Reactive chlorine in the lower atmosphere (as distinguished from chlorofluorocarbon‐derived chlorine in the stratosphere) is important to considerations of precipitation acidity, corrosion, foliar damage, and chemistry of the marine boundary layer. Many of the chlorine‐containing gases are difficult to measure, and natural sources appear to dominate anthropogenic sources for some chemical species. As a consequence, no satisfactory budget for reactive chlorine in the lower atmosphere is available. We have reviewed information on sources; source strengths; measurements in gas, aqueous, and aerosol phases; and chemical processes and from those data derive global budgets for nine reactive chlorine species and for reactive chlorine as a whole. The typical background abundance of reactive chlorine in the lower tropospheric is about 1.5 ppbv. The nine species, CH3Cl, CH3CCl3, HCl, CHClF2, Cl2* (thought to be HOCl and/or Cl2), CCl2= CCl2, CH2Cl2, COCl2, and CHCl3, each contribute at least a few percent to that total. The tropospheric reactive chlorine burden of approximately 8.3 Tg Cl is dominated by CH3Cl (≈45 %) and CH3CCl3(≈25 %) and appears to be increasing by several percent per year. By far the most vigorous chlorine cycling appears to occur among seasalt aerosol, HCl, and Cl2*. The principal sources of reactive chlorine are volatilization from seasalt (enhanced by anthropogenically generated reactants), marine algae, volcanoes, and coal combustion (natural sources being thus quite important to the budget). It is anticipated that the concentrations of tropospheric reactive chlorine will continue to increase in the next several decades, particularly near urban areas in the rapidly developing co