Hot Sauce Scoville Scale, 600 to 49,000 SHU by Maker

Every bottle on one heat axis, each number with its source.

By the Scovidex teamUpdated Oct 18, 2026

Generic unlabeled hot sauce bottles lined up from short green to tall dark red along a long wooden shelf, with a thin heat gradient painted on the wall behind them.

Short answer

Bottled hot sauces with a published rating run from about 600 SHU to 49,000 SHU, far below the peppers inside them.

TABASCO's own chart runs from 600–1,200 SHU (Green Jalapeño) to 23,000–33,000 SHU (Scorpion)
Cholula Original rates 1,000–2,000 SHU, by its maker
A lab gets SHU by multiplying capsaicinoid parts per million by 16

Ranked by the maker's own number

How hot are popular hot sauces in Scoville?

TABASCO's own line spans a 50-fold spread, from 600 SHU at the bottom of Green Jalapeño to 33,000 SHU at the top of Scorpion.⁴ We leave a bottle off when its maker publishes no number.

1Hot Ones Los Calientes Rojo49,000 SHU⁹Hot
2TABASCO Scorpion23,000–33,000 SHU⁴Medium
3TABASCO Habanero Pepperover 7,000 SHU⁴Medium
4TABASCO Original Red2,500–5,000 SHU⁴Medium
5TABASCO Chipotle Pepper1,500–2,500 SHU⁴Mild
6TABASCO Buffalo Style1,200–2,400 SHU⁴Mild
7TABASCO Cayenne Garlic1,200–2,400 SHU⁴Mild
8Cholula Original1,000–2,000 SHU⁵Mild
9TABASCO Salsa Picante1,000–1,800 SHU⁴Mild
10TABASCO Green Jalapeño600–1,200 SHU⁴Mild

Peppers for scale

Jalapeño pepper2,000–8,000 SHU⁸Medium
Habanero pepper100,000–350,000 SHU⁸Extra-hot

Log scale: each step right is ten times hotter. A bar is the maker's published range; an open bar has no stated top.

On the bottle

How do you read a heat number on a label?

A range is the most honest of the four: peppers vary from plant to plant, and a sauce made from them varies too.

A rangeTABASCO Original Red, 2,500–5,000 SHU⁴The spread the maker expects across batches.
An open-ended figureTABASCO Habanero Pepper, over 7,000 SHU⁴A floor, with no stated top.
One numberHot Ones Los Calientes Rojo, 49,000 SHU⁹A single reading or an average, with no spread shown.
A 1–10 scaleHEATONIST rates Los Calientes Rojo 5 / 10⁹The seller's own ranking, which does not convert to SHU.

Pepper versus bottle

Why is a hot sauce so much milder than its pepper?

Because most of the bottle is not pepper: water, vinegar and salt dilute the chiles. The hot sauce pillar walks through the pepper-to-bottle arithmetic.

5.0 %of Cholula Original's ingredients are chiles, listed after water⁶
401.5×how much hotter UF/IFAS rates a bhut jolokia pod than Tabasco sauce⁸

On this page

1Where do hot sauce Scoville numbers come from?
2Does a higher number always taste hotter?
3How hot is a dash once it is in your food?
4Which hot sauce is the hottest?
5Find a bottle at your heat level

Where do hot sauce Scoville numbers come from?

From the maker, on every bottle you see charted here. We know of no shared registry of sauce heat, so each figure is one company's own claim, and this page names the source beside every bar you see.

The dilution test

Wilbur Scoville built the scale in 1912 around human tasters, and you can still see his idea in every number. A pepper rated 100,000 SHU needs 1 part chili extract in 100,000 parts water before the heat disappears¹. The scale tops out at 16 million SHU, the rating of pure capsaicin¹.

The weak spot is the tasters. New Mexico State University notes that the result depends on each taster's palate, and that a taster can only handle so many samples before the next one stops telling you much².

The lab test

Labs today measure capsaicinoids by HPLC and convert parts per million to SHU by multiplying by 16³. NMSU's lab dries and grinds the fruit, extracts the heat compounds and injects the extract into the machine, which reads each of the more than 22 known capsaicinoids on its own².

