1 Kilobyte equals 1,000 Bytes.
| Kilobyte (kB) | Byte (B) |
|---|---|
| 1 kB | 1,000 B |
| 2 kB | 2,000 B |
| 4 kB | 4,000 B |
| 8 kB | 8,000 B |
| 16 kB | 16,000 B |
| 32 kB | 32,000 B |
| 64 kB | 64,000 B |
| 128 kB | 128,000 B |
| 256 kB | 256,000 B |
| 512 kB | 512,000 B |
| 1,024 kB | 1,024,000 B |
| 2,048 kB | 2,048,000 B |
To convert Kilobytes to Bytes, multiply the value by 1,000. This factor comes from the ratio of the two units' definitions: one Kilobyte equals 1,000 Bytes.
For example: 1 Kilobyte = 1,000 Bytes, and 10 Kilobytes = 10,000 Bytes.
To convert in the reverse direction — from Bytes to Kilobytes — multiply by 0.001.
A kilobyte (kB) in the SI (decimal) convention equals exactly 1,000 bytes. The prefix "kilo" follows the standard SI usage, the same as in kilogram or kilometer. In consumer contexts, storage device manufacturers use this SI definition — so a "100 GB" SSD contains 100,000,000,000 bytes. This is distinct from the binary kibibyte (KiB = 1,024 bytes) used in computing contexts where powers of 2 are natural. The discrepancy has caused persistent confusion in the industry for decades.
Historically, computer scientists used "kilobyte" to mean 1,024 bytes (since 1,024 = 2¹⁰ is conveniently close to 1,000), and this usage dominated from the 1970s through the 1990s. Operating systems like Windows still report file sizes using binary multiples while calling them "KB" — a source of endless consumer confusion when a file advertised as "1 GB" seems smaller on disk. The IEC introduced the kibibyte (KiB), mebibyte (MiB) etc. in 1998 to create unambiguous binary units, but adoption has been slow.
A plain-text email typically ranges from 2–20 kilobytes; a web page with minimal graphics might be 50–500 kB; and a high-quality music file compressed as MP3 runs about 1,000 kB (1 MB) per minute of audio. The kilobyte marked the practical lower bound of early personal computing storage: the original IBM PC's minimum RAM was 16 kB, and floppy disks of the era held 160–360 kB. These figures highlight how dramatically data storage has scaled in forty years.
A byte is a group of 8 bits, the standard unit for representing a single character of text in the ASCII and UTF-8 encodings, and the basic addressable unit of memory in virtually all modern computers. The origin of the 8-bit byte traces to IBM's System/360 computer family (1964), which standardized 8-bit characters across its product line and established a convention that has persisted for sixty years. Earlier computers used varying byte sizes (5, 6, or 7 bits), but 8 won out.
A byte can represent 2⁸ = 256 distinct values (0 through 255), which is enough to encode all 128 ASCII characters with room to spare, to represent color channels in images (0–255 per channel for red, green, and blue), or to express integer values in that range. The dominance of the 8-bit byte means that kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes are the everyday units of file size, memory, and storage — while the underlying computation happens at the bit level.
File sizes and storage capacities are measured in bytes across the digital world: a plain text email might be a few kilobytes; a high-resolution photo 3–10 megabytes; a 4K movie 50–100 gigabytes; and the total data stored in global data centers is measured in zettabytes (10²¹ bytes). Memory chips are specified in gigabytes; hard drives and SSDs in terabytes. The byte is so fundamental to computing that its abbreviation (B, uppercase) must be carefully distinguished from the bit (b, lowercase) to avoid factor-of-8 errors in bandwidth and storage calculations.
1 Kilobyte equals 1,000 Bytes.
To convert Kilobytes to Bytes, multiply by 1,000. For example, 0.1 Kilobytes = 100 Bytes.
1 Byte equals 0.001 Kilobytes.