Flag colour codes: why the answer changes from site to site

31 August 2026 · Shyam Verma

My daughter was colouring the tiranga for a school chart and asked me which orange to use. I did what you would do and searched for the hex code, which is how I ended up holding #FF9933 from one site, #FF671F from the next, and a Pantone number with no hex at all from a third, while she sat there with a sketch pen waiting for an answer.

It turns out none of them was wrong. The question was.

The short answer

Of the five flags I looked up, not one is defined by a hex code. Countries reach for dye and print standards instead — Pantone numbers, Munsell notation, CIE coordinates — because a flag is cloth and ink long before it is a picture on a screen. So a hex code for a flag is usually somebody's conversion, and different people convert differently. There are exceptions: Canada's Federal Identity Program publishes the flag red as #FF0000 outright.

That is the whole explanation. The rest of this is the detail, plus what I would actually do the night before the chart is due.

What the standards actually say

I looked up five flags: one because it is ours, and four because our own search traffic keeps landing on them. Here is what each one actually specifies.

India. The flag is covered by IS 1, the Bureau of Indian Standards specification, and the colours are given in CIE 1931 colour space coordinates — X, Y and Z values with a brightness percentage. Navy blue for the Ashoka Chakra sits in a separate standard, IS 1803:1973. Wikipedia's article converts those coordinates to approximate sRGB values of #FF671F for saffron, #046A38 for green and #06038D for navy, and is careful to call them approximate. The nearest Pantone matches it gives are 165 C, 2258 C and 2735 C.

Japan. This one is my favourite, because the law is so short about it. The 1999 Act on the National Flag and Anthem says the disc is 紅色 — beni iro, a deep red — and stops there. No code, no number, just a word. The technical specifications live elsewhere: Munsell 5R 4/12 from a 1973 defence standard, and DIC 156 with CMYK 0-100-90-0 from a 1995 official development assistance manual.

Colombia. The odd one out, and the one that surprised me: Colombia's colours have never been fixed by law. The Pantone numbers everyone quotes — 116, 287, 186 — are a recommendation from the FIAV, the International Federation of Vexillological Associations. They convert to #FFCD00, #003087 and #C8102E. The yellow band takes up half the flag's height, with blue and red splitting the rest — a 2:1:1 arrangement rather than three equal stripes.

Singapore. The government manufacturing guidance names Pantone 032 for the red. A common conversion of 032C is #EE2536.

Egypt. Pantone 186 for the red and Pantone 116 for the gold eagle — Wikipedia's specification table sources those to the London 2012 flags and anthems manual, not to an Egyptian government document. The current design was made official on 4 October 1984, at a 2:3 ratio.

Notice that Colombia's yellow and Egypt's gold are both Pantone 116, and both reds are Pantone 186. I first read that as two independent sources agreeing with each other. It is not: both Wikipedia articles trace those values to the same document, the Flags and Anthems Manual produced for the London 2012 Olympics. Some of what circulates as official flag colour data is that one sports-event style guide, quoted onward.

Why the conversions disagree

A Pantone number describes an ink, and Munsell describes a physical colour chip you can hold up against a thing to compare it. CIE 1931 is a different sort of animal — a description of what a standard human eye sees under a defined light. None of them maps cleanly onto sRGB, the colour space your phone screen uses, because sRGB cannot reproduce every colour those systems can name.

So the conversion needs a judgement call, and the judgement call depends on assumptions — which white point, which rendering intent, whether you are matching a coated or uncoated paper stock. Two careful people can convert Pantone 186 and land a few points apart, and both are defensible. For Egypt there is no official hex sitting behind them to settle the argument.

This is why searching for a flag colour code is unsatisfying in a way that searching for a capital city usually is not. Most capitals have one answer.

A note about our own flag pages

We have a page for each of the 250 flags in our dataset, and 244 of them list hex codes next to the colours. I do not know where those codes came from — the dataset in our repo records no source, which is its own small embarrassment and now on the list to fix. What I do know is that in the five cases I checked they do not match the values you get by converting the standards above. Our Colombia page gives #FCD116 for the yellow where Pantone 116 converts to #FFCD00. Our Japan page gives #BC002D; Wikipedia's own conversion of Munsell 5R 4/12 is #B0000F. Which is closer to a flag actually flying in Tokyo, I have no idea.

