What’s a Good Bill Drill Time? Benchmarks by Skill Level

A good Bill Drill time depends on who you are asking. For a defensive shooter, anything under 5 seconds with six A-zone hits from the holster at 7 yards is respectable. For a competitor, the bar is 2.5 to 3.5 seconds. Under 2.0 seconds is elite — that is the number Bill Wilson set as par when he created the drill, and the same number Gabe White uses for his Turbo Pin.

The catch is that a time only counts if the hits are there. A 1.8-second run with two shots outside the A-zone is not a fast Bill Drill. It is a miss with a stopwatch attached.

Bill Drill benchmarks by skill level

Standard course of fire: 7 yards, one USPSA/IPSC target, six rounds from the holster, all hits in the A-zone.

These brackets are our reading of the standards below, not a survey. Where a number comes from a published standard, it is named.

What the Bill Drill actually measures

Six rounds into one target sounds like a marksmanship test. It is not. At 7 yards the A-zone is a generous 6 by 11 inches, and any competent shooter can hit it slow-fire all day. What the drill isolates is whether your grip survives recoil.

Fire six shots as fast as you can see an acceptable sight picture and one of two things happens. Either the gun returns to the same spot every time and the group stays inside the A-zone, or it climbs, drifts left, and the last two rounds land in the C-zone. There is nowhere to hide: no transitions to blame, no reload to absorb the time, no movement to cover a slow draw.

That is why it has stayed in every serious training curriculum since Bill Wilson built it. Run it properly and it tells you exactly which of two things to fix — your draw or your recoil control.

Where your Bill Drill time actually goes

A Bill Drill is one draw plus five splits. That is the whole equation, and it is worth doing the arithmetic before you decide what to train:

Two things fall out of that table. First, the draw is roughly half of an elite run and only a third of a slow one — so if you are over 4 seconds, your splits are the problem, not your draw. Second, shaving 0.05 seconds off each split saves a quarter of a second overall, which is the same as cutting your draw by 0.25 s. Split work is usually the cheaper win, and it is the one most shooters skip.

Record a run with a shot timer that reports splits, and read the string. A first split of 0.22 s followed by 0.45 s tells you the grip failed under recoil. Five even splits with a 1.9 s draw tells you the opposite.

Scoring: when the run does not count

The strict version is pass/fail: six A-zone hits or the run is scrapped. That is how the drill is usually run in class, and it is the version we recommend when you are establishing a baseline — it stops you from negotiating with yourself.

Gabe White’s pin standards use a time-penalty version instead, which is more useful once you are chasing a number: every C-zone hit adds a quarter second, an outer D-zone hit adds a full second, and a complete miss adds two. That keeps a single dropped shot from erasing an otherwise good run, while still making accuracy expensive.

Either way, print the right target. Scoring a Bill Drill on a target with the wrong A-zone dimensions produces a number that means nothing — grab the free printable Bill Drill target and print it at 100%, not “fit to page”.

How to get faster

In order of return on investment:

• Fix the grip before the speed. Recoil control is grip pressure, and grip pressure has to be set before the beep. If you are re-gripping between shots, no amount of trigger speed will save the string.
• Dry fire the draw. The draw is the half of the drill you can train at home for free. Ten minutes of draw to sight picture against a 0.7-second par beats a box of ammo spent discovering the same thing live.
• Train splits on a cadence, not on feel. Fire five-shot strings at a deliberate rhythm, then tighten the rhythm by 0.02 s per session. Chasing “as fast as possible” teaches you to outrun your sights.
• Verify the first shot separately. The First Shot Drill isolates draw-to-hit with a 2-second par, so you know whether the draw or the string is costing you.

Common mistakes — and what to do instead

Every slow Bill Drill comes down to one of these four habits, and every fast one to its opposite:

Where the Bill Drill fits in a training plan

A Bill Drill time is a diagnostic, not a workout. Six rounds tells you where you stand; it does not make you better on its own. Run it cold at the start of a range session, write the time down, then spend the session on whatever it exposed.

Pair it with drills that stress the same skill under different conditions: the Mozambique Drill forces a gear change from cadence to precision (2.5 to 4.0 seconds carry-ready, with Mozambique par time and scoring broken down by distance), El Presidente adds transitions and a reload, and Dot Torture checks that your fundamentals survive when the clock comes off.

Full course of fire, setup and scoring for the drill itself: the Bill Drill.

Sources

• Bill Wilson, Wilson Combat — the drill’s originator; 2-second par at 7 yards.
• Gabe White Training — Technical Skills Tests: Turbo Pin 2.00 s, Light Pin 2.50 s, Dark Pin 3.50 s at 7 yards, with the time-penalty scoring described above.
• DrillLane skill brackets — our own reading of the above, published so you can argue with it rather than guess.