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FCC counts 4,258 US AM stations, down 142 in a year

The FCC's September 30 tally: 4,258 AM, 6,540 commercial FM and 4,815 noncommercial FM. Commercial radio shrinks, community radio grows.

By AppRadio Team Published 7 min read

The FCC published its station-by-station portrait of American radio on Tuesday, October 6. As of September 30 there were 4,258 AM stations, 6,540 commercial FM and 4,815 noncommercial FM, or 15,613 radio stations in the country. The document is DA 26-1064, one page long, with no commentary at all. Just the count.

The number headlines reach for is the AM figure: 42 stations fewer than last quarter, and 142 fewer than in September 2024. Commercial FM is falling too, for the seventh straight quarter, down 20 stations. Radio World opened a ten-year interactive graph built straight from the FCC data.

The stations disappearing from the list always come with a call sign, a frequency and a city. Cumulus surrendered KZAC in San Francisco. KARN in Little Rock, Arkansas, and KFOG in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, went dark. Saga handed back WZAN in Portland, Maine. The KZAC story is the most instructive of the bunch. The 560 in San Francisco went silent in late 2025, Cumulus moved the KSFO operation over to 810 (the former KGO), and then surrendered the license. The lease on the Pier 94 tower site sat among the costs the company wanted to shed in its Chapter 11 restructuring this spring.

And ten stations left all at once, from a single owner. Hispanic Target Media handed back the licenses for ten of its FM stations in a set of FCC filings dated September 30, with no explanation given: seven in Texas, two in California and one in Florida. All ten ran Regional Mexican under the Radio Amigo brand, and the company still operates 15 stations across Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas and Virginia. In the week of September 28 alone, 28 licenses were filed for cancellation across the country, per Radio Insight via Radio World.

This count measures owners, not listeners

This is where I think the easy read of the number goes wrong.

Put the two FCC bulletins side by side and the math gets clear. On June 30 there were 4,300 AM, 6,560 commercial FM and 4,806 noncommercial FM, for 15,666 stations. On September 30 there are 15,613. So the country's radio total fell by 53 stations in the quarter. But the total hides the real movement: commercial lost 62 stations while noncommercial gained nine. The noncommercial FM count has not stopped rising since the first quarter of 2022, and 4,815 is a record for the series.

American radio is not getting smaller. It is getting less commercial. The money that used to support the AM station in a mid-sized city is gone, and the license went back. Nothing replaces it with another license. The same frequency comes back with a better product: a noncommercial FM for a university, a school, a church or a hospital. There are 4,815 stations like that, plus 2,014 low-power FM and 8,826 FM translators and boosters, the last group down 20 since June while it waits for the noncommercial translator window the FCC opens in November.

Which is why I don't think the AM number is the end of anything. The category peaked at around 5,000 licenses in the early 1990s, according to FCC data, but the commission's own 1969 report already counted 4,269 AMs. Today there are 4,258. A number that looks like a break is actually a number that came back to a level this country has seen before. What is finishing isn't the band. It is the small owner who used to pay for it in the city where AM was still the only game in town.

Yuma's 560 is the same 560 that died in San Francisco

Worth telling the other side of the coin, because the same frequency comes full circle.

On October 4, KBLU in Yuma, Arizona, came back on air after going dark in March, when El Dorado Broadcasters sold both FM stations in the market and took the city's talk station down with them. The buyer was Derek Egeberg, who had hosted a biweekly credit and mortgage show on KBLU for about 12 years and runs a mortgage branch in Yuma. He bought the license for $50,000 in June, under the licensee name Approval Coach Broadcasting. The station runs at 1 kW, one tower by day and a two-tower array at night, and leases its transmitter site.

The part that matters to anyone who operates a radio station is in the rest of the story. The city would not let him get a permit for a satellite dish, so he ran fiber into both the studio and the transmitter site and works with a Tieline IP codec running Thimeo MicroMPX. The studio sits inside his mortgage office, in a space that used to be a podcasting room, with a table and six microphones for guests. The console is a 16-channel digital Wheatstone with two WheatNet Blades, and playout runs on new BSI Simian automation. Premiere and Fox Sports fill out the schedule, but what he wants to sell is his own business: mortgage spots as a proof of concept so other local companies can be sold next.

Two opposite realities with the same number on their backs. San Francisco's 560 died because the company holding it had a Chapter 11 and a tower lease it wanted to dump. Yuma's 560 came back because someone with an actual business paid $50,000 for a license and made the transmitter fit in a room next to the computer. There is a bill in the United States, H.R. 979, that would require AM radio in new cars. It cleared the House and is still waiting on the Senate. Even if it becomes law, it buys dashboard presence, and dashboard presence does not switch a single station back on. The Yuma case makes that plain: the stations that come back are the ones owned by somebody with something to sell, not the ones backed by a statute.

What the count leaves for people on the air

The most useful number on the sheet is not the AM one. It is FM translators and boosters: 8,826. That is the largest radio category on the list, bigger than the 6,540 commercial FM stations, and it is about to gain stations when the FCC opens its window in November.

If you have a small station in mind and assume the transmitter era is over, this is the cheapest door left in the business. A translator takes the signal from an FM station that is already on air and repeats it into an area that has no coverage today. It takes a small transmitter, a small antenna and a deal with the mother station. And KBLU shows the other side of the same idea: an IP codec replaced the satellite link when the city would not sign off, and the operating cost dropped to the level of an office.

The rest of the sheet is a reminder that keeping a license alive is quarterly work: rent, deadlines, paperwork, filings. KZAC had been silent since late 2025 and only turned up in the September 30 count. A licensing file nobody touches for months becomes a shutdown without ceremony, which is exactly how KZAC ended and how Radio Amigo turned ten stations into one day of paperwork.

The FCC counted all of it on a single page. It is the most honest reading of American radio available, and what it shows is not the end of the band. It is a change in who gets to stay on it.

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