Pantone to HEX Converter

Pantone to HEX Conversion Chart — 100 Most-Used PMS Colors

This chart covers a hundred PMS colours in one place: the fourteen base inks the Pantone system mixes everything else from, the seven deck blacks, all eleven Cool Grays, four speciality colours people look up by name, and sixty-four numbered colours that keep turning up in brand guidelines. It is a hand-picked selection rather than a popularity ranking, and it is grouped by ink family so you can scan a hue rather than hunt a number.

Two columns go beyond a plain lookup. Nearest CSS colour gives the closest keyword from CSS Color Level 4 with the CIEDE2000 difference beside it, which tells you at a glance whether a shortcut exists — Pantone Yellow 012 C is exactly #FFD700, which is CSS gold to the digit, while Pantone Black C sits ΔE 10.8 from CSS black and is nothing like it.

The two contrast columns are WCAG 2.2 ratios against white and against black, which is the number you actually need when someone hands you a brand colour and asks whether body text can sit on it. Anything at 4.5 or above passes AA for normal text; 3.0 to 4.49 passes only for large text. Pantone Yellow C manages 1.35 against white and 15.56 against black, which is why yellow brands always set their type in black.

Coated vs Uncoated — Why the Same PMS Number Has Two Different HEX Codes

A PMS number on its own is incomplete. Pantone 186 is not a colour; Pantone 186 C and Pantone 186 U are. The suffix names the paper the ink was printed on when the swatch was made — C for coated stock, U for uncoated — and the same ink on those two papers is genuinely a different colour, so each gets its own approximate hex value.

The mechanism is absorption. Coated stock carries a clay or polymer layer that keeps ink sitting on the surface, where the pigment stays dense and light bounces off a smooth face. Uncoated stock is open fibre: the vehicle soaks in, pigment particles spread and settle among the fibres, and the surface scatters light in every direction. The result is almost always the same two-part shift — lighter, because less light is being absorbed by a dense ink film, and duller, because scattering washes out saturation.

Across all 1,565 PMS numbers that exist in both decks, the median coated-to-uncoated difference is ΔE2000 6.11 and the mean is 6.95. Only 269 pairs — 17% — come in under ΔE 2, the threshold the printing trade treats as a commercial match. At the other end, 436 pairs differ by ΔE 10 or more. The widest gap in the deck is PMS 2685, at ΔE 23.57: a deep violet that publishes as #330072 coated and #765BA7 uncoated.

Working the other way — you have a hex code and need to know which uncoated PMS number it belongs to — is a nearest-match problem rather than a lookup. The HEX to Pantone converter searches the coated and uncoated decks separately for exactly that reason, and there is a longer walkthrough in our coated vs uncoated guide.

Why Pantone → HEX Is Always an Approximation

A hex code describes a mix of three light emitters inside the sRGB gamut. A Pantone colour describes a jar of pre-mixed pigment. The conversion is a translation between two things that are not the same kind of thing at all, and it fails in four specific ways worth knowing about.

1. Some inks are more saturated than sRGB can display

When a colour cannot be represented, the conversion clips it to the nearest value the gamut can hold, and the giveaway is a channel pinned at 0 or 255. In the coated deck, 315 of 1565 colours — 20.1% — have at least one channel sitting on that wall, and 14 have two. Pantone Reflex Blue C is #001489: the red channel is at zero, which means the real ink is bluer than that hex code and sRGB simply ran out of room. Pantone Orange 021 C, #FE5000, is the same story at the other end.

2. Metallics and neons have no honest equivalent

Pantone 877 C is silver ink; it converts to #8A8D8F, a flat grey. Pantone 871 C is gold; it converts to #84754E, a flat olive-brown. Pantone 8003 C is #8A7E70. All three are wrong in the same way: metallic inks contain aluminium or bronze flake and reflect light directionally, so the colour changes as the sheet tilts. A pixel has one value from every angle. Fluorescents such as Pantone 811 C, #FF8F6C, fail differently — the ink re-emits ultraviolet as visible light and is literally brighter than the paper it sits on, which a screen cannot imitate at all.

3. Approximate sRGB values and computed ones disagree

Pantone publishes its own screen values for each ink. Converting the same ink’s measured Lab through a colour-managed sRGB transform gives a slightly different answer, and changing the rendering intent from relative colorimetric to perceptual changes it again. Nobody is wrong; they are answering slightly different questions. This is why the same PMS number produces different hex codes on different sites, usually differing by a few units per channel. Pick one source and use it across the whole brand rather than mixing.

