The Bill Drill: How to Run It, Par Times & How to Break 2 Seconds (2026)

The Bill Drill in 60 seconds (BLUF)

• What it is: Draw and fire six rounds into the A-zone of one target at seven yards, as fast as you can keep them all in. That’s the whole drill.
• Why it’s brutal: Six shots leaves nowhere to hide. A bad grip, a slow draw, or flinching all show up instantly in your hits and your times.
• What’s a good time? Roughly 4.5s for a new shooter, sub-3s for a solid club shooter, and sub-2s is the classic “you can really shoot” benchmark. Top competitors run it in the low 1.4s range.
• The two levers: Your draw (first shot) and your splits (time between shots). A shot timer breaks both out for you so you know which one to fix.
• Train it anywhere: You don’t need live fire to build the pattern. An airsoft pistol or a dry-fire rep with a par time on a free Airsoft Shot Timer app trains the exact same draw-and-run mechanics.

If you’ve ever watched someone at the range draw and rip six shots into a single target in about two seconds, you’ve probably seen a Bill Drill without knowing its name. To a bystander it looks like a John Wick impression. To anyone who trains seriously, it’s one of the most revealing tests in shooting — because there is absolutely nothing to it, and that’s exactly why it’s so hard to fake.

Most drills let you cover for a weakness. A slow reload can be hidden behind good movement; a shaky first shot can be excused on a hard target. The Bill Drill strips all of that away. One target, seven yards, six shots, one timer. Either your grip holds the gun steady enough to fire six fast rounds into the A-zone, or it doesn’t — and the timer and the target tell you which, every single time.

What Is the Bill Drill?

The Bill Drill was created by Bill Wilson, the founder of Wilson Combat, and named after him. There’s a running joke that the name comes from Bill Rogers, or Bill Jordan, or from the idea that you should be able to cover your six-shot group with a one-dollar bill — but Wilson himself will tell you it’s simply his drill. It became a staple of practical shooting because it distills the two skills that win matches into one clean rep: getting the gun out fast, and controlling it once it’s up.

The course of fire hasn’t changed in decades. You stand at seven yards facing a single IPSC/USPSA (or IDPA) target, pistol holstered, hands relaxed at your sides or in a surrender position. On the buzzer you draw and fire six rounds into the A-zone as fast as you can while keeping every hit inside the scoring zone. Miss the A-zone and the run doesn’t count the way you want it to — speed only means something if all six are where they belong.

What makes it such a good diagnostic is that six shots is just enough to expose a grip that comes apart under recoil. One or two shots, most people can muscle through. By round four or five, a weak grip lets the muzzle climb, the sights stop returning to the same place, and the hits start walking up and out of the A-zone. The Bill Drill doesn’t test whether you can shoot fast; it tests whether you can shoot fast repeatably.

How to Run the Bill Drill

Set a single target at seven yards. Load six rounds, holster, and get into your normal start position — for most people that’s hands hanging naturally, though many competitors practice from a surrender or “hands up” position to standardize the draw. Start your shot timer, wait for the random beep, and on the tone draw and fire all six into the A-zone.

The mental cue that separates a clean run from a scattered one is where your eyes go. As USPSA champion Ben Stoeger describes it, you want to look at a specific spot on the target, bring the gun up to your eye-target line, and fire all six without your grip coming apart — without your support hand loosening, without your firing hand driving the gun down to chase the recoil. Pick the spot before the beep, not after. If you draw and then go looking for where to aim, you’ve already lost half a second.

Run it in strings of five or six repetitions, and score honestly. A run with a great time but two shots in the C-zone isn’t a good Bill Drill — it’s a warning that you’re pushing past your current control. The goal is the fastest time at which all six still land in the A-zone, and that number should creep down slowly as your grip and recoil control improve.

Bill Drill Par Times: What’s a Good Time?

