Bars to PSI Converter

A door-jamb sticker or owner's manual written in bar is the most common reason to need this page, usually with a forecourt air line or hand gauge that only reads psi. Convert each axle separately:

Most dial and digital gauges step in half or whole psi, so round to the nearest step your gauge can show. Rounding 36.2594 up to 36.5 adds 0.24 psi, which is under 0.02 bar, far below what a hand gauge can resolve.

The converter uses 1 bar = 14.5038 psi. Multiplying by 14.5 is only 0.026% low, so for anything you can measure with a gauge it is effectively exact. Break it into easy pieces:

1. Take the bar figure times 10: 2.4 × 10 = 24.
2. Add it times 4: 2.4 × 4 = 9.6.
3. Add half of it: 2.4 × 0.5 = 1.2.
4. Total: 24 + 9.6 + 1.2 = 34.8 psi, against 34.8091 from the converter.

Rounding up to ×15 is tempting but 3.4% high. At 2.4 bar it gives 36 psi, more than a full psi over the target.

Workshop compressors, pressure washers and coffee machines often carry a bar rating while the hose fittings or a second gauge read psi. An 8 bar compressor is 116.03 psi; a 10 bar rating is 145.04 psi.

Nearly every gauge you will meet on these machines, and every tyre gauge, reads gauge pressure: how far the pressure sits above the surrounding air. That is why a gauge on an open hose reads zero. Some technical sheets mark this as barg or psig, and pressure measured from a perfect vacuum as bara or psia. This page changes the unit, not the reference point, so a gauge figure in bar comes out as a gauge figure in psi.

Either decimal separator works. 2,5 and 2.5 both convert to 36.2594 psi, so you can copy a figure straight from a European manual. The one case to know: a comma followed by exactly three digits, as in 1,500, is read as a thousands separator, so that entry means 1500 bar, not 1.5.

Results under 100 psi show four decimals and larger ones show two, which is more precision than any placard carries. A placard given to one decimal of bar is itself only exact to about ±0.05 bar, roughly ±0.73 psi.