Chilli heat comparison
Before you read a number off this chart
Every chilli here is shown as a band rather than a figure, and the bands overlap. That is not the tool being cautious — it is the finding. A habanero is not 200,000 Scoville units; habaneros are somewhere between roughly 100,000 and 350,000 depending on the cultivar, the season and how thirsty the plant was, and two pods from one plant differ.
So this will not tell you that one chilli is twice as hot as another. Where two ranges overlap, neither is reliably hotter, and a ratio computed from the midpoints would be arithmetic performed on the wrong kind of data.
The ranges
Select what to compare. Every range comes from the profile it belongs to and carries its sources.
| Chilli | Range | Scoville heat units |
|---|---|---|
| Paprika | 0–1,000 | |
| Chilli flakes | 500–100,000 | |
| Chilli powder | 500–100,000 | |
| Ancho | 1,000–2,000 | |
| Kashmiri chilli | 1,000–2,000 | |
| Poblano | 1,000–2,000 | |
| Pasilla | 1,000–4,000 | |
| Piment d'Espelette | 1,500–4,000 | |
| Cascabel | 1,500–4,000 | |
| Gochugaru | 1,500–10,000 | |
| Mulato | 2,500–3,000 | |
| Guajillo | 2,500–5,000 | |
| Jalapeño | 2,500–8,000 | |
| Chipotle | 2,500–10,000 | |
| Serrano | 10,000–23,000 | |
| Aleppo pepper | 10,000–25,000 | |
| Calabrian chilli | 15,000–30,000 | |
| Chile de árbol | 15,000–30,000 | |
| Cayenne pepper | 30,000–50,000 | |
| Bird's eye chilli | 50,000–100,000 | |
| Habanero | 100,000–350,000 | |
| Scotch bonnet | 100,000–350,000 | |
| Ghost pepper | 800,000–1,050,000 | |
| Carolina Reaper | 1,400,000–2,200,000 |
Logarithmic scale, with gridlines at 100, 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 SHU. Scoville spans five orders of magnitude, so a linear axis would render everything below cayenne as a smear against the left edge.
104 of these pairs overlap
Where two ranges overlap, neither is reliably hotter than the other. A particular pod or packet of one may be hotter or milder than a particular one of the other, and no ratio computed from these numbers would mean anything.
- Paprika and Chilli flakes
- Paprika and Chilli powder
- Paprika and Ancho
- Paprika and Kashmiri chilli
- Paprika and Poblano
- Paprika and Pasilla
- Chilli flakes and Chilli powder
- Chilli flakes and Ancho
…and 96 more.
Why each range is as wide as it is
Paprikaa milled or blended product, not a variety
The range covers sweet through to hot paprika and is genuinely wide, because "paprika" is a family of products rather than one. Sweet grades sit at the very bottom of the scale; picante and erős grades reach materially higher. A single figure for paprika would be meaningless.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Chilli flakesa milled or blended product, not a variety
As wide a range as chilli powder, and for the same reason: the category names a cut rather than a variety. Named formats are far narrower — Aleppo and pul biber sit near the bottom, bird-eye flakes near the top — which is the argument for buying a named one.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Chilli powdera milled or blended product, not a variety
An honest range rather than a figure, and a very wide one. Generic chilli powder spans from mild Kashmiri types near the bottom to hot Indian and bird-eye types near the top, and the packet almost never says which you have bought. Any recipe quantity for "chilli powder" is therefore an estimate, and the only safe method is to add half, taste, and add the rest.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Ancho
Genuinely mild — around a jalapeño at the top of its range and often below it. The band is narrow because poblano is a defined cultivar rather than a loose group, though growing conditions still move it and the occasional pod is noticeably hotter than the rest of the bag.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Kashmiri chilli
Mild — around a jalapeño or below. The band is stated for the style rather than for a defined cultivar, because most product sold under the name is not a single variety, and a packet may be blended. Anyone treating this figure as a guarantee for a specific bag is over-reading it.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Poblano
Mild, and more variable than the band suggests. Poblanos are known for the occasional pod running considerably hotter than its neighbours on the same plant, which is why a recipe cannot assume a stuffed poblano will be gentle.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Pasilla
Mild — around or below jalapeño, and usually experienced as milder still because it is used soaked and blended in quantity. Individual pods vary as they do across all dried chillies.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Piment d'Espelette
Around jalapeño territory on published figures and experienced as milder, because it is used as a fine dusting rather than eaten whole. Individual batches vary with the season, which the appellation controls for but cannot eliminate.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Cascabel
Mild to moderate, broadly in the same band as guajillo and Espelette. Published figures vary and individual pods differ; the seeds are a larger share of this chilli than of most, so a batch used with seeds in runs hotter.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Gochugarua milled or blended product, not a variety
A wide band, because gochugaru is a category rather than a cultivar and Korean packets are labelled by heat grade. It sits well below crushed red pepper flakes, and the deseeding is a large part of why.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Mulato
Mild, in the same band as ancho and around the lower end of jalapeño. These chillies are used by the handful precisely because the heat does not accumulate.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Guajillo
Roughly jalapeño territory and usually experienced as milder, because guajillo is used soaked and strained in quantity rather than eaten whole. Individual pods vary and a bag adulterated with puya will run considerably hotter, which is the commonest reason a batch surprises somebody.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Jalapeño