Here’s the honest answer most people want first. The times below are draw-to-last-shot from seven yards with all six hits in the A-zone:

Level	Bill Drill Time
New shooter	4.5s or slower
Developing shooter	3.5s
Solid club shooter	2.5–3.0s
Advanced / “you can shoot”	2.0s
Competitive / expert	1.7s
Top-tier	1.4s or faster

The sub-2-second Bill Drill has been the classic gold standard for years — the line that separates people who think they’re fast from people who actually are. But it’s worth knowing that the standard keeps moving. As trainer Brennan Brennecke puts it bluntly, “the internet will tell you that in order to shoot a good Bill Drill you need to shoot it sub two seconds — that’s an old standard, and the new standard is way faster than that.” At the top level, shooters are running the drill in the low 1.4s, which means a roughly one-second draw and five splits around 0.10–0.15 seconds each.

Don’t anchor on the elite numbers, though. If you’re a new shooter, getting six clean A-zone hits in 4.5 seconds is a genuine milestone. The value of the drill isn’t hitting someone else’s time — it’s watching your time come down while your hits stay in the A-zone. That progression is the whole point.

Reading Your Draw and Splits on a Shot Timer

This is where the Bill Drill goes from “fun party trick” to “the most efficient training tool you own” — and it’s impossible without a timer. A shot timer doesn’t just give you a total time; it records the time of every shot, which means it hands you a full breakdown of the run: your draw (time to first shot) and your five splits (the gaps between shots two through six). Those two numbers tell you exactly where your time is going.

Break it down the way top shooters do. A one-second draw plus five 0.20-second splits already puts you at 2.0 seconds even. So the question every run answers is simple: is your time bleeding out of the draw, or out of the splits? Most amateurs assume they need faster splits, when in reality the biggest, easiest gains hide in the draw and even in the start signal itself.

Brennecke demonstrated this with real timer numbers. On one run his first shot landed at 1.23 seconds because he waited for the beep to fully end before moving. On the next run, reacting to the very front of the tone instead, his first shot came at 0.72 — half a second saved on a two-second drill, without changing his grip or his splits at all. Half a second is a quarter of the whole run, bought purely by reading the timer and reacting to the start signal a hair sooner. You would never find that free time by feel; the timer put a number on it.

The splits themselves reveal grip quality. If your first two splits are tight (0.15s) and your last three balloon (0.25s+), your grip is degrading under recoil and the sights aren’t returning to the same spot — that’s a grip-and-recoil problem, not a trigger-speed problem. Brennecke’s cue for fixing it is to “paint the A-zone” rather than shoot reactively: instead of see the dot, bang, see the dot, bang, you see your red dot or front sight settle once on a specific spot, then let it streak up and down through that same point while you trust the grip to bring it back. That mental shift — trusting a grip you built out of the holster instead of re-aiming every shot — is what flattens those late splits.

Run the Bill Drill With Airsoft or Dry Fire

Here’s the part almost every Bill Drill article skips: you don’t need live ammo to build most of this. The two things the drill actually trains — a fast, consistent draw and a grip that survives recoil — are pattern skills, and patterns are built through reps, not through burning through a case of ammo. Ammo cost and range access are exactly why so many shooters plateau, and it’s a solvable problem.

Dry fire is the cheapest option. Set a par time on a shot timer — start at a realistic target like 2.5 seconds — clear and safety-check your pistol, then draw and press the trigger six times before the par beep sounds. You get the draw, the sight settle, and the trigger press against a real clock. The Airsoft Shot Timer app does this for free: it gives you the random start beep and a par-time buzzer, so you can run par-time Bill Drill reps in your living room and actually track whether your draw is getting faster week to week. Pair it with the mechanics in our dry fire training guide and you’re training the identical draw you’d use on match day.

Airsoft takes it a step further, because now you get feedback on your hits too. A gas blowback pistol at seven yards (or a scaled-down distance indoors) gives you a real trigger, real recoil impulse, and a real point of impact, so you can run the full Bill Drill — draw, six shots, check your group — without a single live round. If you shoot practical airsoft or Action Air, this is your most realistic off-range rep, and it’s where the shot timer earns its keep: the app doesn’t care whether the “bang” came from a 9mm or a green-gas GBB, it just times your draw and splits the same way. For more on bridging the two worlds, our airsoft-to-firearms training crossover guide covers what transfers and what doesn’t.

