Convert electric current between amperes, milliamperes, microamperes, kiloamperes and CGS units.
Electricity • 6 units
All 6 units on the Electric Current Converter are defined against the Ampere (A), 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 A = 1,000 mA. Change either side and every row in the table recalculates with it.
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This page defaults to amperes into milliamperes because that is the boundary where practical electronics actually lives. A 20 mA indicator LED, a 500 mA USB port and a 32 A cooker circuit are each written in whichever unit keeps the number readable, and the factor between them is simply a thousand. Below that, the microampere describes sleep-mode current in a battery-powered design, where the difference between 5 µA and 50 µA is the difference between a coin cell lasting years and lasting months.
The two CGS rows exist for reading older physics literature, and their scales are wildly apart. The abampere, or biot, is exactly 10 A, which makes it look deceptively like a practical unit. The statampere is around 3.34 × 10⁻¹⁰ A — a third of a nanoamp — and appears only in electrostatic-unit treatments. Neither belongs in modern engineering work, but both turn up in mid-century texts and in translated material, where an unconverted figure is wrong by a factor of ten or of ten billion.
One property of current explains most of its measurement conventions: it is identical everywhere along an unbranched conductor. That is why the 4–20 mA loop endures as an industrial signalling standard, since voltage drop over a long cable run cannot corrupt the reading, and why measuring a live current means breaking the circuit to put the meter in series rather than probing across it as you would for voltage. Clamp meters exist to avoid that break, sensing the magnetic field around the conductor instead — at the cost of accuracy at low currents, where the field is faint.
Quick reference — 1 Ampere (A) is equal to:
| Milliampere | mA | 1,000 |
| Microampere | µA | 1,000,000 |
| Kiloampere | kA | 0.001 |
| Abampere (Biot) | abA | 0.1 |
| Statampere | statA | 2,997,924,540 |
6 units of electric current, each a fixed multiple of the A. The table spans 2,997,924,536,843:1, from statA (3.3356e-1 A) to kA (1000 A). 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 A = 1 A1 mA = 0.001 A1 µA = 0.000001 A1 kA = 1000 A1 abA = 10 A1 statA = 3.3356e-1 Awhere:
Assumptions: Factors are exact definitions. Full double precision is carried internally and rounding is applied only for display.
Result25 A = 25000 mA
Current is the rate at which charge flows, and the ampere is one of the seven SI base units — since the 2019 redefinition it is fixed by defining the elementary charge as exactly 1.602176634 × 10⁻¹⁹ coulombs, rather than by the old force-between-two-wires definition.
The practical range is very wide. A CMOS input draws picoamperes, a microcontroller pin tens of milliamperes, a domestic ring circuit tens of amperes, and an arc-welder several hundred. Instrumentation adds its own convention: the 4–20 mA current loop remains the industrial standard for sensor signalling precisely because current is unchanged along a wire, so voltage drop over a long cable run cannot corrupt the reading.