Chess rating converter

You look up which published cohort your number sits in, then read the matching band on the other scale as a range. There is no official formula that turns a Lichess or Chess.com rating into a FIDE rating.

This page uses one dated mapping: the ChessDojo Universal Rating Converter table, published in September 2024. We read its rows on 2026-08-12, and they have not been re-read since, so treat the bands as a 2024 sample from chessdojo.club/learn/ratings. The companion write-up, dated 24 September 2024, says the comparison is Chess.com Rapid and Lichess Classical against over-the-board lists, and that blitz ratings do not apply.

They measure different player pools with different rating systems. FIDE uses Elo on over-the-board events. Lichess uses Glicko-2 and starts a new account at 1500 plus or minus 1000. Chess.com runs its own Glicko system for its own players.

Lichess states the comparison problem in its own FAQ: ratings are relative inside one pool, and it is best not to treat them as absolute numbers against FIDE or USCF. Wikipedia's Elo article makes the same point about organisations that each run their own scale. Time control splits the pools again. FIDE keeps separate standard, rapid, and blitz lists. An online rapid number is not a classical over-the-board number even before the formula differs.

Rating floors add another gap. FIDE's regulations effective from 1 March 2024 publish a rating only at 1400 or higher and list anyone who drops below 1400 as unrated (Handbook B.02, 7.1.2 and 7.2.1). Online sites show numbers below 1400 that have no FIDE counterpart. The floor is a publication rule. It says nothing about whether a player's first FIDE rating will be higher or lower than an online one.

Chess.com Rapid, Lichess Classical, FIDE standard, and USCF regular. That is the comparison the September 2024 ChessDojo table prints. A blitz or bullet number from either site is a different pool and is not converted here.

The same write-up notes that Chess.com has no classical control, so the table compares 10+0-class rapid games with 90+30-class over-the-board games. Treat that as part of the uncertainty, not as a defect you can correct by typing a blitz rating into the Rapid box.

Because the sourced mapping is a table of bands, and players who share one number still scatter on the other scale. A single converted rating would be false precision.

The converter reports the whole destination band for the cohort your number falls in. NoseKnowsAll, writing for ChessDojo on 24 September 2024, also flags two weak zones: over-the-board estimates are a poor match below about 1250 Lichess Classical or 550 Chess.com Rapid, and the top of the online pools thins out above about 2275 Chess.com Rapid or 2310 Lichess Classical. Those figures are that author's stated limits, not a new sample from this site.

Excerpt only, six rows of the published table, global sample, vintage September 2024, rows read 2026-08-12. The live converter above reads every printed row, including the blank FIDE cells at the low end. A blank cell means this dataset has no estimate for that row. It is not a zero, and it does not mean the player cannot earn a FIDE rating.

USCF regular is a column in the September 2024 ChessDojo table, so it is in this converter as an estimate range. There is no AICF column here. Use the FIDE box for a FIDE rating, which you can look up on ratings.fide.com.

The USCF numbers on this page come only from the ChessDojo table. They are that study's empirical band, not a US Chess official formula. If you need an exact US Chess figure, read it from a current US Chess source.

The AICF article Rating calculation for an Unrated Player in Swiss Tournaments walks through FIDE initial-rating arithmetic for Indian Swiss events. How a player in India gets that FIDE number is on how to get a FIDE rating in India.

It does not compute expected score, rating change after a result, or tournament performance rating. Those are different jobs, and they already have their own tools.

After a game, use the Elo rating calculator for expected score and K-factor change. After an event, the performance rating calculator estimates what rating you played like against that field. To keep a dated series for one student, use the chess rating tracker. Pick one system and stay on it when you chart progress. Sibling helpers sit with all free chess tools.