How to read CBD oil concentrations?

Last update: February 22nd, 2024

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Some manufacturers of hemp oils with phytonutrients, or CBD oils, list cannabinoid concentrations in milligrams, rather than in percentages, as we at Hempking do. This is to give the exact amount of cannabidiol (CBD) in a given product, regardless of the package size. You can find concentrations like 500 mg, 1000 mg, 330 mg and various others. And how to recognize how much CBD is actually in such a product? How to read CBD oil concentrations in mg? How to convert milligrams to CBD concentration in %?

How to read the CBD oil concentrations?

When it comes to percentage CBD oil concentrations, here the matter is clear. CBD concentration expressed as a percentage means what part of the product you are interested in is occupied by cannabidiol (CBD). The rest of the contents of the package are the other components of the CBD oil in question. So it’s easy to understand here what CBD % concentration is all about.

However, when we encounter a product that expresses the concentration in milligrams, the matter is no longer so clear. Assuming that the product has a certain capacity, expressed in milliliters, how do we calculate how many milligrams it occupies and how much CBD we are actually consuming then?

If we are new to the topic of hemp, such variation may make us unable to efficiently compare different hemp products with phytonutrients and choose, for example, the more highly concentrated one. After all, don’t a CBD concentration of 5% and a CBD concentration of 300 mg look completely different? How to convert this? How to compare such products?

First we need to understand what these units are all about. Percentage means the occupied portion of the substance of interest in a given product. And milligrams are the amount of that substance in the product.

In a 10 ml bottle, with a concentration of 5%, we are dealing with 500 mg of CBD. So, is a CBD supplement in any other package with a different capacity, which says 500 mg, the same? No!

The matter is simple if we compare products with the same packaging capacity. 250 mg of CBD is 2.5% CBD in a 10 ml bottle. But already 250 mg of CBD in a 50 ml bottle is only 0.5%! Complicated? We’ll show you how to count it.

CBD mg concentrations and CBD % concentrations – how to convert?

1.Note the capacity of the product packaging with the concentration expressed in milligrams.

Bottles of CBD oils vary, depending on the manufacturer. The most common are those with a capacity of 10 ml. The second most common capacity is 30 ml bottles.

2.Pay attention to the value stated on the packaging – how much is the concentration expressed in milligrams?

Concentrations of CBD oils can be found as low as 100 milligrams, up to as high as 3,000 milligrams. It all depends on the manufacturer. There are plenty of values between these two numbers – you can meet oils with 150 mg or 330 mg, 2500 mg, etc.

Once you have both of these pieces of information, capacity and CBD mg concentration, it’s time to do the calculations. Let’s start with the simplest version and the most popular.

The bottle is 10 ml, the CBD concentration is 500 mg. This means that you are just holding in your hand an oil with a CBD concentration of 5%. In this case, 1 milliliter is 50 mg of CBD. If the CBD concentration is 100 mg in a 10-milliliter bottle, it is a 1% CBD product. If it contains 330 mg of CBD in such a capacity, the concentration is 3.3%. Just put a comma after the last two digits and you’ll get the concentration expressed as a percentage! Simple, right?

However, this method, completely without converting units, works like this only for bottles with a capacity of 10 ml. When the bottle has a different capacity, a little staircase begins. But we know that they are still not so difficult to overcome.

The second most popular capacity of CBD bottles is 30 ml bottles, but you can also find other capacities. In this case, how do you convert CBD mg concentration to CBD % concentration? We will reveal to you a simple way to do it.

Let’s say you have in your hand a 30 ml bottle of CBD oil with a phytonutrient content of 600 mg. You have to divide the milliliters by 3 to come up with 10 ml. By the same amount you divide milligrams of CBD and then you get 200 mg per 10 ml of product. And further on, I’m sure you can do a great job of calculating that this means it’s a 2% product.

So, does a CBD oil with a concentration of 600 mg, but a volume of 30 ml, have more phytonutrients than an oil in a 10 ml bottle with 500 mg of CBD? No!

Summary

To summarize, when dealing with a 10 ml bottle, we put a comma after the last two digits of the CBD content expressed in mg, and we then get the percentage concentration. As it were, we check how many hundreds are contained in a given concentration. In 500 mg there are 5, or 5%, in 2500 mg there are 25, and then we are dealing with a CBD % concentration of 25%.

And when the bottle is larger than 10 ml, we divide its capacity by as much as it would take to get 10 ml, we do the same with the value expressed in milligrams, and then proceed as in the first case.