Original Data Study
Median prices by part-number family, computed from our cross-referenced catalog — September 2026.
Every stocked part number on this site belongs to a family: an MS or NAS standard, an AN legacy design, an SAE AS/AMS document, a mil-spec or federal spec citation, or an OEM drawing number assigned by the original design activity. We cross-reference 6,859 part numbers to stocked, priced NSNs — enough to answer a question we have never seen answered in public: do standard-hardware part numbers actually cost less than drawing-number parts? Short answer: dramatically. The median OEM drawing-number part in our catalog costs roughly 3× the median MS-standard part. Standards exist to make parts interchangeable and multi-sourced; drawing numbers exist because nobody else makes that part. The price data shows exactly that dynamic.
| Family | Parts | Min | Median | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OEM / drawing numbers | 3,196 | $0.03 | $22.50 | $70,092.00 |
| NAS / NASM | 1,490 | $0.14 | $6.75 | $14,752.17 |
| MS (Military Standard) | 1,445 | $0.12 | $7.89 | $3,504.60 |
| Mil-spec, federal spec, CID & ASTM | 387 | $0.18 | $21.03 | $3,504.60 |
| AS / SAE / AMS | 216 | $0.18 | $5.25 | $1,800.00 |
| AN (Air Force-Navy) | 125 | $0.18 | $14.02 | $906.81 |
Practical takeaways: if your drawing calls an MS, NAS, or AN number, you are buying a commodity — shop it by part number and expect single-digit to low-double-digit pricing on most items. If it calls a drawing number, the NSN cross-reference is your leverage: it tells you exactly which cataloged item satisfies the requirement, and lets a stocking distributor compete with the original design activity. When neither works, that is what custom machining to print is for.
Methodology. Figures are computed from the QBF Solutions stocked catalog as of September 2026: every published unit price on this site (8,057 National Stock Numbers), the commercial part numbers cross-referenced to them, and our supplier stock-feed listing history. Prices are our published resale prices in USD. This is our own dataset — the statistics describe what we stock and publish, not the entire federal supply system.
