How many HEX codes are there?

There are 16,777,216 possible HEX codes. To easily work out this number, it's better to switch to the RGB system. Recall in RGB, which is just a different way of writing down HEX, there are three positions, each taking an integer value between 0 and 255. Hence, there are:

• 256 choices at place R;
• 256 choices at place G; and
• 256 choices at place B.

In total, we have 256 × 256 × 256 = 16,777,216 possible combinations, which means this is the exact number of HEX codes.

You can easily see from the computation above what it would take to build a color system with a bigger number of HEX codes. It suffices to use more than $2^8 = 256$ values per RGB position. For instance:

• Imagine we doubled this number to $2^9 = 512$ values. How many HEX codes would we get? The computation now reads:

  $(2^9)^3 = 2^{27} = 134,217,728$

• Let's go even further and boost the initial value to $2^{10} = 1024$ values. How many HEX codes can we produce? An analogous calculation as above yields a whopping number:

  $(2^{10})^3 = 2^{30} = 1,073,741,824$

Hence, the number of HEX colors depends on the underlying number of values we can assign to each of the three primitive components. However, increasing the number of HEX colors in this way would require a different (longer) encoding procedure!

Since RGB and HEX are two different ways of describing the same color system, the number of HEX colors is equal to that of RGB colors. To determine the number of HEX codes, we calculate the number of combinations for choosing 3 out of 256 values with repetition, where order matters.

If you are not sure what we mean when saying RGB and HEX and different representations of the same color system, check out the explanation provided by our RGB to HEX converter.

Another equivalent color system is HSL, which you can discover with Omni's color converter.