Lichess vs Chess.com vs FIDE:
the actual rating conversion

Every week, someone asks the same question on r/chess: "I'm 1900 on lichess, what would that be on chess.com?" And every week the same folklore comes back: subtract 400. No wait, subtract 200. They converge above 2000.

Lichess's own FAQ politely refuses to play: "It is best not to think of ratings as absolute numbers, or compare them against other organisations." Which is careful and responsible, and also testable. If ratings across sites really couldn't be compared, then players who hold accounts on both would scatter like static. They don't. I checked.

I build a bullet-chess analytics tool, so I already spend a lot of time inside both platforms' APIs. So I ran a simple experiment: find every player who plays 1+0 bullet on both lichess and chess.com under the same username, line up their two ratings, and see what the relationship really looks like. 5,495 matched players later, here's the answer.

The rest of this post shows the evidence behind each of those, and there's a converter near the end you can type your own rating into.

How I matched the players

The idea is simple. You can't just compare the two sites' overall rating charts, because the crowds are different sizes and skill levels. But if the same person has an account on both sites, their two ratings are a matched pair: one brain, one time control, scored by two systems. Collect enough of those people and the relationship falls right out.

So I gathered 290,391 usernames, from both sites' public player lists and from live lichess bullet arenas, including the rating-capped low ones so the sample isn't all masters. Then I checked which existed on both platforms and pulled everyone's ratings. After keeping only players with enough recent, settled games on each side, 1,871 had a solid bullet rating on both. One rule I set before looking at anything: never filter on whether the two ratings agree. That would just hand back whatever answer I walked in assuming.

They track each other closely

Every dot is one player: their lichess bullet rating across the bottom, their chess.com bullet up the side. The cloud leans hard along a line, and that line is the whole story: stronger on one site almost always means stronger on the other. For the stats-minded, the rank correlation is 0.93 out of a possible 1.0. And it's not a quirk of my sample: I re-checked it on titled players only, on the strictest activity filters, on only recently-active players, and on a completely separate batch of players. The line barely moved.

But notice how thick the cloud is, not just which way it leans. At any one lichess rating, the chess.com ratings still spread out a lot, a typical gap of about 280 points either side of the line. Two players both sitting at 1900 on lichess can be 1600 and 2050 on chess.com. So the average is real and useful, but your own number is still your own.

The gap isn't a fixed number

This chart shows how much lower the typical chess.com rating is at each lichess level. "Subtract 400" isn't crazy: around 1400–1500 on lichess, the average player really is about 431 points lower on chess.com. The catch is that people treat 400 as a constant, and it isn't. The gap holds near −400 through about 2000, then falls off a cliff: by the master range it's down around −80 and nearly flat. Subtract a flat 400 from a 2500 and you'll be off by hundreds.

The dashed line is a bonus finding I haven't seen measured before: the gap depends on the time control. Run the same analysis on these players' blitz ratings and the gap shrinks faster, and actually crosses zero around 2,100. Above that, strong players are rated higher on chess.com blitz than on lichess blitz. Bullet never crosses. So a conversion rule borrowed from blitz (which is what most online tables secretly are) will steer you wrong for bullet.

Why would the two crowds differ like that? My best guess, and I'll label it a guess: lichess's bullet scene skews hardcore, with more players who mainly play 1+0, while chess.com's huge casual crowd lands more in blitz and rapid. A rating scale stretches to fit whoever's in the pool. The charts show what the mapping is. Why it looks like that is a post for another day.

If you want a single formula

For people who want one equation, here it is. (I fit it with a method called Deming regression instead of a plain best-fit line, because both ratings are noisy, not just one, so a plain line would come out too shallow. A nice side effect is that it reverses cleanly, so converting back and forth returns your original number.)

Same line, both directions. Typical miss ±280 points, and it bends at the extremes. Near the ends, trust the converter's curve below.

The slope is the part worth noticing: a chess.com bullet point is worth about 0.73 lichess points. Chess.com's scale is simply more spread out, so the same two players sit farther apart in chess.com numbers than in lichess numbers. That's the real reason no "add X" rule can work. You can't fix a stretched scale by sliding it over.

And this is how far off the formula can be for one person. It's dead-on for the crowd, but any single player can land about 280 points to either side, because real life is messy: someone with 10,000 games on one site and 60 on the other, or a rusty account they abandoned two years ago. So use the number as a best guess with a wide margin, not a verdict. If someone tells you "1900 lichess is 1620 chess.com," they're describing the average stranger, not you.

FIDE: your over-the-board rating

Both sites let players list a FIDE (over-the-board) rating on their profile. It's self-reported, so treat it gently. It holds up better than you'd expect though: 581 players list a FIDE number on both sites independently, and the two claims usually match within a handful of points. People are honest about this one.

Two takeaways. First, online bullet flatters you, and more so the higher you climb. Around 1700 lichess bullet, players' FIDE is about the same number. By 2750 it's roughly 400 lower, and near the very top it's 600 lower. Fast online chess and slow board chess reward different skills, and the gap between them widens with strength.

Second, the big caveat: this only covers strong players. Almost nobody below about 1650 online bothers to list a FIDE rating, so there's simply no data down there, and the converter won't pretend otherwise. And the people who do list one are a particular crowd: serious tournament players who treat bullet as a side dish. So even where there is data, read it as "typical for tournament regulars," not "your number if you've never played over the board." The fit here is also looser than the site-to-site one, which makes sense. A website and a tournament hall are further apart than two websites.

The converter

Here are those curves as a tool. Type in a bullet rating and it gives you the typical player's rating on the other side, plus the range most players actually land in. The ranges are wide on purpose. That's the real spread, not a rounding choice.

Each result is the typical matched player at that level; the range is where the middle half land. FIDE appears only where enough players report one.

So why does lichess say "don't compare"?

Because for one individual, they have a point, and it's the wide spread from a few sections ago. The two sites start new accounts differently (lichess drops everyone at 1500; chess.com asks you to pick your own level), pair you against different opponents, and settle in at different speeds. A rating only means something relative to the crowd you earned it against, and the two crowds aren't the same. That's also why the gap curve bends instead of running flat.

So both things can be true. There's no formula that nails your rating exactly, and anyone selling you one without a margin is overselling. But there is a clear, measurable average that tells you what a typical player at your level holds on the other site. Lichess's warning keeps you from over-trusting the first. This data gives you the second.

One honest caveat: this is a snapshot. Both crowds drift over time (chess.com's pandemic-era boom shifted its scale, which is exactly why old conversion charts go stale). This page says July 2026 on it. If you're reading it years later, the numbers have probably moved and someone should re-run the scan.