Route grade converter

Font 7A and French 7a are not the same grade

Worth saying before the chart, because it catches everyone: these two are written identically and mean completely different things. Fontainebleau 7A is a bouldering grade — a handful of moves, roughly V6. French 7a is a route grade — a whole pitch, roughly 5.11d. The conventional tell is capitalisation (Font uses 7A, French sport uses 7a), but plenty of gyms and guidebooks ignore it, so read the context instead: if it’s a boulder problem, it’s Font.

The same trap explains why searching “Font to YDS” gives confusing answers. YDS grades routes, Font grades boulders; to cross between the two families you need the bridge further down, not a straight conversion.

The full French ↔ YDS ↔ UIAA chart

One row per rung of difficulty. These three systems all grade a route by its hardest sustained climbing, so unlike the bouldering scales they line up closely — the published tables agree almost the whole way up.

Bouldering to climbing grade conversion

There is no honest one-to-one conversion between a boulder grade and a route grade, because they measure different things. A V-grade describes a few moves at your limit. A route grade describes twenty or thirty moves with pump, rests and clipping in the mix. The usual convention — and the one in the table below — is the route whose hardest single move is about this boulder grade.

Which is exactly why climbing V5 doesn’t mean you’ll send 7a+. Endurance, rest-finding and staying calm above a bolt are separate skills, and strong boulderers routinely fall off routes graded “below” them.

The three systems

YDS (Yosemite Decimal System) is the North American standard. The “5.” prefix is a leftover from a scale where class 5 meant technical roped climbing; everything after the decimal point is the actual grade. From 5.10 upward it splits into a, b, c and d — 5.10a to 5.10d — because the original ladder was never designed to be open-ended.

French sport grades number-plus-letter-plus-optional-plus: 6a, 6a+, 6b … Europe’s default for sport routes, and the notation the hardest routes in the world are quoted in (9a, 9b+). It shares its look with Font bouldering grades, which is the mix-up above.

UIAA uses Roman-ish numerals with plus and minus — 7-, 7, 7+ — and remains common in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, especially on older routes and in alpine guidebooks. Modern hard sport routes there are usually given French grades instead, which is why the UIAA column runs out at the top of the chart.

FAQ

Logging boulders, not routes

A note on what SENDO actually is: a bouldering logger. It speaks V-scale, Font and Japanese kyu/dan, and normalizes between them so your grade pyramid and progress stay comparable across gyms — that converter is here. This route chart exists because climbers cross between disciplines and the notation overlaps confusingly, not because the app tracks routes.