Skip to content

What is a therm?

A therm is 100,000 BTU — a billing unit for natural gas, defined by convention.

The therm is a unit of energy you will meet mainly on natural-gas bills. It exists for convenience in billing, not because it corresponds to anything fundamental in physics — it is a convention layered on top of the British thermal unit.

The definition

The tool uses the US therm, defined as:

  • 1 therm = 100,000 BTU_IT
  • ≈ 1.0550559 × 10^8 J (that is 10^5 × 1055.05585262 J)
  • = 0.1 MMBTU (one tenth of a million BTU)

Because the therm is built directly on the IT BTU, converting a therm to BTU, MMBTU or joules is exact — the number is fixed by convention, not measured.

A billing unit, not a physical constant

The therm rounds off to a tidy hundred-thousand BTU precisely because it was designed as a billing unit. That tidiness is a matter of convention, not physics: there is nothing in nature that prefers 100,000 BTU. The tool labels the therm as a defined convention (it also notes that a European therm exists and differs only at about the 10^-5 level; the US therm is used as the default and labeled on the unit page).

Why a therm is not the same as "a therm of gas"

A therm is an amount of energy. Your gas meter, however, measures volume (cubic metres or cubic feet), and the supplier multiplies that volume by a calorific value to arrive at the energy you are billed for. So converting the gas volume on your meter into therms is not the exact operation that converting therms to BTU is — it depends on the gas composition and on reference conditions, and it can never reproduce your bill exactly. See natural gas: m³ to kWh for why that volume-to-energy step is always an estimate, and the therm unit page for the exact energy-unit conversions.

Converting
1 therm

Energy

105,506,000 J
standard definition
105,506 kJ
standard definition
105.506 MJ
standard definition
0.105506 GJ
standard definition
29.3071 kWh
standard definition
0.0293071 MWh
standard definition
100,000 BTU
standard definition
1 therm
standard definition

Fuel equivalents

0.00251996 toe
standard definition
0.0172414 boe
standard definition
0.00359994 tce
standard definition

Industrial units

1 therm
standard definition
0.1 MMBTU
standard definition
0.0000000001 quad
standard definition

Sources

Follow each source back to its primary document — that traceability is the point. How conversions work →

Sources

Universal Converter

A transparent converter for units, energy, fuels and emissions. Every non-exact result is traceable to its source.

© 2026 Universal Converter · v0.1 — an explanatory reference tool, not a compliance calculator. Sources over invented numbers · exact vs. estimate kept distinct.