How much cream is enough?
Dermatology has a precise answer, and it fits on your finger. Pick the areas you're treating and your schedule, and this calculator converts the standard fingertip-unit tables into grams per application, grams per course — and exactly how long that tube in your bathroom will hold out.
The fingertip unit, in ten seconds
One fingertip unit (FTU) is the ribbon of cream squeezed from a standard 5 mm nozzle along the last segment of an adult index finger — crease to tip. It weighs about 0.5 g and covers a patch of skin around two flat adult handprints (roughly 1.6% of body surface). Every dose below is built from that unit.
Who is being treated?
The published children's table uses combined regions — arm + hand and leg + foot together — and has no separate scalp figure, so the area chips adjust to match it. Always confirm children's doses with your prescriber.
Where are you applying it?
Arms, hands, legs and feet: tap once for one side, tap again for both. Each limb's figure already covers its full circumference — front and back.
How often, and for how long?
What size is your tube?
Educational guidance only — not a diagnosis or a prescription. Follow your prescriber's directions; when in doubt, ask a board-certified dermatologist.
Your dosing settings — saved on this device, and to your free account when you're signed in. See or clear it in Your data.
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Where these numbers come from
The fingertip unit was defined by Long and Finlay in 1991 as a practical, repeatable way to measure topical doses without scales: one unit is the cream expressed from a 5 mm nozzle along the terminal segment of an adult index finger, weighing about 0.5 g and covering roughly two adult handprints of skin. From that unit, dermatology derived a standard table of doses per body region — 2.5 FTU for the face and neck, 3 for an arm, 6 for a leg, 7 for the front or back of the trunk, about 40 for the entire adult body. A companion paediatric table (Long, Mills and Finlay, 1998) scales those figures down across four age bands, using combined arm-and-hand and leg-and-foot regions. This calculator sums the published figures for the areas you select and multiplies by 0.5 g per unit.
The schedule math is deliberately unglamorous: grams per application, times applications per day (alternate-day and twice-weekly schedules average out across the week), times the length of the course. Dividing your tube size into that total tells you how many days the tube survives and how many tubes the full course needs — the question pharmacists get asked daily and tubes never answer. One honest caveat: fingertip-unit dosing exists for prescribed topicals, where both under- and over-application have real costs. It is educational guidance, not medical advice, and it never overrides your prescriber's instructions.
Common questions
How much is a fingertip unit?
A fingertip unit is the line of cream or ointment squeezed from a standard 5 mm tube nozzle along the last segment of an adult index finger — from the crease to the fingertip. It weighs about 0.5 g and covers a patch of skin roughly the size of two flat adult handprints. The measure comes from Long and Finlay’s 1991 paper and has been the dermatology standard ever since.
How much steroid cream should I apply?
It depends entirely on the area being treated. The published adult figures per application are: face and neck 2.5 FTU, one hand 1, one arm 3, one leg 6, chest and abdomen 7, back and buttocks 7, one foot 2 — children need considerably less. Spread the full amount as a thin, even layer. Under-dosing a prescribed steroid is as common a cause of treatment failure as overusing it.
How many grams of cream per application?
Multiply the fingertip units for your body areas by 0.5 g. The face and neck take 2.5 FTU, so about 1.25 g per application; one whole leg is 6 FTU, about 3 g. A full adult whole-body application works out to roughly 40 FTU — around 20 g of product each time, which is why eczema-scale moisturizing goes through tubs, not tubes.
How long does a 30g tube last?
It comes down to area times frequency. Treating the face and neck twice a day uses about 2.5 g daily, so a 30 g tube lasts roughly 12 days. One arm twice daily burns 3 g a day — about 10 days. A whole-body application uses about 20 g, so 30 g barely covers a day and a half. The calculator above runs this arithmetic for any combination of areas, schedule, and tube size.
Can you use too much hydrocortisone?
Yes. Over-the-counter 1% hydrocortisone is one of the mildest steroids, but piling on more than the fingertip-unit amount, using it on thin skin like the eyelids, or continuing for weeks on end raises the risk of skin thinning, rebound redness, and masked infections. Extra cream doesn’t work faster — it just increases absorption. If a patch isn’t improving after about a week of correct use, that’s a see-a-dermatologist signal, not a use-more signal.