PUBG Armor Swap Calculator — When to Drop Your Vest or Helmet

🎽 Vest You're Wearing

🔋 Remaining Durability

110 50%

025%50%75%220

🎯 Pickup on the Ground

L3 wearer → fresh L2  ·  L2 wearer → fresh L1

🔫 Incoming Weapon

Base body damage from extracted game files. Class-specific chest/head multipliers and armor wear rates are applied automatically.

Verdict

— vs —

Keep Current WINNER

Shots to die —

Raw dmg soaked —

Effective HP —

Shots vest survives —

Swap to Fresh WINNER

Shots to die —

Raw dmg soaked —

Effective HP —

Shots vest survives —

How this works, in plain English

Armor in PUBG does two things at once on every bullet that hits it: it blocks some of the damage going to you, and it takes a chunk of durability for itself. When durability runs out, the armor is broken — from that point on, every shot hits you at full strength.

So there are really two clocks running at the same time:

The "how much it blocks" clock — a Level 3 piece blocks 55% of the damage, Level 2 blocks 40%, Level 1 blocks 30%. Higher tier = you take less damage per shot, even if the piece is nearly broken.
The "how long it lasts" clock — durability runs down with every hit. A fresh piece has all of it. A damaged piece has less. Once it hits zero, the next shot lands at full damage.

That's the whole trade-off. A near-broken Spec-Ops vest still blocks more per shot than a fresh Military vest — but it might only block one or two more shots before it breaks. A fresh Military vest blocks less per shot, but it'll keep blocking for a lot longer. The calculator just simulates the fight under both options and tells you which one keeps you alive longer.

A few extra details it accounts for:

Different bullets eat armor at different speeds. SMGs are gentle on armor, ARs are average, snipers chew through it fast.
Snipers also hit harder to the chest than other classes (PUBG applies a 1.3× multiplier on chest shots), so vest math against snipers is much more punishing than it looks.
Helmet mode uses head-shot damage — the weapon's base damage multiplied by its class head multiplier (around 2×–2.5×), which is why helmets break so much faster than vests.
Everything is point-blank, no falloff. Long-range engagements deal a bit less damage, so any L3 keeps a slight edge for a little longer than the calculator shows.

All damage values come straight from the extracted PUBG game files. Armor wear rates are community-tested averages per weapon class and are accurate to within a hit or two — treat the crossover thresholds as a tight estimate, not a frame-perfect rule.