Mil vs MOA, made simple.

Most holdover confusion comes from treating mil and MOA as if they were fixed sizes, like centimetres or inches. They are not. A mil and a MOA are both angles: the patch of target they cover is small up close and larger far away, scaling in direct proportion to distance. That is exactly why a scope reticle can give you a holdover at any range — the angle is constant even though the drop in centimetres keeps growing. Once that clicks, choosing between the two units is much less about ballistics and much more about which system you already own and think in.

What is a mil?

A mil is a milliradian — one-thousandth of a radian, often written mrad. The handy thing about a milliradian is that it lines up cleanly with the metric system: 1 mil subtends 10 cm at 100 m, which is the same as 1 cm at 10 m, or about 3.6 inches at 100 yards. Scale it to your range and the maths stays tidy — at 50 m, one mil is 5 cm; at 25 m, it is 2.5 cm.

Mil turrets and reticles are commonly graduated in 0.1-mil steps, so a single click moves the point of impact by one-tenth of a mil. For anyone who measures targets and ranges in metres, that 1-cm-at-10-m relationship makes mil the natural choice: read a miss in centimetres, divide by your range in tens of metres, and you have the correction in mils with almost no arithmetic.

What is MOA?

MOA stands for minute of angle — one-sixtieth of a degree. One MOA is about 1.047 inch at 100 yards, which shooters very often round to a convenient 1 inch at 100 yards (and which works out to roughly 2.9 cm at 100 m). The small gap between 1.047 and 1 is harmless at airgun and rimfire distances but worth remembering if you ever stretch a MOA reticle out to long range.

MOA turrets typically click in quarter-MOA (1/4-MOA) increments. Because a quarter of a MOA is a finer angle than a tenth of a mil, MOA dials give you slightly more granular adjustment per click — a point in their favour if you like dialling precise corrections. If your background is in inches and yards, MOA usually feels the more intuitive of the two.

Mil vs MOA — how to choose

There is no universally correct answer, but there are three rules that keep you out of trouble:

• Match your reticle to your turrets. The single most important rule is to never mix units. A mil reticle belongs with mil turrets; a MOA reticle with MOA turrets. Mixing them forces a conversion on every shot, which is exactly where mistakes creep in.
• Think in your measurement system. If you measure in metres and centimetres, mil's 1-cm-at-10-m maths is the path of least resistance. If you live in inches and yards, MOA will feel more natural. The best unit is the one you can do in your head at the firing line.
• For short airgun ranges, either is fine. Out to HFT and field-target distances the practical difference between the two is tiny. Pick the system your scope is already marked in and stay consistent.

Both are angular units — neither is inherently more accurate. The right choice is the one that matches your scope and the way you measure.

How PelletArc helps

PelletArc is built so the unit question never slows you down. Solve a shot and the holdover is shown in mil, MOA and cm at a tap — so whichever scope you reach for, the number you need is already on screen, and you can sanity-check one unit against another. There is no re-entering the problem just to switch from mils to minutes.

It also ships 15 angular-correct reticles in both mil and MOA, so you can pick the pattern that matches your own optic and read the hold straight off it. Because the reticles are angular-correct, a mil dot really subtends a mil and a MOA mark really subtends a MOA — the holdover lands on the line you already trust. Pair that with BC truing so the drop itself is honest, and the path from trigger to target stays short. You can read more about the answer-first design and how truing tightens the solution, browse the full guides, or see it inside the airgun ballistics calculator and the .22LR ballistics calculator.