The Scoville Scale
27 peppers on one logarithmic axis, each a measured range rather than an invented single number. Click any pepper to compare the rest against it.
Bars span each pepper’s reported range. The right-hand column shows heat relative to Jalapeño, or its own midpoint in SHU when it is the one selected. Showing 27 of 27.
Jalapeño
C. annuumtypical range2,500 – 8,000 SHU
The reference point most people actually have a memory of, which is why this tool compares against it.
Why every pepper here is a range
Most Scoville charts publish one tidy number per pepper, and those numbers get copied between sites until nobody can say where they came from. Capsaicin is not a fixed property of a variety — it moves with cultivar, soil, water stress and ripeness, routinely by a factor of two within the same plant type. A single number implies a precision that does not exist. Each entry above is tagged typical range for a commonly reported commercial spread, or verified record for a specific measured sample. A record is not what you should expect from a pod you grow yourself.
Why the axis is logarithmic
Pepper X tops out near 2,693,000 SHU. A jalapeño averages about 5,250. On a normal linear axis the jalapeño occupies two tenths of one percent of the chart — a flat line, indistinguishable from a bell pepper at zero. That is why almost every Scoville graphic you have seen is useless for the range people actually cook in. Each labelled step above is a tenfold increase, so the distance from 1K to 10K is the same as from 100K to 1M, and the everyday peppers stay readable next to the superhots.
Where the scale came from
Wilbur Scoville published the test in 1912. An extract of the pepper was diluted in sugar water until a panel of tasters could no longer detect any heat, and the dilution factor became the score. It was subjective by design and depended on whose tongue was on the panel. Modern figures come from high-performance liquid chromatography, which measures capsaicinoid concentration directly. The unit survived the change of method, which is a large part of why older published numbers and newer ones disagree about the same pepper.
Sources
- Guinness World Records — "Hottest chilli pepper" (Pepper X, certified October 2023; Carolina Reaper, 2013).
- Scoville, W. L. (1912), "Note on Capsicums", Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association — the original organoleptic dilution test.
- Modern SHU figures are derived from HPLC capsaicinoid assay rather than taste panels; the two methods do not always agree on historical varieties.
- Typical ranges reflect commonly reported commercial values and vary with cultivar, growing conditions and ripeness.
The habanero sits around 200,000 SHU — roughly forty times a jalapeño. Hot enough to matter, short of the novelty superhots. That is the pepper in the shaker, and nothing else is in there.
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