A parity bit, or check bit, is a bit added to a string of binary code. Parity bits are a simple form of error detecting code. Parity bits are generally applied to the smallest units of a communication protocol, typically 8-bit octets (bytes), although they can also be applied separately to an entire message string of bits.

The parity bit ensures that the total number of 1-bits in the string is even or odd. Accordingly, there are two variants of parity bits: even parity bit and odd parity bit. In the case of even parity, for a given set of bits, the bits whose value is 1 are counted. If that count is odd, the parity bit value is set to 1, making the total count of occurrences of 1s in the whole set (including the parity bit) an even number. If the count of 1s in a given set of bits is already even, the parity bit's value is 0. In the case of odd parity, the coding is reversed. For a given set of bits, if the count of bits with a value of 1 is even, the parity bit value is set to 1 making the total count of 1s in the whole set (including the parity bit) an odd number. If the count of bits with a value of 1 is odd, the count is already odd so the parity bit's value is 0. Parity is a special case of a cyclic redundancy check (CRC), where the 1-bit CRC is generated by the polynomial x+1.

In mathematics parity can refer to the evenness or oddness of an integer, which, when written in its binary form, can be determined just by examining only its least significant bit.

In information technology parity refers to the evenness or oddness, given any set of binary digits, of the number of those bits with value one. Because parity is determined by the state of every one of the bits, this property of parity—being dependent upon all the bits and changing its value from even to odd parity if any one bit changes—allows for its use in error detection and correction schemes.

In telecommunications the parity referred to by some protocols is for error-detection. The transmission medium is preset, at both end points, to agree on either odd parity or even parity. For each string of bits ready to transmit (data packet) the sender calculates its parity bit, zero or one, to make it conform to the agreed parity, even or odd. The receiver of that packet first checks that the parity of the packet as a whole is in accordance with the preset agreement, then, if there was a parity error in that packet, requests a retransmission of that packet.

In computer science the parity stripe or parity disk in a RAID provides error-correction. Parity bits are written at the rate of one parity bit per n bits, where n is the number of disks in the array. When a read error occurs, each bit in the error region is recalculated from its set of n bits. In this way, using one parity bit creates "redundancy" for a region from the size of one bit to the size of one disk. See § RAID array below.

In electronics, transcoding data with parity can be very efficient, as XOR gates output what is equivalent to a check bit that creates an even parity, and XOR logic design easily scales to any number of inputs. XOR and AND structures comprise the bulk of most integrated circuitry.

If an odd number of bits (including the parity bit) are transmitted incorrectly, the parity bit will be incorrect, thus indicating that a parity error occurred in the transmission. The parity bit is suitable only for detecting errors; it cannot correct any errors, as there is no way to determine the particular bit that is corrupted. The data must be discarded entirely, and retransmitted from scratch. On a noisy transmission medium, successful transmission can therefore take a long time or even never occur. However, parity has the advantage that it uses only a single bit and requires only a number of XOR gates to generate. See Hamming code for an example of an error-correcting code.