Abstract An analysis was performed to establish a relationship between specific damping capacity and loss angle for materials with arbitrary loss angle. The motivation for this work is that the usual relationship is only valid for low loss materials and leads to some confusion when the specific damping capacity is greater than one. In this paper, two equations for specific damping capacity are derived that are valid for all values of loss angle. One equation uses the usual definition of specific damping capacity as dissipated energy per cycle divided by maximum stored energy. The other equation defines specific damping capacity as dissipated energy per cycle divided by work done per cycle. The latter equation has the desirable property of varying between zero and one. The analysis done in the time domain is extended to include analysis of hysteresis curves as well.