Lichess vs Chess.com vs FIDE: How Ratings Convert

A 1200 on Chess.com, a 1555 on Lichess and a 1415 USCF rating sit on the same row of the table below: typical ratings for players of the same strength. The numbers differ because each one comes from a separate pool of players with its own starting point and its own rating formula, and an online rating is only comparable to other ratings in the same pool and time control. This page puts the three side by side using one public dataset, and the converter below reads straight from it.

ChessDir is run by a 2250 Lichess player, which is also a reminder of the problem: that number means little to a FIDE arbiter until it is translated.

Where the numbers come from

Everything on this page comes from the ChessGoals rating comparison, updated July 2026 and retrieved for this guide on 2026-10-06. ChessGoals collects rating surveys from players active on several platforms and publishes the result as a table anchored on Chess.com blitz: each row is a Chess.com blitz rating and the ratings that players at that level typically hold elsewhere. Its published samples range from about 10,000 Chess.com rapid profiles down to 240 active Lichess classical players, so the Lichess classical column is the least reliable one. ChessDir has not run its own survey; no number here is ours.

Convert a rating

Pick the platform and time control the rating comes from. A rating that is a row of the table returns that row unchanged. A rating between two rows is interpolated in a straight line between those two rows, and the published values on either side are shown next to the estimate. A rating above or below the table is reported as outside the published range: nothing is extrapolated, and a cell the dataset leaves empty stays empty.

What the table says

• Lichess runs high, but less so as players improve. The Lichess blitz figure is 490 points above Chess.com blitz at 800, 355 points above at 1200, 185 at 1700, and the two meet around 2200. At 2400 the Lichess number is 60 points lower.
• FIDE compresses the top and the bottom. 1800 Chess.com blitz maps to 1865 FIDE, but 2100 maps only to 2020, and the lowest published FIDE value is 1660. A beginner online has no FIDE equivalent in this data at all.
• Rapid is flatter than blitz. On Chess.com, 800 blitz sits next to 1085 rapid while 2200 blitz sits next to 2110 rapid: weaker players rate well above their blitz number in rapid, stronger players slightly below it.
• Spreads are wide. ChessGoals publishes, for each column, the window around the row value that holds roughly half of active players: ±75 for FIDE, ±120 for USCF, ±135 for Chess.com bullet. The other half falls outside it. Treat any single converted number as the middle of a range, not a verdict.

The full conversion table

How to use a converted rating

A conversion is useful for two decisions: which section of an over-the-board tournament to enter, and what to expect from a first rated event. For both, read the converted number as a starting estimate, then let a few rated games replace it. To look up the real FIDE rating and history of an opponent or a section, a tool such as Chess Second shows any rated player's history instead of an estimate.

For choosing between the two online platforms on play quality, price and training tools rather than numbers, see Chess.com vs Lichess.

Puzzle ratings are a different scale

Puzzle ratings on Lichess and Chess.com are separate pools from game ratings and are not in the ChessGoals table, so this page does not convert them. For what a puzzle rating does and does not measure, see ChessTactics' guide to chess puzzle ratings explained (disclosure: ChessTactics is built by ChessDir's editor).