Raise any base to any exponent — whole, negative, or fractional.

How to Use the Exponents Calculator

Enter a base and an exponent — try 0, a negative number, or a fraction like 0.5 or 0.333 in the exponent field to see how each case gets handled differently underneath.

Whole-number exponents are the easy case: 2^10 just means ten 2s multiplied together, which comes to 1,024. The site's original Exponent Calculator already covers that ground — this one exists for the same searches with independently written explanations, so the interesting part here is the three rules that don't follow the "multiply it out" intuition at all.

base^0 = 1                (for any base except 0)
base^(−n) = 1 ÷ base^n
base^(1/n) = nth root of base

Zero as an exponent always gives 1, no matter how large or small the base is — 5^0 and 1,000,000^0 both land on exactly 1. 0^0 is the one genuine exception, and it's not this calculator being cagey about it: mathematicians actually disagree on whether it should equal 1, equal 0, or stay undefined, depending on which branch of math is asking. Different fields pick different conventions on purpose, and both sides have a real argument.

A negative exponent doesn't mean a negative result — it means "flip me into a fraction." 2^(-3) isn't -8, it's 1 divided by 2³, or 0.125. A fractional exponent is a root wearing different notation: base^(1/2) is a square root, base^(1/3) is a cube root, and this calculator handles negative bases with odd-denominator fractional exponents correctly too — (-8)^(1/3) comes back as -2, since -2 cubed really does equal -8. The more familiar case, a negative base to the power of 1/2, has no real answer at all and gets flagged as such instead of silently returning nothing useful.