Font to V Scale: The Full Conversion Chart, 6A to 9A

The first time I climbed in Europe I stood under a 6A for eleven minutes doing arithmetic. I'd been climbing V4 at home for about a year, I had a guidebook in one hand, and I could not for the life of me work out whether the thing above me was going to be a warm-up or a humiliation. It was a humiliation. Not because the conversion was wrong — 6A really is about V3 — but because nobody had told me that the number is the easy part, and the rock is the hard part. This page is the chart I wish I'd had, plus the four paragraphs of context that make the chart safe to use.

The 10-second answer

To convert Font to V scale: 6A is V3, 7A is V6, 8A is V11. Anchor on those three and you can reconstruct the rest of the ladder in your head. Below 6A the Font scale uses bare numbers (4, 5, 5+) and covers V0 to V2. From 6A up it adds letters and pluses, and each step is worth roughly one V number. From 7A upward the V-scale stretches out, so every Font grade and every plus gets its own V number: 7A+ is V7, 7B is V8, 7C is V9.

Two warnings before the chart. First, no governing body publishes this conversion — every table you find, including this one, is consensus rather than law. Second, Fontainebleau grades are famously stingy, so an outdoor Font grade will usually feel harder than the V-number it maps to, especially if your V-numbers come from a gym.

The full Font to V scale conversion chart

The middle column is the conversion most guidebooks and most climbers use. The right column is what you'll also see quoted, because the boundaries genuinely are contested.

Font grade	V grade	Also seen as
3	V0	Below V0 / VB
4	V0	—
4+	V1	V0
5	V1	V2
5+	V2	V1
6A	V3	V2
6A+	V3	V4
6B	V4	—
6B+	V4	V5
6C	V5	—
6C+	V5	V6
7A	V6	—
7A+	V7	—
7B	V8	—
7B+	V8	V9
7C	V9	—
7C+	V10	—
8A	V11	—
8A+	V12	—
8B	V13	—
8B+	V14	—
8C	V15	—
8C+	V16	—
9A	V17	—

If you'd rather not scroll a table every time, we built a two-way tool that does this instantly in both directions: the CRACX grade converter. It's free, it doesn't ask for an email, and it's the page most people end up bookmarking.

Why the two scales don't line up cleanly

The Font scale grew out of Fontainebleau, the sandstone forest south of Paris, over roughly a century. The V-scale is younger and American — John Sherman put it together at Hueco Tanks in the 1980s, which is why it was called the Hueco scale first. They were built by different people, on different rock, to answer slightly different questions.

Font grades tend to describe the whole problem: the friction, the body position, the way the top-out punishes you for being tired. The V-scale leans harder on the crux — the single hardest move. So a long, sustained, slopey problem often gets a stiffer number in Font than its V conversion suggests, and a short, powerful, one-move problem often converts the other way.

There's a third distortion on top of that, and it's the one that gets Americans in trouble: gym grades. Most US gyms set soft, for good commercial reasons. If your V4 was earned indoors, treat your outdoor conversion as one grade lower until proven otherwise. We went into why gyms do this in bouldering grades explained.

6A in V grade

6A is V3. This is the grade where the Font scale starts using letters at all, and it's the first grade that assumes you know how to use your feet. In the forest a 6A will typically ask for a real slab move or a sloper you have to trust. Americans arriving from a gym V4 habit routinely bounce off 6A on day one — that isn't the chart lying, it's sandstone.

6A+ is V3, sometimes called V4. The plus in Font is a genuine half-step, and the V-scale has no room for it, which is where most of the chart's ambiguity comes from.

6B to V grade

6B is V4. If there's a single grade that represents "competent recreational boulderer" on both continents, it's this one. 6B+ is V4, occasionally quoted as V5.

6B is also the grade where the two scales start to diverge by style rather than by difficulty. A 6B in Font is often a technical, low-percentage sequence. A V4 in an American gym is often three big pulls on good holds. Same number on the chart, very different afternoon.

6C in V grade

6C is V5. 6C+ is V5, sometimes V6 — this is the single fuzziest boundary on the whole chart, because it sits right where the Font scale's half-steps and the V-scale's whole numbers fall out of sync.

Practically: if a guidebook says 6C+ and you climb V5 comfortably, expect a fight rather than a warm-up.

7A boulder to V

7A is V6. This is the famous one — the grade that functions as a career milestone in Europe the way V6 or V7 does in the States. It's the number people train for years to touch, and the one you'll see written on more T-shirts than any other.

7A+ is V7. From here upward the mapping gets cleaner, not messier: the V-scale spreads out enough that each Font step gets its own integer.

7B and 7C to V scale

7B is V8. 7B+ is V8, often quoted as V9. 7C is V9. 7C+ is V10.

This band is where climbing stops being something you fit around a job for most people. The conversions here are more stable than the lower ones, simply because far fewer problems exist and the community that climbs them is small enough to argue itself into consensus.

8A in V grade

8A is V11. 8A+ is V12. 8A is the second great milestone number in the Font system, and the point at which a boulder problem becomes a documented thing with a name, a video, and an opinion attached.

8B and 8C to V scale

8B is V13. 8B+ is V14. 8C is V15. 8C+ is V16.

At this end of the scale the conversion is essentially exact, because the same few dozen climbers are establishing and repeating problems in both systems and they talk to each other. 9A is V17, and as of now that band contains a handful of problems worldwide.

Going the other way: V to Font

Reverse the chart and the three anchors still hold: V3 is 6A, V6 is 7A, V11 is 8A. The most-searched conversions in the middle: V4 is 6B, V5 is 6C, V7 is 7A+, V8 is 7B, V9 is 7C, V10 is 7C+.

One asymmetry worth knowing. Converting Font to V is usually about planning a trip — you're reading a European guidebook and want to know what to get on. Converting V to Font is usually about ego — you want to know what your number is worth abroad. The first one is useful. The second one will make you feel worse than you expected, because of the gym-softness problem above.

Going the other way — a V-grade and you want the Font number — is handled grade by grade on the V scale to Font converter. If the question behind the question is how hard a grade actually is, that is what every V-grade feels like.

How to actually use this when you travel

The chart is a planning tool, not a scoreboard. Use it to pick which sector of a guidebook to walk to, then throw it away and climb what looks good. Every climber I know who had a great first trip to Font did the same thing: spent day one on things two grades below their conversion, learning what the rock wanted, and spent the rest of the week climbing better than they do at home.

If you're at the start of that curve, our V0 to V5 progression timeline covers what the lower bands actually take in time, and gym to crag covers the first outdoor day specifically.

What ends up in your bag either way

Grades change across the Atlantic. The kit doesn't. Outdoor sandstone means brushing — Font's holds are polished by a century of traffic and a dirty sloper is a different grade entirely — and it means carrying chalk that survives a walk-in without redecorating your bag.

If you're still deciding between formats, chalk bag vs chalk bucket lays out which one suits which kind of session.