Types are one of the most fundamental elements in the world of Pokémon. Every Pokémon has one or two types that determine their strengths and weaknesses in battle. Understanding type matchups is crucial for becoming a skilled trainer.
When a Pokémon uses a move in battle, its effectiveness depends on the defending Pokémon's type(s). Moves can be:
Many Pokémon have two types, which can result in unique defensive properties. Type effectiveness is multiplied when attacking dual-type Pokémon, potentially resulting in 4x damage or 0.25x damage.
When a Pokémon uses a move that matches one of its types, the move receives a 50% power boost. This is known as STAB and is a crucial concept in competitive battling.
Because no single type resists every matchup, competitive teams are usually built around "type coverage" — carrying moves of different types so the team has an answer to as many threats as possible. A Water-type Pokémon, for example, is strong defensively against Fire but is walled by Grass- and Dragon-types unless it also carries an Electric or Ice move. Teams also plan around common dual-type combinations: a Fire/Flying Pokémon like Charizard is 4x weak to Rock despite resisting several other types, which is exactly the kind of interaction the type chart on the right is built to surface at a glance.
The eighteen types are the oldest mechanic in Pokémon and still the one that decides most battles. The chart above tells you the multipliers; what it does not tell you is which of those multipliers matter in practice, why some types are far better than their raw numbers suggest, and where the chart quietly changed between generations.
Every attacking move is checked against the defending Pokémon's type or types, producing a multiplier of 0x, 0.25x, 0.5x, 1x, 2x or 4x. Dual types multiply together, which is where the extremes come from: a Rock/Flying Pokémon takes 4x from Electric and Rock alike, because both types are super-effective against each half.
Most players never memorise all 324 combinations, and they do not need to. The chart is dominated by a handful of high-leverage facts: Ground beats Electric, Steel and Rock; Fighting beats Normal, Rock, Steel, Ice and Dark; Fairy walls Dragon completely; and Ghost and Normal cannot touch each other at all. Learn the immunities and the two 4x-prone type pairs and the rest follows from intuition.
The three immunities are worth committing to memory because they are absolute and cannot be played around with a stat boost: Ground moves do nothing to Flying types, Ghost and Normal pass straight through one another, and Steel is immune to Poison. A missed immunity is the most common way a winning position is thrown away.
A type's value splits cleanly in two, and conflating the halves is the most common mistake in team building. Offensive value is how many things a type hits for super-effective damage; defensive value is how many things it resists.
Ground and Fighting are the best offensive types in the game — between them they hit fourteen of the eighteen types for at least neutral damage and cover the Steel and Rock walls that block most other attackers. Neither is especially good defensively. Steel is the reverse: it resists ten types, more than anything else in the game, but its offensive coverage is narrow enough that Steel attackers usually carry a secondary type to do the actual damage.
This is why mono-type teams struggle and why the strongest defensive cores pair complementary resistances rather than stacking the same one. A Steel type covers a Fairy type's Poison and Steel weaknesses; the Fairy covers the Steel's Fighting and Ground weaknesses. That reciprocity, not raw bulk, is what makes a core hold.
The chart is not fixed. Generation 2 split the old Special stat and added Dark and Steel, largely to rein in the Psychic type that had dominated Red and Blue. Generation 6 added Fairy for much the same reason, this time to answer Dragon — and in doing so made Dragon, previously close to untouchable, one of the riskier offensive types to build around.
Smaller revisions matter too. Steel lost its resistance to Ghost and Dark in Generation 6, and Ghost and Dark moves became far more usable as a result. Before Generation 4, whether a move was physical or special was determined by its type rather than the move itself, which meant a Fire-type physical attacker was mechanically impossible.
If you are comparing a matchup here against an older guide or a memory of an earlier game, the generation is usually the explanation for the discrepancy. The chart on this page reflects the current generation.
A Pokémon using a move that matches one of its own types gets a 1.5x same-type attack bonus, usually written STAB. That multiplier stacks with type effectiveness, so a super-effective STAB move lands at 3x before any stat comparison.
STAB is why raw base power is a poor way to compare moves. A 90-power STAB move from a matching attacker beats a 120-power coverage move from the same Pokémon in most situations, and it is why dual-typed attackers with two strong offensive types — Ground/Fire, Water/Dark, Fighting/Steel — end up disproportionately represented in competitive play.
There is no single strongest type, because offensive and defensive strength diverge. Ground and Fighting are the strongest offensively, hitting the most types for super-effective damage and breaking through the Steel and Rock walls that stop other attackers. Steel is the strongest defensively, resisting ten of the eighteen types. Fairy is arguably the best all-round type introduced since Generation 1, combining a Dragon immunity with solid offensive coverage.
None. No single type hits all eighteen for super-effective damage, and this is deliberate — the chart is built so that every attacking type has at least one type it cannot damage effectively. The closest practical answer is Ground plus Fighting as a coverage pair, or Ground plus Ice, which together hit almost the entire chart for at least neutral damage.
The two multipliers are multiplied together, not averaged. If both halves are weak to the same type you take 4x damage, which is how Rock/Flying Pokémon end up taking quadruple damage from Electric moves. If one half resists what the other is weak to, the multipliers cancel to neutral. An immunity always overrides a weakness, so a Flying type takes no Ground damage regardless of its other half.
No single type is without weaknesses, but some dual-type combinations come very close. Combinations built around Steel and Fairy, or Ghost and Dark, historically produce the smallest weakness lists in the game. The trade-off is almost always narrower offensive coverage or lower base stats.
Yes. Dark and Steel were added in Generation 2, Fairy in Generation 6, and several individual matchups have been revised — Steel lost its Ghost and Dark resistances in Generation 6. Type effectiveness shown on Pokemondex reflects the current generation, so figures may differ from guides written for older titles.