The confidence associated with the hot-channel analysis of the thermal performance of a given reactor must necessarily depend upon the number of limiting points in the core. That is, if there are N equally limiting hot channels, the probability of nonfailure is the single-channel probability of nonfailure raised to the N'th power. Usually, no account of this fact is taken in thermal analyses, which implies an acceptance of a reduction in confidence level if there is more than one limiting channel. In this paper, a simple prescription is presented for determining an effective hot-channel factor that would maintain the same confidence level of a singlechannel case. This effective hot-channel factor (fN) is simply determined by equating the probability of any one of N channels (with hot-channel factors f) failing to the corresponding failure probability for a single pseudo channel with hot-channel factor fN. It is shown that the effective hot-channel factor may be quite a bit larger than the single-channel factor if N is large. These results suggest that not all of the performance gain resulting from flattening power distributions (thereby increasing the number of limiting channels) should be quoted because of this increase. In addition, it is shown that flattening the power distributions until each channel is equally limiting does not lead to the maximum probability of nonfailure unless the thermal capacity of each channel is the same.