The National Armed Robbery Monitoring Program (NARMP) aims to examine weapon use in armed robbery, and to monitor trends and patterns over time in the commission of the offence. Since 2003, state and territory police services have forwarded armed robbery data on agreed variables to the Australian Institute of Criminology for analysis and reporting. The collected information provides detailed national-level monitoring of trends, identifies changes in trends and highlights the factors responsible. Quantitative evidence is presented of victim and offender details, individual and organisational victim numbers, incident location and timing, weapon use, type of property theft, victim-offender relationship, offender motivations, and demographic information such as age and gender. This report updates previous collection of armed robbery statistics at the national level. It provides an appraisal of trends and patterns in armed robbery and weapon use for the 2005 calendar year, and factors underpinning those trends. A comprehensive discussion is presented of the characteristics of victims and offenders, and patterns of incidents over time. Despite changes in the level of detail and how information is analysed, the findings are consistent with those observed since 2003. This shows that the features of armed robberies have not changed markedly over that time.