Home › Charts › Stainless steel Gauge Chart

Stainless steel Sheet Metal Gauge Chart

Stainless steel sheet does not follow the carbon steel chart. It keeps its own older gauge series, governed by ASTM A480, whose published values are decimal renderings of simple fractions. The result: stainless reads thicker than carbon steel at every shared gauge number — at 16 gauge, 0.0625 inches against steel's 0.0598 — and ordering stainless off a steel chart will quietly hand you the wrong thickness.

The stainless range runs from 7 gauge at 0.1875 inches down to 30 gauge at 0.0125 inches. The table below gives every gauge in inches and millimetres. If you only remember one cell, make it 16 gauge: 0.0625 inches, exactly 1/16 inch, 1.587 mm.

Stainless steel gauge thickness chart

Why stainless reads thicker than steel

The stainless series was never rebuilt on the weight basis that produced the Manufacturers' Standard Gauge. It descends from a fraction-based gauge for sheet iron and steel, and its steps land on tidy fractions: 0.1875 (3/16) at 7 gauge, 0.125 (1/8) at 11 gauge, 0.0625 (1/16) at 16 gauge, 0.0313 (about 1/32) at 22 gauge. Suppliers publish those values rounded to four decimals, which is the form the chart here uses.

The offset against carbon steel is not constant. At 16 gauge stainless is about 4.5 percent thicker than steel; at 7 gauge the gap is 0.0082 inches. Thin gauges nearly converge — at 30 gauge the two differ by only 0.0005 inches — but in the middle of the range, where most stainless is bought, the difference is big enough to matter for fit, weight, and forming.

Where stainless gauges get used

Stainless is bought for corrosion resistance, not strength per dollar. Commercial kitchens, food processing, and medical work are its home ground: counters, sinks, splashbacks, and equipment housings are commonly 16 to 18 gauge — 0.0625 to 0.0500 inches — thick enough to feel solid, resist dents, and weld into sanitary seams. Marine hardware and coastal cladding use it for the same reason, usually in a molybdenum-bearing grade that shrugs off salt spray.

Thinner gauges, 20 to 26, cover appliance panels, trim, and backsplashes where the sheet is supported and only the surface matters. Heavy gauges, 10 to 14, show up in industrial tanks, chute work, and wear surfaces where the sheet has to hold its shape under load.

Working with stainless sheet

Stainless work-hardens: it gets harder and stronger where you bend, drill, or punch it. Drill with steady pressure and a sharp bit — letting a bit skate polishes the surface into a spot too hard to start again. It also springs back more than mild steel on the brake, so test bends on scrap from the same sheet before committing to a run.

None of that changes which gauge to order, but it changes what a gauge buys you. A stainless panel in 18 gauge will feel stiffer in service than a mild steel panel in the same nominal gauge, both because it is slightly thicker — 0.0500 against 0.0478 inches — and because the alloy is stronger. When substituting stainless for steel in an existing design, keep the gauge number the same and let the small thickness gain work in your favour.

Nearest stainless steel gauge for metric thicknesses

Computed from the chart above: for each common metric size, the published stainless steel gauge whose thickness is closest, with its actual thickness.

Related charts

• Sheet metal gauge chart (all four metals)
• Steel gauge chart
• Aluminum gauge chart
• Galvanized gauge chart
• Gauge to mm converter
• All charts

Thickness values follow Stainless sheet gauge series, fraction-based (ASTM A480); cross-checked against published supplier charts, November 2026.