---
title: "How many possible passwords are there? 6.6 quadrillion for eig"
description: "6.6 quadrillion for eight characters — 540 sextillion for twelve How the figure is estimated, how confident it is, and what makes the scale graspable."
url: https://atoneplace.net/how-many/possible-passwords/
site: "At One Place"
---

# How many possible passwords are there?

**How many possible passwords are there?: 6.6 quadrillion for eight characters — 540 sextillion for twelve**

A four-digit PIN has 10,000 possibilities and studies of leaked PINs find that "1234" alone accounts for roughly 10% of real ones. Human choice, not the size of the space, is almost always what breaks a password.

With the 95 printable ASCII characters, an eight-character password has 95^8 = 6,634,204,312,890,625 possibilities. That sounds large and is not: a purpose-built cracking rig testing a fast hash at 100 billion guesses a second exhausts the entire space in under a day. Add four characters and 95^12 = 5.4 × 10^23 takes the same rig around 170,000 years. Length beats complexity by an enormous margin, which is why modern guidance dropped the mandatory-symbol rules and raised the minimum length instead.

## How the figure is arrived at

c^n, where c is the character set size and n the length: each extra character multiplies the space by 95, while each extra symbol class multiplies it far less. Real attacks never search the space uniformly — they try leaked password lists, dictionary words with predictable substitutions, and keyboard patterns first, which is why an eight-character password chosen by a person is usually broken in minutes rather than a day.

## Other numbers and possibilities counts

- [How many combinations does a Rubik's Cube have?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/rubiks-cube-states/) — 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 — about 43 quintillion
- [How many ways can you shuffle a deck of cards?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/possible-shuffles-of-a-deck/) — about 8 × 10^67
- [How many possible chess games are there?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/possible-chess-games/) — about 10^120 games; about 4.8 × 10^44 legal positions
- [How many combinations are there in the lottery?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/lottery-combinations/) — 292,201,338 for Powerball
- [How many digits of pi have been calculated?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/digits-of-pi-computed/) — about 202 trillion
- [How many Sudoku puzzles are there?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/possible-sudoku-grids/) — 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 completed grids
- [How many prime numbers are there under a million?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/primes-under-a-million/) — exactly 78,498
- [How many possible positions are there in Go?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/possible-go-positions/) — about 2.08 × 10^170

## Common questions

### How many possible passwords are there?

6.6 quadrillion for eight characters — 540 sextillion for twelve

### How is that estimated?

c^n, where c is the character set size and n the length: each extra character multiplies the space by 95, while each extra symbol class multiplies it far less. Real attacks never search the space uniformly — they try leaked password lists, dictionary words with predictable substitutions, and keyboard patterns first, which is why an eight-character password chosen by a person is usually broken in minutes rather than a day.

## Related pages

- [How many combinations does a Rubik's Cube have?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/rubiks-cube-states/)
- [How many ways can you shuffle a deck of cards?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/possible-shuffles-of-a-deck/)
- [How many possible chess games are there?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/possible-chess-games/)
- [How many combinations are there in the lottery?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/lottery-combinations/)
- [How many digits of pi have been calculated?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/digits-of-pi-computed/)
- [How many Sudoku puzzles are there?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/possible-sudoku-grids/)
- [How many prime numbers are there under a million?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/primes-under-a-million/)
- [How many possible positions are there in Go?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/possible-go-positions/)
- [How many people are there in the world?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/people-alive-right-now/)
- [How many stars are there in the universe?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/stars-in-the-universe/)
- [How many countries are there in the world?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/countries/)
- [How many bones are in the human body?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/bones-in-the-human-body/)
- [How many grains of sand are there on Earth?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/grains-of-sand-on-earth/)
- [How many ants are there in the world?](https://atoneplace.net/how-many/ants-on-earth/)

## Sources

- Calculated on this page — At One Place (/about/)