Variations to Keep the Drill Honest

Once your standard seven-yard Bill Drill is repeatable, there are a few ways to keep it challenging. The simplest is distance progression: run it at five yards to build raw speed, then push back to ten yards, where the same splits will scatter your hits if your grip isn’t genuinely solid. The A-zone doesn’t get bigger, but the margin for a sloppy grip disappears fast.

Ben Stoeger’s favorite variation adds target transitions. Set three targets edge to edge, draw, and fire two rounds on each while shifting your vision to the next target between pairs — a “moving” Bill Drill that trains how fast you can drive your eyes and the gun together. Start with the targets touching, then spread them apart so the gun has to travel farther each time. Stoeger’s warning is worth repeating: this is a training exercise, not a match technique, because shooting that aggressively makes mistakes easy — but for pushing your visual speed and finding your real limits, it’s excellent. The last useful twist is adding concealment: run the draw from a covered holster and you’ve turned the Bill Drill into a genuine self-defense benchmark, which is exactly what that “sub-2-second from concealment” question on every shooting forum is really asking about.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good Bill Drill time?

For all six shots in the A-zone at seven yards, roughly 4.5 seconds is a realistic new-shooter time, sub-3 seconds marks a competent club shooter, and sub-2 seconds is the classic benchmark for someone who can genuinely shoot. Elite competitors run it in the low 1.4-second range. The number only counts if every hit is in the A-zone — a fast time with hits in the C-zone means you’re going faster than you can control.

Why is it called the Bill Drill?

It’s named after Bill Wilson of Wilson Combat, who developed it. Despite the popular myths, it’s not named after Bill Rogers or Bill Jordan, and it has nothing to do with covering your group with a dollar bill — that’s just a memorable coincidence people repeat.

How do you shoot a sub-2-second Bill Drill?

Break the two seconds into a roughly one-second draw and five 0.20-second splits. The fastest free time usually hides in the draw and in reacting to the start beep sooner — shooters routinely save half a second just by moving on the front of the tone instead of after it. The splits come down when your grip stops the muzzle from climbing, so you “paint” one spot in the A-zone and trust the sights to return rather than re-aiming each shot. A shot timer showing your draw and each split tells you which one to work on.

Can you practice the Bill Drill with dry fire or airsoft?

Yes — and you should. Dry fire with a par time on a shot timer trains the draw, the sight settle and the trigger press; an airsoft pistol adds real recoil and a real point of impact so you can check your group too. Both build the exact draw-and-grip pattern the live-fire drill measures, at a fraction of the cost. The Airsoft Shot Timer app provides the random start beep and par-time buzzer for both.

What target should I use for the Bill Drill?

The standard is an IPSC/USPSA metric target or an IDPA target at seven yards, scoring the A-zone (or the down-zero zone on IDPA). Any target with a defined center scoring area works for training — the point is that “fast” only counts when all six rounds land inside that zone.

Does the Bill Drill really improve your shooting?

It does, because it isolates the two skills that carry over to almost everything else in practical shooting: a fast, repeatable draw and recoil control under speed. Six shots is just enough to expose a grip that fails, and the timer turns every run into measurable feedback. Track your draw and splits over a few weeks and you’ll see exactly where you’re improving.

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The Bill Drill’s genius is its honesty. Six shots, one target, one number — no room to fool yourself. Grab a shot timer, whether you’re on a live range, dry-firing in the living room, or running an airsoft pistol in the backyard, and start logging your draw and splits. Watch which number moves and which one sticks, and you’ll always know exactly what to train next. For a broader menu of drills to build around it, see our complete guide to classic shooting drills.

• Bill Drill
• Shooting Drills
• Shot Timer
• Practical Shooting
• USPSA
• IPSC
• Recoil Control
• Draw Speed
• Splits
• Dry Fire
• Airsoft
• Pistol Training
• Par Time
• Wilson Combat