B-8 Target: Printable PDF, Scoring Rings and What a Good Score Is

The B-8 is the NRA’s 25-yard pistol repair center: four concentric scoring rings, 8.00 inches across at the outside, with a 5.54-inch black aiming bull in the middle. It has become the default accuracy benchmark in American pistol training because it does one thing no silhouette does — it grades every shot on a scale instead of telling you “hit” or “miss”.

Ten rounds on a B-8 produce a number out of 100. That number is comparable across shooters, across years, and across guns, which is exactly why instructors keep reaching for it.

Download the printable B-8 target

Our printable B-8 target is free, in both A4 and US Letter, with the ring dimensions reproduced exactly. Two things about it are deliberate and worth knowing before you print.

First, it is outline only. The official target fills the 9-ring with solid black. Ours draws it as a line. A filled 5.54-inch bull costs a startling amount of toner per sheet, and you are shooting at the center either way — but if you train specifically for a match that issues black-bull targets, buy those for the match and use this one for practice.

Second, it stops at the 8-ring. A full B-8 continues outward to the 5-ring, and the 7-ring alone is 11 inches wide — wider than a sheet of Letter paper. Any page-sized “B-8” that shows you a 7 or a 6 has shrunk the whole target to make it fit, which means none of its rings are the right size. Ours reproduces the four inner rings at true scale and stops honestly where the paper does.

B-8 ring dimensions

These are the numbers in the PDF, and the numbers you can check with a tape measure once it comes off the printer:

Print at 100%, not “fit to page”. An A4 file sent to a Letter printer with fitting enabled comes out at 94%, which turns the 8-ring into 7.53 inches and quietly inflates every score you shoot on it. The footer carries a 1-inch calibration mark — measure it before you score a single shot. The full explanation, with the settings for each print dialog, is in how to print shooting targets to exact scale.

How to score a B-8

Each hole takes the value of the ring it lands in. Three conventions cover everything else:

• A shot touching a ring line scores the higher value. If the hole breaks the line between the 9 and the 10, it is a 10. Use a scoring plug or hold the target up to the light rather than eyeballing it — the difference between a 9 and a 10 is decided by paper fibers.
• X counts as 10 and breaks ties. Two shooters at 98 are separated by X-count. On a practice target, log it as “98-3X”.
• Anything outside the 8-ring on our version is a miss. On a full B-8 it would score 7 or lower; on a page-sized reproduction there is no ring to give it, so score it zero and note that you dropped one off the paper.

Ten rounds is the standard string, so a clean target is 100 points. Twenty rounds on one sheet works, but the holes start to overlap in the middle and scoring gets argumentative — one string per sheet keeps the record honest.

What is a good B-8 score?

The most widely used B-8 standard is ten rounds, ten yards, ten seconds — one string, 100 points possible. It is a fair test because it makes speed and precision trade against each other directly: you have a full second per shot, which is plenty to shoot a 100 and just tight enough that most shooters do not.

These brackets are our reading of the standard, published so you can argue with them rather than guess. The 90-point pass mark is the one number here with broad consensus behind it — instructors have used “90 out of 100 on a B-8” as a go/no-go for decades.

Two things change the difficulty enormously and must be recorded with the score: distance and start position. The same 10-round string is a different test at 25 yards than at 10, and starting from the holster instead of low ready costs most shooters a full second of the par. A B-8 score written down without those two facts is not comparable to anything, including your own score from last month.

Drills that run on a B-8

The target is only worth printing if you have a course of fire for it. Three that use it directly:

• 10-10-10 Drill — ten rounds, ten yards, ten seconds. The benchmark the table above is built around. Ten rounds, one sheet, one number.
• First Shot Drill — one round from the holster at 7 yards against a 2-second par. Scored on the 8-ring: outside it, the time does not count. This is where you find out whether your draw survives a precision standard.
• Slow fire groups at 25 yards — no clock, five rounds, and an honest look at what your pistol and your trigger can actually do. Everything else you shoot is built on this number.

If you want a full session rather than a single test, the plan configurator will assemble a range day around these and tell you the round count before you leave the house.

Why the B-8 beats a silhouette for practice

A silhouette answers one question: did the round land in the scoring zone. That is the right question for a match, and the wrong one for practice, because it treats a shot that clips the edge of the A-zone the same as one through the middle.

The B-8 grades the near misses. Ten rounds that all land in the 9-ring and ten that scatter between the 8 and the 10 both look like “hits” on a silhouette — on a B-8 they are 90 and 90, but the group tells you which one was luck. Over a few sessions the score becomes a trend line rather than a pass/fail, and a trend line is something you can train against.

It also scales cleanly with distance. The same target, the same ten rounds, moved from 10 yards to 15 to 25, gives you three points on a curve instead of three separate drills. When the 25-yard score stops falling apart, something real has changed.

The trade-off is that it teaches nothing about speed. Pair it with a target that does — the Bill Drill A-zone for recoil control under the clock, or Dot Torture for fundamentals with no clock at all — and you have both halves covered. All of them are in the free printable target library.

Sources

• NRA Competitive Shooting Rules — Pistol: official target specifications and the line-touching scoring convention.
• B-8 ring diameters — X 1.695 in, 10-ring 3.36 in, 9-ring 5.54 in, 8-ring 8.00 in. Our printable file was measured against these before publication.
• DrillLane skill brackets — our own reading of the widely used 90-point pass mark, published so it can be checked rather than assumed.