agency's argument that mandates are unnecessary. Participation rose 58 percent between the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 seasons, and 77 percent of survey respondents said they used only lead-free ammunition on refuges last season, up from 46 percent the year before.
The toxicity case, in peer-reviewed work
The science that underpinned the 2023 requirements is not an advocacy summary. The Service's own 2023 rule states flatly that "the best available science, analyzed as part of this rulemaking, indicates that lead ammunition and tackle have negative impacts on both wildlife and human health," and points to "the USGS study of bald and golden eagles" as a nationwide sample designed for nationwide applicability.
That study is Slabe and colleagues, "Demographic implications of lead poisoning for eagles across North America," published in Science on February 17, 2022. USGS summarized it as sampling 1,210 eagles across 38 states, finding chronic lead poisoning in 46 to 47 percent of bald and golden eagles and modeling suppression of population growth rates by 3.8 percent for bald eagles and 0.8 percent for golden eagles. Todd Katzner, a USGS wildlife biologist and an author, called it "the first study of lead poisoning of wildlife at a nationwide scale." Brian Millsap, the Fish and Wildlife Service's national raptor coordinator, said the modeling "shows that lead reduces the rate of population growth for both of these protected species."
The 2026 rule does not dispute that literature. It reframes the question as scale, stating that "the number of hunters and anglers using lead ammunition or tackle would result in no more than a negligible increase of lead in the environment" and that the Service is "not aware of any significant negative effects on bald and golden eagles due to current hunting activities." The 2023 rule had rejected the premise underneath that framing, writing that population-level impacts "are not necessary for regulation to the exclusion of any other factors." Same agency, three years apart, two readings of the same standard. That is the honest shape of this dispute.
Where hunters actually split
They do not split cleanly. Michael Jean, litigation counsel for the Sportsmen's Alliance Foundation, said in May that the group "applauds the Fish and Wildlife Service's proposal to expand hunting and fishing opportunities throughout the refuge system." State wildlife agencies mostly lined up with the rescission. The final rule records the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources supporting the rule, the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources supporting removal at Canaan Valley, and support for state alignment from the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and its Northeast association, with all of them urging the Service to keep the voluntary incentive programs running.
On the other side, the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks urged the Service in a June 23, 2026 letter to keep the phase-outs and warned that expanding hunting across 107 refuge units without matching staffing was its own problem. Many commenters argued that lead-free alternatives are widely available and only marginally more expensive, and the rule concedes that "several commenters stated that lead-free ammunition is readily available where they live."
The litigation question
There is a real history here, and it is narrower than the headlines suggest. On July 31, 2023, the National Wildlife Refuge Association, Friends of Blackwater and the Sierra Club, represented by Earthjustice, sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Case 1:23-cv-02203, over the Service's withdrawal of a lead phase-out at Canaan Valley. That case settled in December 2024, with the Service agreeing to require nonlead on the Big Cove section and to "revisit the issue and make a reasoned decision by 2026 on a refuge-wide lead phaseout." The 2026 rule is that reasoned decision, and it went the other way on both counts.
As for a new suit, Aaron Bloom, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, told Time in early September that the organization "will be looking at litigation, as will other environmentalist groups." Looking at is not filing. As of September 20, 2026, no complaint challenging the 2026 rescission has been confirmed on the public record, and anyone telling you a lawsuit has already stopped this rule is ahead of the docket.
How to find out what applies where you hunt
This is station by station, so a national answer is the wrong tool. Start with the refuge's own hunting page on fws.gov, which carries the current hunt brochure, permit requirements and any station-specific restrictions, as Blackwater and Chincoteague both do. The binding text sits in 50 CFR part 32 under your state's heading, which the September 1 rule rewrote with more than 1,000 modifications. Then check your state agency, because the rescission changed nothing about state seasons, licenses or state nonlead law. When the brochure and the regulation disagree, call the refuge office.
The requirement that never started is the easiest kind of rule to misremember. Check the brochure in your truck against the one on the refuge website, because the one in your truck may be describing a season that no longer exists.
Hunters working around shifting federal rules often look at private ground for the back half of the season. HLRBO's Lease Finder sorts leases by state and species, and the HLRBO blog follows access rules as they change.