Abvy

BAC chart

Estimated blood alcohol by drinks and body weight

This is a lookup table: estimated peak blood alcohol content for a number of standard drinks against body weight, computed with the same pharmacokinetic model that runs inside the Abvy app. It is not a measurement - nothing on a screen can read what's actually in your blood - so treat every cell as a rough estimate, not a verdict. Switch sex, or flip to kilograms and per mille, below.

Sex

Units

Drinks100 lb120 lb140 lb160 lb180 lb200 lb220 lb240 lbHours to sober*
10.013%0.012%0.011%0.010%0.009%0.009%0.008%0.008%2.0 h
20.027%0.024%0.021%0.019%0.017%0.016%0.015%0.013%3.6 h
30.047%0.042%0.038%0.034%0.031%0.028%0.026%0.024%4.8 h
40.069%0.062%0.057%0.052%0.047%0.043%0.040%0.037%6.0 h
50.093%0.084%0.077%0.070%0.065%0.060%0.055%0.051%7.2 h
60.118%0.107%0.098%0.090%0.083%0.077%0.071%0.066%8.5 h
70.143%0.130%0.120%0.110%0.102%0.094%0.088%0.082%9.7 h
80.169%0.154%0.141%0.130%0.121%0.112%0.105%0.098%10.9 h

* Hours to sober assumes a body weight of 180 lb.

Every row assumes a 180 cm, 32-year-old body, 14 g standard drinks spread evenly across a two-hour evening, on a moderate meal. Only sex and body weight change between cells - see below for why that's not the whole story.

Why the chart is wrong for you

Two people who drank the identical round can land on meaningfully different real BAC. A lookup table can't see any of this - it only knows drinks and weight.

  • Absorption speed swings hugely with food: Abvy's model uses an absorption rate more than three times faster on an empty stomach (4.6 per hour) than on a full one (1.5 per hour), fitted to real breath-alcohol data from healthy volunteers drinking on separate occasions. — Lee et al., 2013
  • Elimination speed varies from person to person too, which is why every curve in the app carries an uncertainty band running from 80% to 120% of the average rate - a conservative slice of the real spread: a forensic review of published studies found ethanol clears from blood at anywhere from about 10 to 35 milligrams per 100 mL per hour depending on the person. — Jones, 2010
  • Being fed doesn't just slow absorption, it speeds elimination too: Abvy's model raises the fed-state elimination ceiling by 30%, a scaled-down version of the 39% food effect researchers found when they reanalyzed three clinical ethanol studies. — Büsker et al., 2023
  • Weight isn't really the number that matters, body water is: the standard formula for estimating it gives a man and a woman of the same height, weight and age different totals, because it treats their body composition differently - which is why a chart built only on weight can't tell two same-sized people apart. — Watson et al., 1980

See your own curve

Pour your drinks onto the curve, drag them to when you had them, and read your own estimate - not a lookup table's.

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Questions people ask

It depends entirely on your weight, sex and what you've eaten - there's no fixed number. In this chart's own assumptions (moderate meal, drinks spread over two hours), an average-sized man crosses 0.08% somewhere around his sixth standard drink; a lighter person or a woman crosses it sooner. Read your own row and column in the table above rather than a single rule of thumb.

Estimates only. No chart, and no app, can tell you whether you're under a legal limit or safe to drive - only a breath or blood test administered by a professional can do that. Never use this page, or any BAC estimate, to decide whether to get behind the wheel: if you've been drinking, don't drive. This is not a medical device and isn't a substitute for medical advice.

References

Legal limits

Research