A genuinely narrow range by chilli standards, which is why jalapeño works as a reference point on heat charts. Individual fruit still varies, and removing the placental tissue lowers it considerably.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Chipotle
Broadly the parent jalapeño range, since drying concentrates by weight but does not create capsaicin. It reads hotter than a fresh jalapeño because the water has gone, not because the chilli has changed.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Serrano
A wide range, and the width is the fact rather than an imprecision to be tidied away. Growing conditions, water stress and ripeness all move it, and fruits from a single plant differ noticeably.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Aleppo pepper
A range for the whole fruit, and the finished flake is generally milder because of the salt and oil diluting it and because the seeds are removed. Recorded as a range because this is a landrace group rather than a defined cultivar, and heat varies with season and with how much seed is left in.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Calabrian chilli
Published figures for Calabrian landraces sit broadly in cayenne territory and vary widely between varieties and seasons, which is a real spread rather than measurement noise — there is no appellation narrowing the material, so a jar is less predictable than a protected product would be.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Chile de árbol
Broadly cayenne territory, and several times hotter than the guajillo it is confused with. Batches vary considerably and no grading captures it, so a sauce is built by adding pods and tasting rather than by counting them.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Cayenne pepper
The conventional range for the cayenne type. Retail product labelled "cayenne pepper" is not always made from cayenne cultivars and can sit outside this range, so the figure describes the type rather than guaranteeing the packet.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Bird's eye chilli
Roughly ten to twenty times a jalapeño and well below the superhots. The range is wide partly for the usual growing-condition reasons and partly because the name covers several peppers, so a bag bought under it is genuinely less predictable than one bought as serrano or habanero.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Habanero
A wide band, and honestly so. Habanero is a cultivar group rather than a single variety, and growing conditions move heat substantially within any one of them — water stress in particular raises capsaicin. Individual pods from one plant vary. A single figure for habanero would be false precision.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Scotch bonnet
Effectively the same band as habanero, and stated as such rather than differentiated for the sake of it. Both are Capsicum chinense cultivar groups, both vary widely with cultivar and growing conditions, and the ranges overlap almost completely. Anyone claiming a reliable heat difference between the two is claiming more than the evidence supports.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Ghost pepper
The width of this range is the fact, not an imprecision to be tidied. Growing conditions move the figure by roughly a factor of two, and the widely quoted "over one million" is a maximum recorded under favourable conditions rather than a typical value. Any single number for this pepper is a claim about one crop.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
Carolina Reaper
Averages around 1.6 million with individual assayed pods reported well above 2 million. Both ends of this range are laboratory measurements of samples: growing conditions move the figure substantially, pods from one plant differ, and no packet in a shop has been assayed.
Note on Capsicums; Handbook of Herbs and Spices
What Scoville actually measures
The original 1912 method was a taste test: an extract was diluted with sugar water until a panel could no longer detect heat, and the dilution factor became the score. It measured a panel’s perception, so it varied with who was tasting and how recently they had tasted something else.
Modern figures come from chromatography — capsaicinoids are measured directly and converted to Scoville units by a fixed factor. That removed the panel and not the variation, because the variation was never mostly in the measurement. It is in the fruit.
Why the ranges overlap
Three separate reasons, and they compound.
Some of these are not varieties. Chilli powder and chilli flakes are made from whatever was available and declare nothing, which is why their bands span two orders of magnitude and overlap almost everything else on the chart. Paprika and gochugaru are processed products too, though from material selected far more narrowly.
Cultivar groups are not single plants. Habanero names a group containing everything from ordinary orange habaneros to Red Savina, which was once the hottest chilli on record. A range that covers the group has to be wide.
Growing conditions move capsaicin. Water stress raises it particularly, so the same cultivar in the same field differs between a wet season and a dry one — and individual pods on one plant differ from each other.
What this cannot tell you
It cannot tell you how hot the jar in your cupboard is. Capsaicin does not fade the way aroma does, so an old chilli powder stays roughly as hot while losing everything that made it worth buying — but which chilli went into it, and at what heat, is not something the packet usually says.
It also says nothing about how hot a dish will be, which depends on quantity, on the fat carrying the capsaicin, and on what else is in the pot. Sugar and dairy blunt the perception; there is no conversion from a Scoville figure to a mouthful of food.
And it covers Scoville only. Sichuan pepper is deliberately absent: its tingling numbness comes from sanshools acting on touch receptors rather than from capsaicinoids acting on the heat receptor, so placing it on this chart would be a category error rather than an approximation.
Questions this page answers
- chilli heat scale comparison
- scoville scale chart
- compare chilli heat
- how hot is a jalapeno compared to cayenne