Every army, priced today
The Cheapest Warhammer 40k Army to Start
Every 40k army ranked by what its cheapest start actually costs right now — the lowest live price for each army's cheapest box, across every shop we track. Not RRP, not last year's guess.
The cheapest way in today is Orks, at C$90.62 for Warhammer 40,000: Introductory Set. But the cheapest box is not the cheapest army to own: grown to a full 2,000-point force at the per-point rate its kits actually go for, Thousand Sons comes out lowest at about C$860.00.
10 of 34 armies have no starting box we can price today — they are listed at the bottom rather than left out, because an army missing from a ranking looks like an army that does not exist.
Which army gives you the most for your money?
Entry price and value are different questions, and the per-point columns answer different ones — which is why they rank the armies differently.
Start C$ / point prices the box itself: what one point of what is inside it costs. The spread is far wider than the shelf prices suggest — Adeptus Custodes gives you a point for C$0.24 against C$0.62 for Adeptus Mechanicus, 2.6× as much for the same points on the table, from boxes priced within pennies of each other. Points come from Munitorum Field Manual v1.2 (2026-08-05), and the column is blank for the 4 armies whose cheapest box we have not sourced points for — we leave it empty rather than estimate it.
2,000pt army asks the longer question, and it is the one worth reading: not what the first box costs, but what the army costs at the rate every kit of it we can price and point actually goes for. A cheap Combat Patrol can front an expensive range, and the two genuinely disagree. Each cell says what it was measured over, because a mean over sixty-five kits and a mean over four are not the same claim — and below 3 kits we do not scale one at all.
How this ranking works
"Start" here means the army's cheapest currently-priced box — usually its Combat Patrol. We compare the live price at every shop we track and rank on the lowest, and the buy button beside each price goes to the shop quoting it. Rows we cannot price today carry no button rather than a link to somewhere we have not checked.
The last column scales to a standard 2,000-point game, the size most people are actually building towards. It carries a tilde because it is an estimate — but an estimate computed from points we sourced and prices we checked today, at the per-point rate of every kit of that army we can measure. Every other figure you will read for this was arrived at by guessing, and was stale the day Games Workshop last changed the points. Armies do not scale perfectly evenly: characters and centrepiece models cost differently per point from the rank and file, so treat the ordering as sound and the exact number as a good approximation of a moving target.
31 of 34 armies have enough measurable kits to estimate that way. The rest show nothing rather than a weaker number in the same column: multiplying a mean taken over one kit by 2,000 produces a confident four-figure number out of a single data point, which is worse than a blank. Space Marine chapters are measured together with the Space Marines range, because that is where the kits a chapter player buys are filed.
Next steps: every Combat Patrol ranked by value · how much a Warhammer army costs · the easiest armies to paint
Prices were last checked 25 Aug and can change — the retailer's own page always has the final say. Affiliate links — how we make money.