How Much Does a THAAD Missile Cost? Interceptor & Battery

Between about $12 million and $15 million, depending on the year and who is counting. The most widely quoted number, about $12.7 million, comes from JINSA’s study of the June 2025 war between Israel and Iran, a price Stars and Stripes attributed to recent Missile Defense Agency budget estimates. The Congressional Research Service repeats it in its THAAD primer, last updated on June 23, 2026.

A higher figure appears in the budget books. When the Pentagon moved more than $700 million into fiscal 2025 THAAD procurement, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) worked out that it bought 45 missiles at about $15 million apiece, Breaking Defense reported in December 2025. The fiscal 2027 request implies a similar price: $11.4 billion divided by 857 interceptors is about $13.3 million each, by Silent Dossier’s arithmetic.

There is no single list price, because each budget line can include spares, testing, packaging and support as well as the missile itself.

About $2.73 billion for one battery with 192 interceptors, according to a September 2025 American Enterprise Institute working paper that the Congressional Research Service cites. The same paper put the cost of running and sustaining each battery at about $32.5 million a year.

A standard battery is smaller than that loadout suggests. It has about 90 soldiers, six truck-mounted launchers carrying eight interceptors each (48 in all), fire-control stations and one AN/TPY-2 radar, the CRS says. The 192 interceptors in the AEI estimate equal four full loads, so most of the $2.73 billion is missiles: at $12.7 million each they come to about $2.4 billion, by Silent Dossier’s arithmetic.

Foreign sales give another benchmark. In October 2017 the State Department cleared a possible sale to Saudi Arabia worth up to $15 billion for 44 launchers, 360 interceptors, 16 fire-control and communications stations and seven AN/TPY-2 radars, Defense News reported. That works out to a little over $2 billion per battery, training and support included. Saudi Arabia commissioned its first battery in July 2025.

Hundreds of millions of dollars per radar. In June 2020 the Missile Defense Agency awarded Raytheon a $2.3 billion contract for seven AN/TPY-2 radars built for Saudi Arabia, roughly $330 million a set by Silent Dossier’s arithmetic, although that contract also covers support items.

The radar is what lets THAAD find a ballistic missile hundreds of kilometers away and guide an interceptor to it, and it is also the part the United States uses on its own as a forward-based sensor. Losing or damaging one costs far more than any single missile.

Because it is a precision hit-to-kill missile built in small numbers. THAAD carries no explosive warhead. A single-stage solid-fuel booster lifts a kinetic kill vehicle, which tracks the incoming warhead with a gimbaled infrared seeker, steers with small divert thrusters and destroys it by collision, inside or just outside the atmosphere, as the CSIS Missile Defense Project describes. Every part has to work at closing speeds measured in kilometers per second.

Volume is the other half of the answer. Lockheed Martin builds about 96 THAAD interceptors a year, the company said on January 29, 2026. Fixed costs spread across so few missiles keep each one expensive. The PAC-3 MSE, produced at more than 600 a year, costs about $5.3 million in the Army’s fiscal 2027 request, as we set out in How Many Patriot Missiles Does the US Have? Israel’s Iron Dome Tamir is estimated at $40,000 to $100,000.

Enough to turn the cost per shot into a stockpile problem. During the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025, the United States fired 92 THAAD interceptors out of an estimated 632, about 14 percent, according to the JINSA study cited by the CRS. At $12.7 million each, that is roughly $1.2 billion in 12 days. Other counts ran from about 100 to 250 rounds over that summer, and CSIS put the pre-war stock lower, at 534.

The war with Iran that began in February 2026 cut deeper. CSIS estimated that American THAAD stocks fell from 452 to between 234 and 278, figures we reported in Iron Dome vs Patriot vs THAAD. Gulf partners have spent heavily too: the UAE made THAAD’s first combat interception, against a Houthi ballistic missile, in January 2022, and Saudi Arabia is still building up its batteries while under fire, as we explained in why Houthi missiles get through Saudi air defenses.

Possibly, but not soon. On January 29, 2026, Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon signed a framework agreement to raise output from 96 to 400 interceptors a year over seven years. On June 24 the government followed with a seven-year contract action worth up to $35 billion to pay for that ramp.

Missiles ordered now arrive years later. CSIS projected a gap in THAAD deliveries to the United States from July 2023 to April 2027. Most of the fiscal 2027 money also depends on a reconciliation bill: 830 of the 857 requested interceptors would be paid for that way. Cheaper challengers are coming, including Anduril’s Steelfin, which the company says could one day do the THAAD mission at a fraction of the cost, as we reported in Anduril’s Steelfin explainer, but it has yet to fly.