Gigahertz to hertz:
multiply by 1,000,000,000

How many hertz are in a gigahertz?

One gigahertz equals 1,000,000,000 hertz, one billion cycles per second. The prefix giga means 10 to the power of 9, so 1 GHz is 10^9 Hz.

Hertz counts how many times something repeats each second. At gigahertz speeds the numbers become so large that engineers write them in scientific notation, such as 1e+9 Hz.

The hertz is named after the German physicist Heinrich Hertz and measures how many times a repeating event occurs in one second. At everyday scales, such as the 50 or 60 Hz of mains electricity, the numbers are small. In electronics and radio they become huge, so we add prefixes: kilo for thousand, mega for million and giga for billion. Converting a GHz figure to hertz is helpful in software and formulae that expect the base unit, such as a signal-processing library or a timing calculation.

The GHz to Hz formula

A radio example: a 433.92 MHz remote control is 0.43392 GHz, since 1 MHz is 0.001 GHz. And a Wi-Fi band at 2.4 GHz is 2,400,000,000 Hz.

1. 1Write the frequency in GHz.
2. 2Multiply by one billion, moving the decimal point nine places right.
3. 3Pad with zeros where needed.
4. 4Check the zero count: the answer should have nine more digits than the whole GHz number.

Chart: gigahertz to hertz

The chart writes each value in full, so you can see the digits.

Where GHz to Hz appears

• Computer processors, advertised at speeds such as 3.5 GHz, which means 3.5 billion clock cycles each second.
• Wi-Fi routers, which broadcast on the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.
• Microwave ovens and satellite links, which work at gigahertz frequencies.
• Programming and signal processing, where code often needs the value in plain Hz.

A 5 GHz Wi-Fi band is 5,000,000,000 Hz. A signal at this frequency has a period of 0.2 nanoseconds, one fifth of a billionth of a second.

Quick sanity checks for gigahertz to hertz

The units are linked: 1 GHz is 1,000 MHz, 1,000,000 kHz and 1,000,000,000 Hz. Each step is a factor of one thousand.

Frequency and period are opposites. At 1 GHz one cycle lasts 1 nanosecond, and at 3.5 GHz a cycle lasts about 0.286 nanoseconds.

Write the answer with commas in groups of three digits. It is much easier to spot a missing zero.

Common mistakes when converting GHz to Hz

• Miscounting zeros. Nine zeros follow the 1, and seven or eight zeros give a result ten or a hundred times too small.
• Confusing GHz with MHz. A MHz is a thousand times smaller than a GHz, so 3,500 MHz is 3.5 GHz.
• Dividing when you should multiply. A frequency in hertz has many more digits than the GHz figure.
• Misreading scientific notation. 1e+9 means 1 times ten to the ninth, not 1 times 9.