Convert capacitance between farads, microfarads, nanofarads and picofarads.
Electricity • 7 units
All 7 units on the Capacitance Converter are defined against the Farad (F), so each result is one conversion factor away from a single reference rather than the end of a chain of roundings.
The conversion this page is most often opened for is ready before you type anything: 1 µF = 1,000 nF. Change either side and every row in the table recalculates with it.
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The default pairing on this page — microfarads to nanofarads — is a shift of three decimal places, so 4.7 µF is 4,700 nF and 0.022 µF is 22 nF. Stepping down again to picofarads shifts three more: that same 4.7 µF part is 4,700,000 pF. The ladder is worth internalising, because catalogue search fields, schematic symbols and bills of material rarely agree on which of the three scales to use, and a value that looks impossible is usually the same number expressed a thousand-fold away.
Capacitor values are not arbitrary, which makes a mistyped prefix easier to spot. Standard parts follow the E-series of preferred numbers, so 1.0, 2.2, 4.7 and 10 dominate the catalogue while 5.0 barely exists. Against that grid the common application values stand out: roughly 100 nF beside a logic chip for decoupling, tens to thousands of microfarads for bulk smoothing on a power rail, and 10–100 pF in timing and radio-frequency work. The two CGS rows sit far outside that range. The abfarad is 10⁹ F, a size no component approaches, while the statfarad is about 1.113 pF — small enough to look like a real part value, and therefore the more dangerous of the two to copy without checking.
Converting the units precisely does not make the capacitor precise. Class-2 ceramic dielectrics — X7R, X5R and above all Y5V — lose capacitance as DC bias is applied across them, and the loss is large rather than marginal: a 10 µF X5R part in a compact package can deliver well under half its marked value at its rated voltage, before tolerance and temperature drift are counted. Class-1 dielectrics such as C0G/NP0 hold their value but are only manufactured at small capacitances. Where a circuit depends on the farads actually present rather than the farads printed on the part, the manufacturer's bias-derating curve decides the answer, and no unit conversion can recover it.
Quick reference — 1 Microfarad (µF) is equal to:
| Farad | F | 0.000001 |
| Millifarad | mF | 0.001 |
| Nanofarad | nF | 1,000 |
| Picofarad | pF | 1,000,000 |
| Abfarad | abF | 1.000000e-15 |
| Statfarad | statF | 898,755.224000 |
7 units of capacitance, each a fixed multiple of the F. The table spans 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000:1, from pF (1.0000e-12 F) to abF (1000000000 F). Conversion is one multiplication into the base unit and one division out of it, with no lookup table and no approximation.
value_to = value_from × (factor_from ÷ factor_to)1 F = 1 F1 mF = 0.001 F1 µF = 0.000001 F1 nF = 0.000000001 F1 pF = 1.0000e-12 F1 abF = 1000000000 F1 statF = 1.1126e-12 Fwhere:
Assumptions: Factors are exact definitions. Full double precision is carried internally and rounding is applied only for display.
Result25 µF = 25000 nF
Capacitance is charge stored per volt applied, and the farad (F) is defined as one coulomb per volt. The farad is a wildly impractical size: a one-farad capacitor of traditional construction would be enormous, so real components are marked in microfarads (10⁻⁶), nanofarads (10⁻⁹) and picofarads (10⁻¹²).
That is why this converter exists. Component markings move between the three scales without warning — 100 nF, 0.1 µF and 104 in the three-digit code are all the same part — and the picofarad end matters most, because stray capacitance between adjacent circuit-board tracks is a few pF and is enough to matter at radio frequencies. Supercapacitors have since made whole farads ordinary, which makes reading the prefix carefully more important, not less.