Pounds and Ounces Calculator

Pounds and ounces trip people up for one reason: the carry happens at 16, not 10. Add 9 lb 12 oz to 5 lb 8 oz and you cannot just stack the columns the way you would with decimals. The ounces come to 20, which is 1 lb 4 oz, so the real answer is 15 lb 4 oz, not 14 lb 20 oz. This calculator handles that carry for you, in both directions, so subtraction with borrowing works too.

There are 16 ounces in a pound. That is the avoirdupois ounce, the everyday one used for body weight, food, and parcels. It is not the troy ounce used for gold and silver (that one is heavier, and there are only about 14.58 of them in a pound), so do not use this for precious metals.

Where does it come up? New parents compare weekly weigh-ins, where a baby might gain 7 oz one week and 1 lb 2 oz the next. Anglers add up a stringer of fish. People mailing parcels total several items to stay under a shipping tier. Cooks scaling a recipe move between ounces and pounds. In every case the awkward part is the same: regrouping at 16.

The tool also converts the result into total ounces, decimal pounds, kilograms, and grams, since one pound is 453.592 grams and one ounce is 28.3495 grams. Enter both weights, pick add or subtract, and read the answer in whichever unit you need.