50-Yard Zero Target: Printable PDF for 5.56 and .223

A 50 yard zero target is a ruler you shoot at: a 1-inch grid and a small aiming dot, so you can measure exactly how far your group sits from your point of aim and convert that offset into scope clicks. Everything else about zeroing is arithmetic.

The zero itself means your 5.56 carbine’s point of impact meets your point of aim at 50 yards. Because the bullet is still climbing at that range, it crosses the line of sight a second time somewhere near 200 yards — which is why the setup is usually written as a “50/200 zero” and why it has become the default for general-purpose AR-15s.

The practical appeal is simple. Between the muzzle and roughly 200 yards, your impacts stay within about two inches of where you are aiming. For most defensive and practical shooting, that is close enough to hold dead-center and stop doing arithmetic.

Download the 50-yard zero target

Our printable 50-yard zero target is free in A4 and US Letter. The layout is deliberately plain:

• A 6 × 8 inch grid in 1-inch squares. One square equals one inch of impact offset — no MIL or MOA conversion printed on the page, because the conversion depends on your optic and printing it invites the wrong one.
• Five 0.75-inch aiming dots — one dead center, and four more set 2 inches to each side and 3 inches above or below it, so every dot sits a full inch inside the grid edge with room for a group around it. They are solid black rather than outlined, which is the one place we break our own toner-saving rule: at 50 yards through a low-power optic, an outlined dot disappears.
• A heavy crosshair through the center, so you can count squares up, down, left and right from the aim point without losing your place.

Print it at 100%. A grid target is a ruler you shoot at, and a ruler printed at 94% turns every measurement — and therefore every correction — into a number that is 6% wrong. Check the 1-inch calibration mark in the footer, or that the full grid measures 6 by 8 inches, before you drive to the range; the settings for each print dialog are in how to print shooting targets to exact scale.

There is a matching 100-yard version with the same grid, for confirming at distance once the 50 is set.

How to zero at 50 yards

Five steps. The whole job takes 10 to 15 rounds if you do not rush it.

• 1. Build a stable position. Prone with a bipod, a pack or sandbags. A zero shot off a wobbling position is a measurement of your wobble, not of your rifle. If the group is bigger than the correction you are trying to make, stop and fix the position first.
• 2. Fire three to five rounds at the center dot. Not one. A single shot tells you nothing about where the rifle is pointing — you cannot separate the rifle’s zero from that shot’s dispersion.
• 3. Find the center of the group, not the best shot. Ignore the flier if you called it; keep it if you did not. Measure from the aiming dot to the group center in grid squares — 2 squares right and 1 down means 2 inches right and 1 inch low.
• 4. Convert inches to clicks using the table below, and dial the correction toward the aim point.
• 5. Fire a confirming group on a fresh dot. This is what the four outer dots are for. Re-using a torn-up aim point makes the next group impossible to read.

Clicks per inch at 50 yards

This is the number people get wrong, because almost every optic is marked for 100 yards. At 50 yards each click moves the impact half as far, so it takes twice as many clicks:

Worked example: your group sits 2 inches low and 1 inch left, and your optic has 1/4 MOA clicks. Two inches is 15.3 clicks and one inch is 7.6, so you dial 15 up and 8 right. Multiply the exact 7.6 rather than the rounded 8 whenever the correction is more than an inch — rounding first and multiplying after is how a 2-inch correction turns into 16 clicks and overshoots. On a 1-MOA red dot the same correction is 4 clicks up and 2 right, which also shows why a coarse red dot cannot be zeroed to a finer standard than about half an inch at this distance, no matter how carefully you shoot.

One detail worth recording: 50 yards and 50 meters are not the same distance. Fifty meters is 54.7 yards, which shifts the far zero out slightly. It is not enough to matter on a carbine at practical ranges, but write down which one you used — otherwise next year’s confirmation will disagree with this year’s for a reason you cannot find.

Confirming the zero

Zeroing and confirming are two different jobs. Zeroing moves the sights; confirming asks whether the rifle and the shooter still agree with the sights weeks later. The 50-yard zero confirmation drill separates the two sources of error deliberately:

Run the supported string first. If it fails, there is no point diagnosing your position — check the mount screws, try a different lot of ammunition, and confirm the optic is not loose before you blame yourself. If the supported group is fine and the unsupported one opens to seven inches, the rifle is telling you exactly where to spend the next session.

Then confirm at distance. A 50-yard zero implies a second crossing near 200 yards, and “implies” is doing real work in that sentence — barrel length, muzzle velocity, bullet weight and sight height all move it. If you have access to 100 yards, shoot the 100-yard confirmation on the matching grid and see where the impacts actually land instead of trusting a ballistic calculator’s opinion of your rifle.

50/200 versus the alternatives

There is no universally correct zero, only one that matches how you use the rifle:

The numbers above are typical for 55 to 62 grain 5.56 from a 16-inch barrel with a sight height around 2.6 inches — the common AR-15 configuration. Change the barrel length, the load or the optic height and the trajectory changes with it. Treat any published table, including this one, as a starting point you then verify on paper at the actual distance.

Keep the target

Write the date, the rifle, the load and the distance on the sheet before you take it off the frame, and keep it. A zero target is the only physical record you have of what the rifle did on a particular day with a particular lot of ammunition — and when a zero appears to have wandered six months later, that sheet is the difference between diagnosing it and guessing.

Zeroing is also the cheapest part of a range day, at 10 to 15 rounds. Plan the rest of the session around it rather than letting it consume the trip — the plan configurator will build a carbine session with the round count worked out, and the whole printable target library is free if you need more than one sheet.

Sources

• Click values are computed from the definitions of the minute of arc (1 MOA ≈ 1.047 in at 100 yd) and the milliradian (0.1 mrad = 0.36 in at 100 yd), halved for 50 yards. Reproducible with a calculator.
• Group standards — 3 in supported, 4.7 in unsupported at 50 yd — are the DrillLane confirmation standard published on the drill page.
• Trajectory figures are typical for 55–62 gr 5.56 from a 16 in barrel at ~2.6 in sight height. They are a starting point, not a substitute for confirming your own rifle on paper.
• Our target file was measured after rendering: 6.00 × 8.00 in grid, 0.75 in aiming dots, identical on A4 and US Letter.