The Gun Belt Is the Part Everyone Skips
You can spend $80 on a holster and ruin it with a $15 belt. Here's what actually separates a gun belt from a regular one.
The most common complaint about carrying a pistol, that it sags, shifts through the day, and prints against a shirt, is usually blamed on the holster. It's usually the belt. A holster can only hold a gun as steady as whatever it's clipped to, and a soft dress belt under a loaded pistol behaves like a rubber band.
Stiffness across the width, not just thickness
A gun belt resists twisting along its vertical axis, which is what keeps a holstered pistol upright instead of rolling away from your body. That comes either from thick full-grain leather, typically 14 ounces or heavier and often two layers bonded together, or from a polymer or nylon core sandwiched inside a leather or webbing shell. Thickness alone isn't the spec; a thick but soft belt still rolls.
Sizing is not your pants size
Order a gun belt by measuring an existing belt from the fold at the buckle to the hole you actually use, not by the waist size on your jeans. Then account for the holster: carrying inside the waistband adds roughly the thickness of the gun and holster to your effective circumference, which is why many makers suggest sizing up. Most quality belts have multiple holes for exactly this reason: the right hole changes day to day depending on whether you're carrying IWB, OWB, or not at all.
Leather or reinforced synthetic
Full-grain leather looks appropriate with anything from jeans to a jacket, breaks in to your body, and lasts decades if it's the real thing rather than bonded scrap. Reinforced synthetic (a polymer core in nylon webbing, often with a low-profile buckle) is stiffer per unit of thickness, completely weather-indifferent, and adjusts in much finer increments than punched holes allow. Choose by dress code more than by performance; both work.
What to avoid
Skip anything sold as a gun belt that's under about a quarter-inch thick, anything bonded-leather (it delaminates), and the very heavy tactical buckles that are visible under a shirt and defeat the point of concealing anything. The belt should be the least interesting part of the outfit and the most boringly reliable part of the system.
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