Reading Resistor Color Codes (with the Navy Mnemonic I Still Use)
05/ 03/ 2026
If you've worked with any kind of through-hole electronics, you've had to squint at a tiny resistor and decode the bands of color painted around it. Surface-mount components have made this less common — most SMD resistors use printed numeric codes instead — but if you're prototyping on a breadboard, repairing older gear, or pulling parts out of a kit, color bands are still the daily reality.
The good news: it's not hard. There's a pattern, and once you know the mnemonic for the colors, you can read most resistors in a few seconds.
The mnemonic I learned in the Navy
When I was in the Navy many years ago — and people weren't quite so worried about being polite — we had a saying for the resistor color order. I'll give you the cleaned-up version:
Bad Boys Race Our Young Girls Behind Victory Garden Wall
Each word is the first letter of a color, and each color stands for a digit:
| Word | Color | Digit |
|---|---|---|
| Bad | Black | 0 |
| Boys | Brown | 1 |
| Race | Red | 2 |
| Our | Orange | 3 |
| Young | Yellow | 4 |
| Girls | Green | 5 |
| Behind | Blue | 6 |
| Victory | Violet | 7 |
| Garden | Gray | 8 |
| Wall | White | 9 |
Then for the multiplier and tolerance bands you'll also see:
- Gold — ×0.1 multiplier, or ±5% tolerance
- Silver — ×0.01 multiplier, or ±10% tolerance
- No band — ±20% tolerance
I had the rest of that one drilled in too — *"Get Started Now"* for Gold, Silver, None — but honestly the colors stick on their own once you've used them a while.
How the bands actually work
Hold the resistor with the gold or silver band on the right (that's the tolerance band — it's the one with the bigger gap from the rest). Then read left to right:
4-band resistor — the most common kind:
- First digit
- Second digit
- Multiplier (number of zeros to add)
- Tolerance
So a resistor with brown / black / red / gold is 1, 0, × 100, ±5% — that's a 1,000 Ω (1 kΩ) resistor at 5% tolerance.
5-band resistor — used for precision parts (1% or tighter):
- First digit
- Second digit
- Third digit
- Multiplier
- Tolerance
That extra digit gives you finer-grained values like 4.99 kΩ instead of "5k-ish."
6-band resistor — same as 5-band, plus a sixth band for temperature coefficient (how much the resistance drifts per °C). You only see this on resistors meant for precision analog work.
Why it still matters with SMD everywhere
Two reasons. First, even if your project boards are all surface-mount, breadboard prototyping is still through-hole — and that's where most learning, debugging, and one-off tinkering happens. Second, every drawer of "mystery resistors" anyone inherits is full of color-banded parts. If you can't read them, you can't use them.
The cheat sheet trick
I have a small printed color-code chart taped to the wall behind my workbench. After 30 years it's still the fastest way to verify a value when I'm tired or the lighting is bad. Recommended.
Or just use the calculator
If you've had a long day, and you just don't want to think, go to our calculator. It will make you life easier.
TronKits Resistor Color Code Calculator →
Pick the bands, get the value, tolerance, and (for 6-band parts) temperature coefficient.