Rock Climbing Grade Converter

Climbing grade systems vary by country but map roughly to each other.

Route climbing comparison:

Bouldering comparison:

Grades are approximate, and difficulty perception varies by style and region.

Why the columns do not line up cleanly. The American YDS scale splits the 5.10 to 5.14 range into four letter grades each, while French splits the same span into thirds with a plus sign. There is no whole-number ratio between those, so any conversion table has to double up somewhere. This one puts both 5.11a and 5.11b at French 6c, and both 5.10b and 5.10c at UIAA VII-. That is not sloppiness in the table, it is two systems with different resolutions, and it is why an American climbing in France sometimes finds a grade unexpectedly easy and sometimes unexpectedly hard.

Sandbagging is real and regional. Every area has a reputation. Traditional crags graded decades ago tend to run harder than a modern sport crag with the same number, and a route protected by gear feels a grade above the same moves with bolts every two metres. Indoor grades are generally the softest of all, partly because setters want people to have a good session and partly because plastic holds are more predictable than rock. Add a grade of headroom when you travel somewhere new, especially for the first few days.

Why British grades are not in the converter. The British trad system is two numbers, not one. The adjectival grade (VD, S, HS, VS, HVS, then E1 upward) describes how serious the route is: how sustained it is, how good the gear is, how far you would fall. The technical grade (4a, 5b, 6a) describes the hardest single move. An E1 5a is a route with one moderate move and terrible protection; an E1 5c is safe but physically hard. Squeezing that into a single YDS number throws away exactly the information that keeps British climbers alive, so the table above pins a few anchor points and the converter deliberately stops short of pretending it is a clean one-to-one mapping.

On bouldering. The V-scale and Font grades in the second table are a separate axis and do not convert to route grades at all. A V4 boulder problem is not “the same as” any particular 5.12. Boulder grades measure a handful of moves at maximum difficulty; route grades measure sustained difficulty over a whole pitch, where endurance matters as much as power.