There are two types of units in CSS. Absolute and relative units. Pixels are the commonly most used absolute unit.

Relative units are all mostly commonly used:

Percentages

Percentages are always relative to some other value. Sometimes its a value from the parent and other times its a value from the element itself:

  • width will be a percentage of the parent;
  • line-height will be a percentage of the font size of the element itself.

Ems

Ems are a relative unit with font-size. 1em equals the font size of the parent. 2 ems is twice the font size of the parent and so on.

With other properties, em is equal to the computed font-size of the element itself.

Rems

Relative to the root HTML element’s font size. Often easier to work with over Ems. If the root font size is 20px, 1 rem is always 20 pxs.