Methodology

The source

Everything here derives from the FCC’s Universal Licensing System bulk data downloads — the same public archives the Commission publishes at data.fcc.gov/download/pub/uls. No figure on this site is hand-entered, estimated, or sourced from a third party. Nothing is scraped from a web page.

Two feeds are used. A weekly full archive carries every GMRS licence and application record the FCC holds. A daily delta archive carries just the records that changed the previous day. The current set was built from licence data published Nov 1, 2026 and application data published Oct 31, 2026.

Two pipelines, and why it matters which one you are reading

The weekly archive rebuilds the licence tables from scratch on every load. Counts, state breakdowns, growth history, call sign series, licensing eras and the expiry horizon are all derived from that snapshot, so they are complete regardless of what happened on any individual day.

Daily Transaction Flow is the exception. It is the only page built from the daily deltas, accumulated into a change log one day at a time. That makes it the only page that can have a hole in it — and holes there are permanent, because the FCC overwrites each weekday file the following week and retains no history. A licence missed by the daily feed still appears in the next weekly snapshot and in every total on this site; what is lost is only the ability to say which day it arrived. Its net change counts expirations as losses, and a save there is a renewal of a licence that had already expired; both definitions changed in September 2026, and that page says how.

Dates are offset by one day

A daily archive is compiled overnight and published the following morning, so the file published on a Tuesday describes Monday’s activity. Dates shown on this site are transaction dates — the day the activity happened — not the day the FCC published the file describing it.

How to read a blank

A value of 0 and a blank — mean different things, and the distinction is enforced rather than left to chance.

• 0 — the day was measured and the count was zero.
• — — the day was not measured, so no honest number exists.

Of the 67 days currently in the daily record, 12 are blank. Every blank carries a machine-readable reason, and the reason is published alongside the data so it can be checked rather than taken on trust. Coercing those to zero would make an unmeasured day indistinguishable from a genuinely quiet one, and would quietly corrupt any average drawn from the series.

Every figure declares what kind of claim it is

• observed — counted directly from FCC records.
• projected — derived from observed data by a stated rule, such as when currently active licences will reach the end of their ten-year term.
• unavailable — the FCC does not publish what would be needed to answer.

Where a period is affected by something outside the data — an upstream outage, a holiday, a day the FCC published nothing — an annotation records it once, and every page that shows that period displays the same explanation. There are 13 such annotations in the current set.

What is deliberately not published

ULS records carry licensee names, street addresses, FRNs and other personal fields. None of them reach this site. The published files are aggregates only, and the publishing step is blocked automatically if a prohibited field is detected in the output.

Geographic figures are drawn from the licensee’s mailing address, which is not necessarily where a radio is used — GMRS licences carry no station coordinates at all. Any group smaller than 25 licences is withheld rather than published, to avoid identifying individuals in sparsely licensed areas. That is why the state table sums to 468,133 rather than the official 468,147: 12 licences are withheld in small jurisdictions, and 2 have no state on file. The same minimum applies to the count of each entity type, the number of holders in each licence-count bucket, and each state’s first grants; filing-method counts are exempt because they count filings, not people.

What is counted

A figure described as a licence count is a count of licence records, not of people. One person may hold several. A GMRS licence covers the holder’s immediate family, so the number of people lawfully operating under these licences is considerably larger than any figure here, and this site does not estimate it.

Verification before publication

Each build is checked against a published file contract before it is released: every file is validated against a schema, series are checked for gaps, counts are reconciled against the row totals the FCC declares in its own archives, and the privacy rules above are re-tested. If any check fails, publication stops and the previous set stays live. The current build parsed 620,001 of 620,001 declared licence rows and 801,453 of 801,453 declared application rows.

Corrections

If a figure here looks wrong, it may well be. The underlying archives are public and the derivation is documented, so any number on this site can be reproduced from source. Corrections are welcome via the contact form ↗ (opens in a new tab).