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Electric charge

Milliampere-hours to ampere-hours

1 mAh = 0.001 Ah

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One milliampere-hour is exactly 0.001 ampere-hours. Both measure electric charge, and both share a limitation worth stating immediately: neither tells you how much energy a battery holds without the voltage.

About the units

An ampere-hour is the charge transferred by a current of one ampere flowing for one hour. It is a charge, not an energy — to get energy you multiply by the voltage, which is why watt-hours rather than ampere-hours appear in airline battery regulations. The milliampere-hour became the consumer standard because phone and laptop cells fall naturally in the range of a few thousand of them. A 5,000 mAh power bank at 3.7 V holds 18.5 Wh; the same 5,000 mAh at 12 V would hold three times as much, and the label on the box does not distinguish them.

The exact factor

The factor is exactly 1,000. Reference values: an AA alkaline cell is about 2,500 mAh at 1.5 V; a smartphone battery 4,000 to 5,000 mAh at 3.85 V; a laptop battery 5,000 to 8,000 mAh at 11.1 V; and an electric car pack 100 to 200 Ah at 350 to 800 V. The last figure is why electric vehicles are specified in kilowatt-hours instead — at pack level the ampere-hour figure alone is meaningless without the system voltage.

Where you meet this conversion

Battery specification and comparison across every kind of device. Power bank marketing uses milliampere-hours because the numbers are large and impressive, which is also why comparing two power banks by mAh alone is unreliable: the internal cell voltage and the conversion losses in the USB output both matter. Drone and radio-control battery packs are labelled in mAh together with a cell count that gives the voltage. Battery testers and chargers report capacity in the same unit.

Common values

Value (mAh) Converted (Ah)
1 0.001
2 0.002
5 0.005
10 0.01
25 0.025
50 0.05
100 0.1
500 0.5
1 000 1

Values are rounded for reading. The converter above keeps full precision.

The other way around

1 Ah = 1 000 mAh

Ampere-hours to milliampere-hours multiplies by 1,000. The habit worth building: whenever you see a mAh figure, look for the voltage on the same label — the product of the two is the number that actually tells you something.

Value (Ah) Converted (mAh)
1 1 000
2 2 000
5 5 000
10 10 000
25 25 000
50 50 000
100 100 000
500 500 000
1 000 1 000 000

Related conversions

All electric charge conversions