Accuracy

If you were looking for the in-battle stat, see Stats#Accuracy.

Accuracy is an aspect of moves that determine how often they can hit their target. A move's base accuracy currently can be any number from 30% to 100%, usually in multiples of 5.

Many moves have an accuracy of "—%", indicating that they are exempt from accuracy calculations. This is usually because they affect no one but the user (and/or the partner in a Double Battle), or because they will never miss the target (excluding type immunities) unless the target uses a move that grants invulnerability for the turn (such as Protect, or the first stage of Fly or Dig). However, the situation for one-hit knockout moves is very different; the accuracy varies based on the difference between the user's level and the target's level.

Accuracy can be increased by Abilities or held items, such as Compoundeyes raising the user's accuracy by 30%, Victory Star raising a Pokémon's accuracy by 10%, and the Wide Lens boosting accuracy by 10%.

Formula for accuracy and evasion

The probability that a move will hit is calculated as follows:

Where:

• A_base is the base accuracy of the move (in percent - e.g. a base accuracy of 95 is counted as 0.95),
• Accuracy is the current accuracy stat of the user (in percent - e.g. raising accuracy by three stages raises this number to 2), and
• Evasion is the current evasion stat of the target (in percent - e.g. lowering evasion by two stages lowers this number to 0.6).

If P is greater than 1, the move will surely hit. In a Double or Triple Battle, it is possible for a move that targets multiple Pokémon to hit some and miss others—the probabilities are calculated individually for each Pokémon.

Trivia

• In the Generation I games, even moves with a 100% accuracy would miss once in a great while for seemingly no reason whatsoever. This was due to accuracy being internally calculated as a fraction of 256, when the highest internal accuracy a move could possess was 255 (FF in hexadecimal, and the highest value expressible in a single byte), yielding an accuracy of 99.6%. This also applied to secondary effects such as poison or paralysis, but it was resolved in Generation II.
• It was not possible to view a move's accuracy in-game until Generation III.