Convert Kilobytes to Megabytes

About converting Kilobytes to Megabytes

Kilobytes (KB) and Megabytes (MB) are both units of digital storage, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Kilobytes figure by 0.001. Ten Kilobytes comes to 0.01 Megabytes, and a hundred works out at 0.1 Megabytes.

Rule of thumb: going from Kilobytes to Megabytes divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 1,000 Kilobytes to make a single Megabyte. If your answer came out bigger, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

What is a Kilobyte?

A kilobyte is 1,000 bytes here, because this site uses the SI meaning of "kilo" — the same thousand as in kilometer, and the same one storage manufacturers print on the box. Computing muddied this by borrowing the prefix for 1,024, the nearest power of two, and Windows still reports storage that way while labelling it "KB". The IEC tried to settle the argument in 1998 by inventing the kibibyte (KiB) for the binary version, so the two could finally be told apart; adoption has been patchy. At this scale the gap is trivial either way.

What is a Megabyte?

A megabyte is a million bytes under the SI prefixes this site uses, though Windows will call 1,048,576 bytes a megabyte; the IEC name for that binary version is the mebibyte (MiB). The best illustration of how confused this all got is the 1.44 MB floppy disk, whose "MB" was neither one nor the other — it meant 1,024,000 bytes, a decimal thousand of binary kilobytes, and essentially nothing else has ever used that unit. Today the megabyte is the natural size of a photo, a song or a document.

To put both in perspective: a kilobyte is a paragraph or two of plain text, while a minute of MP3 audio is roughly a megabyte.

The converter above updates as you type, and the table lists common values for quick reference. Need the opposite direction? Use the Megabytes to Kilobytes converter, or browse all Digital Storage converters.