Candle Wick Size Calculator

How to Choose the Right Candle Wick

The wick is the engine of your candle. Choose too small and you get tunneling. Choose too large and you get soot, mushrooming, and an unsafe flame. Our wick size calculator matches your container diameter, wax type, and fragrance load to the correct wick series so you can test smarter, not harder.

Candle wick size chart (soy wax, single wick)

Starting points by container diameter for the most common wick series. These assume soy wax with a 6-8% fragrance load — the calculator above adjusts for other waxes and loads:

Paraffin: go one size smaller. Beeswax or coconut blends: one size larger. Every fragrance oil and dye combination burns differently, so treat the chart as a starting point for test burns, not a final answer.

Diameter Is the #1 Factor

Wick manufacturers size their products primarily by the diameter of the container, not the depth or volume. A wider jar needs a larger wick (or multiple wicks) to generate enough heat to melt the wax all the way to the container walls. This is called achieving a full melt pool, and it should happen within the first 2-4 hours of burn time.

Wax Type Changes Everything

Different waxes have different melting points and viscosities. Soy wax melts at a lower temperature than paraffin but has a higher viscosity, meaning it needs more heat (a larger wick) to achieve the same melt pool. Beeswax sits at the opposite end: high melting point, dense structure, and needs an even larger wick to burn properly.

Wooden and zinc wick sizes

Read this before using the tables below. These are the widest containers each wick has been rated for, not recommendations for your candle. Treat every figure as an upper bound and start at least one size below it. An over-wicked candle produces a tall flame, soot, and a container hot enough to crack or to burn you — the failure that actually matters. Under-wicking only leaves wax on the glass. Burn test every wick and wax combination yourself before you sell anything.

Wooden wicks are sized by name rather than number, and the wax matters more here than it does for cotton. Lone Star Candle Supply rates them separately for soy and paraffin, and the difference is large enough that a single column would be misleading — a Small wooden wick is not recommended in soy at all. Where our sources disagreed we have used the smaller figure:

Zinc core wicks are cotton braid around a zinc centre. They hold themselves upright while the wax sets, which is why beginners like them. They mushroom more readily than coreless wicks, and a mushrooming zinc wick sheds carbon into the melt pool, so size down rather than up and trim to 1/4 inch before every burn:

Why two wick charts give you different answers

If you have looked up the same wick in two places and got numbers an inch and a half apart, you are not misreading them. Published charts really do disagree. For a CD 12, Lone Star Candle Supply lists 3.25–3.5″, while CandleScience puts the same wick at roughly 2.7–2.94″ in Golden Brands 464 soy.

Both are right, because they are answering different questions. A generic series rating — the kind most supply shops publish, and the basis for the chart above — describes what the wick does in an easy wax with little fragrance. A wax-specific chart is the result of burn tests in one named wax at a stated fragrance load. CandleScience tests at 1.2 oz per pound, about 7.5% fragrance, and soy carrying that much oil needs more wick than the generic rating suggests.

There is a third number in circulation that is easy to mistake for the other two. Wick manufacturers publish a melt pool diameter — Stabilo rates a CD 10 at 2.30″ and a CD 26 at 3.00″. Those figures are smaller than the containers the same wicks are sold for, and that is not a contradiction: a melt pool measured in a reference wax is not the same thing as a container recommendation, because a candle burns hotter as the flame travels down and heat is trapped by the glass. Do not read a melt pool spec as a container maximum, and do not use one to justify jumping up two wick sizes.

So: if your supplier publishes a chart for the exact wax you run, trust theirs over any general table, including this one. If they do not, start from the generic size, then expect to move up if you are in soy, running fragrance above about 8%, or using dye — pigment particles clog the wick and restrict fuel flow. Move up one size at a time and re-test in between; do not jump two sizes because a chart elsewhere said so. When your container falls between two sizes, always take the smaller one. An under-wicked candle leaves a ring of wax on the glass, which you can fix on the next pour. An over-wicked one gives you a tall flame, soot, and a container that gets too hot to hold, which you cannot fix once it is in someone else’s house.

Sizing data above compiled from published guides by Lone Star Candle Supply, CandleScience, and The Flaming Candle Company, checked against each other in August 2026. Where they disagreed, the smaller figure is shown. These suppliers test without dye at moderate fragrance loads, so your results will differ. Nothing here replaces your own burn testing, and none of it is a safety certification.

Pro Tip: Always test burn at least 3 candles before committing to a production wick size. Burn each test candle for a minimum of 4 hours and check for tunneling, mushrooming, soot, and flame height. Write down your observations for every test.