How Much Does Iron Dome Cost per Interception? Tamir Prices in 2026

Estimates for one Tamir interceptor run from about $40,000 to $150,000, depending on who is counting and what the price includes. Early estimates put the Tamir at about $100,000 to produce. Later estimates settled at roughly $40,000 to $50,000, the figure most often quoted.

The highest figure on the record comes from Washington. In its 2019 comparison of interim air defenses, the US Army put Iron Dome at about $1.37 million per launcher and $150,000 per interceptor. The rival NASAMS option fired AIM-120 missiles at about $800,000 each, and the Army counted cost among its reasons for choosing Iron Dome.

The two numbers measure different things. Israel buys Tamirs in bulk from a line that has supplied its batteries since 2011. The Army bought 240 missiles in a single export order. Neither price per shot includes the radar, the launchers or the soldiers who run them.

A single interception costs one Tamir, about $40,000 to $100,000, and twice that when a target draws a second missile. What keeps the bill down is selectivity. Iron Dome’s radar works out where each rocket will land, and the system fires only at those heading for towns or protected sites, letting the rest fall in open ground.

That choice matters most in a barrage. When hundreds of rockets are fired in a day, many need no interceptor at all, so the cost per rocket launched is far lower than the cost per interception.

Israel’s Defense Ministry says Iron Dome has made more than 10,000 interceptions in 15 years, and Rafael puts its success rate above 90 percent. Those are the operators’ own figures, with no independent audit. At $50,000 a shot, 10,000 interceptions would amount to about $500 million in missiles alone.

A complete battery was estimated at about $100 million in 2012 and 2013, and the only public purchase price is higher still. A battery has three or four launchers, each holding 20 Tamirs, plus a radar and a battle management and control center.

The US Army paid about $373 million for two batteries under a contract signed in August 2019: 12 launchers, two radars, two battle management centers and 240 interceptors. It received the first battery in November 2020 and the second in January 2021, and fired them at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, that summer. On October 24, 2023, the Biden administration said both would go to Israel, which took them on a lease.

Filling one launcher with 20 Tamirs costs about $800,000 to $2 million at the $40,000-to-$100,000 estimates.

Yes, much of it. US defense appropriations for Iron Dome came to about $6.1 billion from fiscal 2011 through fiscal 2025, for batteries, interceptors, co-production and maintenance.

Most of that arrived in two wartime surges. In March 2022, Congress added $1 billion to replace interceptors used in the May 2021 Gaza fighting. In April 2024, after Iran’s first direct missile and drone attack on Israel, an emergency supplemental gave Iron Dome about $3 billion more. In normal years the line has run at $70 million to $108 million since fiscal 2019, part of the $5 billion in missile defense money that Washington pledged for fiscal 2019 to 2028 under the 2016 memorandum of understanding.

Part of the money pays for American work. Under a 2014 co-production agreement, about 30 percent of Iron Dome production was done in the United States as of 2023, with RTX as Rafael’s partner.

Iron Dome is the cheapest missile layer that Israel and the United States field, and only the laser beside it costs less per shot. A Tamir costs roughly $40,000 to $100,000. A Patriot PAC-3 MSE costs about $5.3 million in the US Army’s latest request, as our Patriot stockpile explainer sets out. A THAAD interceptor costs about $12.7 million, as detailed in how much a THAAD missile costs. Israel’s Iron Beam laser costs a few dollars of electricity per shot.

The prices are not like for like, because each system does a different job. Iron Dome reaches about 4 to 70 km against rockets, mortars, artillery shells and drones. Iron Beam reaches about 10 km against drones, mortars and short-range rockets. Long-range ballistic missiles are left to David’s Sling and Arrow, whose interceptors cost far more.

Rafael builds Tamirs in Israel, and since 2026 so does a Raytheon-Rafael joint venture in Camden, Arkansas, the first plant outside Israel able to make the whole missile. RTX said on November 21, 2025, that the venture had won a $1.25 billion contract to build Tamirs for Israel there.

The same plant makes SkyHunter, the American version of the Tamir, for the US Marine Corps. A 2023 Marine Corps contracting notice described three batteries of its Medium-Range Intercept Capability with 44 launchers and 1,840 Tamir missiles, a planned buy rather than a funded one.