The energy loss of argon ions in a target depends on their velocity and charge density. At the energies studied in this work, it depends mostly on the free and bound electrons in the target. Here the random-phase approximation is used for analyzing free electrons at any degeneracy. For the plasma-bound electrons, an interpolation between approximations for low and high energies is applied. The Brandt-Kitagawa (BK) model is employed to depict the projectile charge space distribution, and the stripping criterion of Kreussler et al. is used to determine its equilibrium charge state Q(eq). This latter criterion implies that the equilibrium charge state depends slightly on the electron density and temperature of the plasma. On the other hand, the effective charge Q(eff) is obtained as the ratio between the energy loss of the argon ion and that of the proton for the same plasma conditions. This effective charge Q(eff) is larger than the equilibrium charge state Q(eq) due to the incorporation of the BK charge distribution. Though our charge-state estimations are not exactly the same as the experimental values, our energy loss agrees quite well with the experiments. It is noticed that the energy loss in plasmas is higher than that in the same cold target of about, ∼42-62.5% and increases with carbon plasma ionization. This confirms the well-known enhanced plasma stopping. It is also observed that only a small part of this energy loss enhancement is due to an increase of the argon charge state, namely only ∼2.2 and 5.1%, for the partially and the fully ionized plasma, respectively. The other contribution is connected with a better energy transfer to the free electrons at plasma state than to the bound electrons at solid state of about, ∼38.8-57.4%, where higher values correspond to a fully ionized carbon plasma.