Abstract The jet energy calibration and its uncertainties are derived from measurements of the calorimeter response to single particles in both data and Monte Carlo simulation using proton–proton collisions at $$\sqrt{s} = 13$$ s = 13  TeV collected with the ATLAS detector during Run 2 at the Large Hadron Collider. The jet calibration uncertainty for anti- $$k_T$$ k T jets with a jet radius parameter of R $$_\textrm{jet} = 0.4$$ jet = 0.4 and in the central jet rapidity region is about 2.5% for transverse momenta ( $$p_{\text {T}}$$ p T ) of 20  $$\text {GeV}$$ GeV , about $$0.5\%$$ 0.5 % for $$p_{\text {T}} =300$$ p T = 300   $$\text {GeV}$$ GeV and $$0.7\%$$ 0.7 % for $$p_{\text {T}} =4$$ p T = 4   $$\text {TeV}$$ TeV . Excellent agreement is found with earlier determinations obtained from $$p_\textrm{T}$$ p T -balance based in situ methods ( $$Z/\gamma $$ Z / γ +jets). The combination of these two independent methods results in the most precise jet energy measurement achieved so far with the ATLAS detector with a relative uncertainty of $$0.3\%$$ 0.3 % at $$p_\textrm{T}=300$$ p T = 300  GeV and $$0.6\%$$ 0.6 % at 4 TeV. The jet energy calibration is also derived with the single-particle calorimeter response measurements separately for quark- and gluon-induced jets and furthermore for jets with R $$_\textrm{jet}$$ jet varying from 0.2 to 1.0 retaining the correlations between these measurements. Differences between inclusive jets and jets from boosted top-quark decays, with and without grooming the soft jet constituents, are also studied.