New Balance 1300 Made in USA “Slate Grey” Costs More Than the Early Coverage Said

New Balance put the Made in USA 1300 back out June 11 in Slate Grey, and the price is the first thing that needs fixing. Most of the coverage that ran ahead of the drop put it at $210, and one outlet said $220. New Balance’s own listing says $224.99. The gap is small, it is the kind of number that sits uncorrected on a page for years, and on a shoe whose whole reputation is built on what it costs, getting it wrong is not a rounding error.

The 1300 is the model people reach for when they want to argue that New Balance is a premium maker rather than a running brand that got lucky. New Balance’s own archive material dates the M1300 to 1985 and calls it “one of the first running shoes over $100,” which is the brand telling on itself about why the shoe mattered. The widely repeated figure is $130 at launch, and while Complex and Highsnobiety both carry it, New Balance has never published the number, so treat it as well supported rather than settled. Worth noting for anyone shopping the archive: New Balance describes the 1985 shoe only as having a “unique gray color,” and the “Steel Blue” name that attaches to it in most write-ups belongs to the modern recreations rather than to the original label. The price story is sharper in Japan, where the shoe listed at 39,000 yen, a figure Complex reports designer Kubota remembering as the equivalent of $350 to $400 at the time. The more reliable piece of lore comes straight from the brand: New Balance’s own newsroom states that it has reissued the original M1300 every five years since 1985, a cadence that runs through the 1300JP line. Worth separating out, because coverage conflates them constantly, is the 1300CL, which arrived around 1996 and is a different shoe, swapping in an outsole from the New Balance 577.

This one is not an anniversary pair. It is a seasonal Made in USA release, and New Balance’s press material names the colorway in full as Slate Grey, Permafrost and Harbor Grey, with the upper listed as leather, mesh and hairy suede. That brings up the second correction. An earlier version of this post said ENCAP and C-CAP cushioning sit underfoot. New Balance’s spec sheet for U13007PT lists ENCAP only, described as a full-length midsole combining lightweight foam with a durable polyurethane rim. C-CAP appears nowhere on the product page. The two get run together in enthusiast writing because several New Balance models do use both, but this is not one of them. The Made in USA label carries its own asterisk, which New Balance prints itself: the footwear “contains a domestic value of 70% or more.”

What makes the 1300 interesting in 2026 is that New Balance is now selling three different tiers of the same silhouette and most buyers cannot tell them apart. The seasonal Made in USA 1300 runs roughly $190 to $225. The 1300JP anniversary platform, the one the five-year cadence actually refers to, sold for $330 in 2025. A shopper searching “New Balance 1300” gets all of it in one grid. That is a good problem for a brand with a deep archive and a bad one for anybody trying to work out whether a $225 grey shoe is the grail everyone keeps describing or the accessible version of it. This pair is the accessible version, and that is not a knock.

At $224.99 it lands at the top of the seasonal band. The Drift Red 1300 was $205 on April 30, and the Sea Salt pair that arrived September 10 was $190. Sitting $20 to $35 above both, on a grey colorway with no collaborator attached, is New Balance testing what the plain version of a famous shoe is worth. The earlier $210 and $220 figures in circulation are traceable: New Balance announced the Spring/Summer 2026 Made in USA collection with a $185 to $220 band months before this pair shipped, and the coverage carried the ceiling of that range rather than the final SKU price. Todd Snyder was still listing $210 in September, so the conflict is live at retail and not only in the archives. For comparison, the Made in USA 992 in Shadow Grey ran $200. The 1300 asks more and delivers a longer story, which is roughly the whole pitch.

The New Balance 1300 Made in USA Slate Grey released June 11 at $224.99 under style code U13007PT, in Slate Grey, Permafrost and Harbor Grey. It is stocked at newbalance.com, Kith and Extra Butter. Earlier colorways are gathered on the New Balance 1300 hub, including the Grey Days release, and the rest of the brand’s output sits in the New Balance archive.

Source: Sole Retriever

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The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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