Understanding Climbing Grades Around the World
A climbing grade is a shorthand for difficulty, but there is no single global system. Instead, climbers navigate a patchwork of national and discipline-specific scales: the French sport grades, the American Yosemite Decimal System, the UIAA scale of the Alps, the V-scale for bouldering, and the Fontainebleau scale born in the forest south of Paris. Each grew from a particular climbing tradition, and understanding how they relate is essential for any climber travelling between regions or reading an international guidebook. Explore the destinations behind each system on the map.
What a Grade Actually Measures
A grade attempts to express the technical and physical difficulty of the hardest move, or the sustained difficulty, of a route or boulder problem. It does not measure danger, length, or commitment directly — those are often expressed by separate ratings. A free-climbing grade assumes the climber uses only hands and feet on the rock, with gear or bolts for protection rather than progress. Crucially, grades are consensus-based: a route's grade reflects the collective opinion of those who have climbed it, and it can shift over time as more ascents refine the verdict. This is why grades feel objective in a guidebook yet are endlessly debated at the crag.
The French Sport System
The French system is the dominant scale for sport climbing worldwide. It runs from around 1 to 9c, with each number subdivided by letters a, b, and c, and refined further by a + sign — so the sequence climbs 6a, 6a+, 6b, 6b+, 6c, 6c+, 7a, and onward. It is an open-ended scale, growing as climbers push the limits; Chris Sharma's Jumbo Love (9b) and Adam Ondra's Silence (9c) extended its top end. Because it is concise and continuous, the French system is the lingua franca of bolted crags from Spain to Thailand.
The Yosemite Decimal System
In the United States, free climbing uses the Yosemite Decimal System (YDS), where the fifth class denotes technical roped climbing. Grades run 5.0 through 5.15, and from 5.10 upward each is split into a, b, c, and d. So 5.12a is harder than 5.11d, and Tommy Caldwell's Dawn Wall pitches reach 5.14d. The YDS also carries protection ratings borrowed from film classifications — R for runout, X for potentially fatal falls — adding a dimension of danger absent from the pure French number.
The UIAA Scale
The UIAA scale, developed by the international mountaineering federation, is still common in Germany, Austria, and the Alps. It uses Roman numerals from I to XII, with + and - modifiers. Roughly, UIAA VII corresponds to French 5c–6a, and the scale climbs from there. It remains the standard in classic alpine guidebooks and in the Saxon Switzerland sandstone region, where local traditions run deep.
Bouldering: V-Scale and Font
Bouldering uses its own scales. The American V-scale, devised by John Sherman, runs from V0 upward with no theoretical limit; the hardest problems reach V17. Europe uses the Fontainebleau scale, which mirrors the French route grades — 6A, 6B, 7A and so on, with the crucial detail that Font 6A is harder than 6a sport because boulder grades concentrate difficulty into a few moves. The two scales are roughly convertible, with V5 near Font 6C+.
Comparing and Converting Grades
Conversion tables exist, but they are approximations. A French 7a sits near YDS 5.11d–5.12a and UIAA VIII+/IX-; a V5 boulder aligns with Font 6C+. Style matters too: a route graded for sustained endurance and one graded for a single desperate crux can share a number yet feel utterly different. Seasoned travellers learn to read the local consensus, treat the first routes of a trip as calibration, and avoid the trap of chasing numbers across systems that were never designed to align.
Explore on the map
Each grading system grew from a particular landscape, from the sandstone of Fontainebleau to the granite of Yosemite. Use the interactive map to explore the regions behind each scale and to plan a trip where you can test your grade against local rock.