I would rather say that plainly here than have you find it yourself and wonder which of us to trust. The dataset values are the ones you will meet on plenty of other sites too, which is genuinely useful if you want your chart to look like the flags your child sees online. They are not a national specification. Where one exists at all, the sources at the foot of this post are where to start.

Sorting this out properly across all 250 flags is a bigger job than one evening, and it is on the list.

What I would actually do the night before

Honestly, almost none of this matters for a school chart.

Pick a red that reads as red at arm's length and move on. A child's chart is judged on whether the stripes are the right way up and the chakra has roughly the right number of spokes, not on whether the saffron is within a few points of IS 1. The colour codes are for the parent who wanted to know, which on that particular evening was me.

If you do want to get close, a few things help more than the hex code does:

Look at the flag large and flat first. Colour perception shifts badly on a small swatch. Open the country's flag page and look at the whole flag before choosing a pen.

Get the proportions right before the colour. Colombia's yellow band is half the flag. Egypt's ratio is 2:3. A chart with the right shapes and approximate colours looks far more correct than the reverse.

Mixing beats matching. If your child is old enough to be curious about why the red on screen is not the red in the pencil box, Color Mixer is a more useful twenty minutes than any code. Mixing a colour teaches more about colour than copying one does.

Try it on epotli

Flags seem to stick young, in my experience — the shapes and colours give a child something to hold on to.

Flag Quiz shows a flag and asks your child to pick the country from four options.
Find the Flag runs it the other way — we name a country, your child picks its flag.
Locate the Country is the hardest of the three: a flag appears and your child spins a globe to find where it belongs.

Most flags also have a colouring version, like colour the India flag or colour the Colombia flag, where the child taps regions to fill them in. Those use an artwork palette rather than any national standard, for the same reason a poster-paint set does: the whole game runs on a shared box of 26 colours covering all 241 flags, so each one gets a close-enough red rather than its own.

Common questions

Is there an official hex code for the Indian flag?

No. IS 1, the Bureau of Indian Standards specification, defines the flag's colours as CIE 1931 coordinates rather than as hex values, with navy blue covered separately by IS 1803:1973. The sRGB values commonly quoted — saffron #FF671F, green #046A38, navy #06038D — are approximate conversions of those coordinates, not the standard itself.

Why do different websites give different colour codes for the same flag?

Because they are converting from different source standards, or making different assumptions during the same conversion. Occasionally one site has quoted a country that does publish a hex, as Canada does, while another converted the Pantone. Pantone, Munsell and CIE coordinates all describe colours that sRGB cannot reproduce exactly, so the conversion involves a judgement call. Two careful conversions of the same Pantone number can land a few points apart.

What colour is the red on the Japanese flag?

The 1999 Act on the National Flag and Anthem describes it only as 紅色 (beni iro), a deep red, without giving a code. Technical specifications elsewhere give Munsell 5R 4/12 from a 1973 defence standard, and DIC 156 with CMYK 0-100-90-0 from a 1995 official development assistance manual.

Is #FCD116 the official yellow of the Colombian flag?

No — but neither is anything else, because Colombia has never fixed its flag colours by law. The yellow usually quoted is Pantone 116, a FIAV recommendation used in the London 2012 Olympics manual, which converts to roughly #FFCD00. #FCD116 is a widely circulated value with no national standing, which is why you will see it on many sites including this one.

Does my child need the exact colours for a school chart?

Very unlikely. Getting the stripe order, the proportions and any central emblem roughly right matters far more than matching a specific shade. Save the colour codes for the child who asks why, which is a better reason to learn them anyway.

Where can I find the specification for a flag not listed here?

Start with the country's own government or national symbols page, then check the Wikipedia article for that flag, which usually reproduces the specification and cites where it came from. Look for the words Pantone, Munsell or CIE — if you find a hex code with no standard behind it, treat it as somebody's conversion.