Worked through, if your sauce reads 300 ppm it comes out at 300 × 16 = 4,800 SHU, inside the 2,500–5,000 SHU that TABASCO prints for its Original Red⁴. That 300 ppm is our example figure, chosen to show the math. The method costs more than a tasting panel, NMSU says, but it gives an objective number and can run many samples in a short time².

Does a higher number always taste hotter?

Not when the ranges overlap, and on this chart many of them do. Two bottles can share most of their span, so the one that tastes hotter to you on a given night may be the one with the lower printed top.

Cholula Original

Maker's range: 1,000–2,000 SHU⁵
Pepper: Árbol and piquín, 5.0 % of the ingredients⁶
First ingredient: Water⁶

TABASCO Buffalo Style

Maker's range: 1,200–2,400 SHU⁴
Same range as: TABASCO Cayenne Garlic, 1,200–2,400 SHU⁴
Overlap with Cholula: 1,200–2,000 SHU, most of both ranges⁴⁵

The pods behind each bottle move too. NMSU found that any kind of stress in the field pushes a mild chile cultivar hotter, while ideal conditions keep a hot one only moderately hot². A maker's range covers that spread, which is why you see so few single numbers on these labels.

So use the chart to sort your bottles into rough bands rather than to rank neighbors. A sauce at 23,000–33,000 SHU is clearly in a different class from one at 1,000–2,000; two bottles both near 2,000 are, for your tongue, the same class.

How hot is a dash once it is in your food?

Far milder than your bottle, because your food dilutes it the way the vinegar diluted the pepper. SHU follows concentration, parts per million times 16³, so spreading the same capsaicin through ten times the weight cuts the number by ten.

1
Weigh your dash
USDA weighs a teaspoon of hot pepper sauce at 4.7 g.⁷
2
Weigh the dish
Say you stir that teaspoon into 470 g of chili, 100 times its 4.7 g. The 470 g is our example amount.⁷
3
Divide the bottle's rating
TABASCO Original Red at 2,500–5,000 SHU, divided by 100, leaves the bowl averaging 25–50 SHU.⁴
4
Compare with a pepper you know
That average sits far below a jalapeño's 2,000–8,000 SHU, which is why a few dashes season a pot without making it hot.⁸

The catch is that nobody eats an average. A dash on one spoonful hits that bite at close to the bottle's full strength, so you feel a sauce on top of a dish more than one stirred through it.

That gives you two ways to use one bottle. Stir it into the pot when you want the whole dish warm and even, and shake it on at the table when you want each person to set their own heat. A pot that came out too hot follows the same math in reverse: add more of the unspiced base and you divide the heat again.

Which hot sauce is the hottest?

The published numbers cannot settle it for you. Of the bottles above, Los Calientes Rojo carries the highest maker figure at 49,000 SHU⁹, but many sauces built on super-hot peppers publish no SHU at all.

HEATONIST's Season 31 Hot Ones pack shows how rare a number is: of its ten sauces, only Los Calientes Rojo prints an SHU, and the other nine carry just a 2 to 11 rating on the seller's 10-point scale⁹.

The Last Dab Thermageddon is one: its mash holds Pepper X, Carolina Reaper, Red Scorpion and Pepper Y, and HEATONIST rates it 11 on a 10-point scale¹⁰. Pepper X itself averages 2,693,000 SHU per Guinness World Records¹¹; the sauce has no published number, so it stays off the chart.

A super-hot pepper on a label tells you its class, not the bottle's figure. The Carolina Reaper in that blend sits in the same record class as Pepper X, yet vinegar and other ingredients dilute both before the sauce reaches you.

Find a bottle at your heat level

Start from a pepper you already eat. A jalapeño runs 2,000–8,000 SHU⁸, and TABASCO Original Red at 2,500–5,000 SHU sits inside that band, so a jalapeño eater can pour it without surprises.

Want more? Step up one band at a time, and give your palate a few meals at each step. TABASCO's own line climbs from its Habanero Pepper at over 7,000 SHU to its Scorpion at 23,000–33,000 SHU⁴, and each step is a few times hotter than the last.

Happy at that level and curious about more? Habanero pods run 100,000–350,000 SHU⁸, and the full Scoville scale shows where every pepper in the index sits on the same log axis as this chart.