How Much Does a Khorramshahr-4 Missile Cost?

Published on March 7, 2026 | Written by Alec Pow
This article was researched using 13 sources. See our methodology and corrections policy.

Khorramshahr-4, also reported under the name Kheibar, is an Iranian medium-range ballistic missile that appears in Khorramshahr-family coverage from outlets like Reuters and the Associated Press, with reference catalogs such as IranWatch used to keep variant names consistent. Public reporting does not include purchase orders, line-item bills of materials, or contract schedules, so any dollar figure you see is an estimate built from analyst assumptions and limited disclosures. No invoices are public.

The cleanest way to frame price is as a range and then explain why the range is wide. A 2025 writeup places medium and long-range missiles like Ghadr, Sejjil, and Khorramshahr in a USD 5–8 million bracket, which matches the “single-digit millions per round” intuition most open-source tracking uses in a medium-range cost analysis.

Unit-level estimates also circulate as discrete point values. A July 2025 unit-cost PDF lists illustrative unit costs of $250,000 for Emad, $5 million for Ghadr, and $8 million for Khorramshahr-4, which is why you often see Khorramshahr-4 quoted near the top of the single-digit-million range.

Most of these numbers are per missile, not per launcher, and the estimate shifts fastest when a source folds in warhead package, guidance electronics, testing, storage, and the operating costs needed to keep launch units ready.

TL;DR: Public estimates put Khorramshahr-4 in the single-digit millions per missile, and the biggest swing is what the source counts as part of “the missile” versus the wider ready-to-fire and sustainment package.

For pricing, the unit is typically “per missile” in USD, and the biggest modifiers are guidance package quality, warhead integration, and how much testing and storage overhead a source silently assigns to the round. A quote that counts only the airframe and propulsion can land millions lower than a quote that treats the missile as a ready-to-fire system under sanctions and wartime dispersal.

How Much Does a Khorramshahr-4 Missile Cost?

Jump to sections

• Open-source ballpark for Khorramshahr-4 style MRBMs sits near USD 5–8 million per missile in a 2025 conflict cost brief.
• One widely-circulated unit ladder puts Emad around $250,000 and Khorramshahr family missiles around $8 million each in a June 2025 cost roundup.
• High-end air defense shows up in the same exchange-ratio conversations, with Iron Dome’s Tamir often cited near $40,000–$50,000 per interceptor in Iron Dome cost.

What you’re actually buying

Khorramshahr-4 is best thought of as a long-range strike round rather than a consumer product with a posted sticker price. It belongs to a state-run arsenal where manufacturing, procurement, and deployment decisions are tied to strategic messaging, deterrence, and wartime use patterns. A “cost” figure in public writing is usually a proxy for industrial effort and replacement burden, not a checkout price you could verify. That also means the same missile can look cheap or expensive depending on the comparison set, whether the discussion is about production cost, wartime consumption, or the price of defending against it. In most coverage, the practical question is not what one missile costs, but how quickly a stockpile can be built, replaced, and sustained under sanctions, shortages, and battlefield losses.

What we verified

• Checked baseline capability descriptions in a Feb. 2026 Reuters recap.
• Cross-referenced naming and family descriptions in a May 2023 AP report as historical context.
• Confirmed variant naming consistency using IranWatch’s arsenal table.

Khorramshahr-4 vs other munitions

Khorramshahr-4 often feels “expensive” only when the comparison set is drones or short-range rockets, and “cheap” when the comparison is modern air defense or large precision strike rounds. That framing matters because most public cost discussions are really about exchange ratios, how many rounds are fired, and how many defensive shots are taken in response.

For a U.S. reference point, a single Tomahawk is often priced in the low single-digit millions, with many public figures clustering around $1.8 million to $2.0 million depending on variant and accounting, which makes an $8 million Khorramshahr-4 estimate look like a several-Tomahawk replacement burden. Tomahawk unit cost At the smaller end, Hellfire is commonly discussed in the low six figures, often quoted around $130,000 to $160,000 per missile, which is why analysts sometimes translate a ballistic-missile estimate into “how many tactical missiles that money buys.” Hellfire unit cost The practical takeaway is that Khorramshahr-4 sits in a tier where firing a handful of rounds can add up fast, even before you layer on training, readiness, and the costs on the defending side.

What a per-missile estimate is counting

A public “per missile” price usually tries to represent the hardware round leaving a factory or being pulled from stock, but sources vary on whether they quietly include overhead like testing, storage, transporter-erector-launcher availability, or wartime attrition of launch infrastructure. Those choices move a quote by millions without changing the missile itself.

