[Glossary](/glossary.md)/[Gunnery](/glossary/category/gunnery.md)

# Damage per minuteDPM

Damage per minute: how much a gun deals over a sustained exchange, alpha multiplied by how often it can fire.

Also known as DPM, sustained damage.

DPM is the sustained counterpart to [alpha](/glossary/alpha-damage.md). It answers what a gun produces if it never stops firing, which is what decides a long brawl where both vehicles are [trading](/glossary/trading.md) in the open.

`DPM = alpha x 60 / reload`

On a magazine gun the whole cycle counts: the clip's damage divided by the time to fire it and reload it.

It is a ceiling, not a measurement. Nobody fires on cooldown for a full minute: aiming, repositioning and waiting for a target all cut into it, so a gun with the best DPM on paper often loses to one that hits harder per shot.

[Crew skills](/glossary/crew-skill.md), [equipment](/glossary/equipment.md) and [consumables](/glossary/consumable.md) all raise it, which is why the figure shown for a [stock](/glossary/stock.md) configuration and the figure a fully equipped vehicle reaches can differ by a fifth or more.

## Related terms

[Alpha damageThe damage a single penetrating shell deals, before the plus or minus 25 percent the game rolls on every shot.](/glossary/alpha-damage.md)[ReloadThe time between one shot and the next being ready, or for a magazine gun the time to refill the whole magazine.](/glossary/reload.md)[Rate of fireHow many shells a gun can fire in a minute, the reciprocal of its reload time.](/glossary/rate-of-fire.md)[Damage per gameDamage per game: the average damage dealt per battle, the most quoted measure of personal output and the one most sensitive to which vehicles are played.](/glossary/dpg.md)

[Every World of Tanks term](/glossary.md)

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