4. Viewing conditions are part of the measurement

A printed swatch has no colour without a light source. Graphic-arts measurement is normally specified at D50 with an M0, M1 or M2 illumination mode — M1 includes the UV component and is what you need for paper with optical brighteners, M2 excludes it. Screens are characterised at D65. So the number you are comparing against was captured under a different white point than the one your monitor renders, before anyone even mentions the office lighting you are holding the swatch under.

How Far Apart Coated and Uncoated Really Are

Every PMS number in the Solid deck exists twice, and the two hex codes are rarely close. This chart puts all 1,565 coated-to-uncoated pairs into CIEDE2000 buckets so you can see the shape of the problem rather than take it on trust.

The takeaway: the C and U printings of a PMS number are usually not the same colour. Only 269 pairs (17%) fall under ΔE 2, the point below which most people cannot tell two colours apart side by side. 456 pairs land between ΔE 5 and 10, and 436 — 27.9% of the deck — exceed ΔE 10, which reads as a different colour to anyone looking. The median is ΔE 6.11and the extreme is PMS 2685 at ΔE 23.57.

Two consequences follow. First, a brand sheet that lists one hex code for a PMS number without saying whether it means C or U has left out information you cannot recover. Second, deep and highly saturated colours dominate the right-hand buckets: the more ink density a colour depends on, the more it loses when the paper drinks it.

How to Convert Pantone to HEX in Illustrator, Photoshop, Figma and InDesign

The tool at the top of this page is faster than any of these, but you will sometimes need the value out of a file you have been handed rather than out of a number someone told you. Here is where each application keeps it.

When You Should NOT Use the HEX Value

A hex code is the right answer for anything rendered by a display and the wrong answer for almost everything else. Three cases in particular go wrong regularly.

• Anything going on a press. Handing a printer a hex code makes them guess at an ink. If the job runs spot, give them the PMS number. If it runs four-colour, give them a process build — the Pantone to CMYK converter produces one, and explains where the conversion loses colour.
• Brand-guideline compliance. Auditing a partner’s artwork against a hex code tells you what their screen did, not what their ink was. Measure against the PMS number and compare in a device-independent space — Pantone to LAB gives you the coordinates and the colour comparison tool gives you the ΔE between any two.
• Physical materials. Embroidery thread, cut vinyl, heat-transfer film and paint are all fixed catalogues of real pigments; the useful question is which stocked item is closest, not what the hex code is. Use Pantone to DMC for floss, Pantone to ORACAL 651 for vinyl, Pantone to Siser HTV for garment film, and Pantone to RAL for coatings.

A useful habit for brand documents: publish the PMS number as the master, then the hex code labelled “digital only” and the CMYK build labelled “process print only”, with the coated or uncoated variant spelled out. That one line of labelling prevents most of the colour arguments that reach a print buyer.

Where to Go From a HEX Code

Chosen for what a hex code is usually the first step towards, rather than a list of everything on the site.

Where These Numbers Come From

Every HEX and RGB value on this page is read from this site’s Pantone dataset, which holds 3,679 colours across the coated, uncoated, metallic, pastel-and-neon, Colour of the Year and skin-tone libraries. No value is entered by hand and no row appears for a colour the dataset does not contain.

Derived figures are computed at build time by scripts/build-color-stats.mjs and written to a JSON file the page imports, so they can be reproduced by re-running the script. Colour differences use CIEDE2000 as formulated by Sharma, Wu and Dalal (2005) with kL = kC = kH = 1, computed on Lab values converted from sRGB through CIE XYZ under the D65 illuminant and the 2° standard observer. Contrast ratios follow the WCAG 2.2 relative-luminance definition. The nearest-CSS-colour column is ranked by CIEDE2000 against the 148 keywords defined in CSS Color Module Level 4.

One honest limitation: this dataset carries approximate sRGB screen values, not spectrophotometer readings of printed ink. That is enough to give you a close hex code, and not enough to predict what a specific press on a specific stock will produce. For a job where that matters, proof it and measure the proof.

The HEX, RGB, contrast and ΔE figures above were last recomputed from the dataset on 2026-09-26. This converter has been online since 2024-11-18.