One easy way to see the spread is to compare common point estimates used in modeling. If a source treats a Ghadr as $5 million and a Khorramshahr-4 as $8 million, the implied gap is $3 million per round because eight minus five equals three in the JINSA unit-cost note. The same modeling logic often treats older or less advanced rounds as far cheaper, which is why any mixed-salvo assumption can dominate the final bill. Budgets are classified. In practice, per-missile figures should be read as an order-of-magnitude tool for comparing systems and for estimating replacement burden under sustained firing, not as a literal procurement price that a buyer could confirm.

Configuration and logistics

Even in open-source writing, Khorramshahr-4 is not always described as a single fixed configuration. The family name, payload descriptions, and claimed performance attributes vary by outlet, and those differences map to real cost levers like warhead section complexity, guidance electronics, and quality control needed to field a reliable missile in quantity.

Coverage that emphasizes larger payload capacity and longer-range class positioning tends to imply a heavier, more material-intensive round and a more expensive handling and storage footprint, which pushes estimates upward even if the source never states the cost logic out loud. For a program-style summary of common descriptions used in defense reporting, see a Khorramshahr family profile. The pricing point is that, without a public contract, analysts map qualitative claims like payload class, guidance sophistication, and production maturity into dollars using analogs, and small changes in assumptions can move the estimate by millions per missile.

Mini cases

Case one is the “program cost” framing in day-to-day coverage. One report quotes an estimate that a “standard missile” costs around $1 million, then adds that a missile like Khorramshahr would cost more, which is a common pattern where outlets set a baseline and then ladder up by class in a June 2025 weapons recap.

Case two is the “strike package” framing where the story is about how many missiles were launched, not what model each one was. Euronews describes April and October 2024 attacks as involving on the order of 180 missiles and ties that to public debate about interception and escalation in a June 2025 report.

Case three is the “macroeconomic cost of war” framing. An Al Jazeera analysis discusses damage and disruption figures such as $150–200 million in estimated damages in a cited context, which shows how quickly the story can shift from the cost of a missile to the economic bill around the campaign in a conflict cost analysis.

Hidden costs

When people talk about “how much it costs,” they often mean the missile body, but wars and readiness burn money in other places. Launch crews, dispersal and concealment practices, maintenance cycles, transport capacity, and the losses of fixed infrastructure can dwarf a simple per-round estimate in a prolonged fight.

One reason the cost debate stays intense is that defensive actions have their own per-shot price tags and readiness overhead. Even outside missile defense, the cost of rapid-response posture can be large, and sortie generation creates a steady burn that does not show up in a per-missile quote. For a baseline on what high-readiness response can look like, see scramble cost ranges, where published figures often land in the tens of thousands per scramble. The bigger point is that a unit estimate is only a slice of the bill, and once conflict stretches into weeks, the hidden costs start to look like the real costs for both sides.

Worked total example

A simple way to sanity-check totals is to build a mixed basket that uses commonly cited unit costs, then scale by a plausible number of rounds. This is not a procurement quote. It is a way to translate a headline estimate into a total bill you can compare with other defense spending claims.

If you assume a notional package of six Khorramshahr-class rounds at $8 million each, six Ghadr-class rounds at $5 million each, and twelve Emad-class rounds at $250,000 each, the total comes to $81 million because 6 times 8 equals 48, 6 times 5 equals 30, 12 times 0.25 equals 3, and 48 plus 30 plus 3 equals 81 in a compiled missile cost list. This single basket also shows why composition drives results, since swapping even a handful of higher-priced rounds into a larger salvo shifts the bill by tens of millions quickly.

Article Highlights

• Public estimates often place Khorramshahr-4 around the top end of a single-digit-million per missile range.
• Unit costs are not contract prices, they are modeling inputs.
• Salvo composition can matter more than the headline unit figure.
• Defense and readiness costs can eclipse the missile-only line item in a longer fight.
• Use these figures for order-of-magnitude checks, not procurement claims.

Answers to Common Questions

Is there an official published unit price for Khorramshahr-4?

No official price list is public. Most numbers come from analyst modeling and press estimates, not disclosed contracts.

Why do sources disagree by millions of dollars?

Different sources count different things, missile-only hardware versus a broader ready-to-fire and sustainment package. Assumptions about guidance, testing, and production maturity also move the estimate.

Does the $8 million figure mean every round costs that much?

No, it is an estimate used in some modeling. Real costs can move with variant details and what overhead is counted.

Can you estimate the cost of a large strike from the unit price alone?

You can get an order-of-magnitude total by multiplying a unit estimate by a missile count. The result stays sensitive to the mix of missile types and to costs outside the missile itself.