A comparative study of two capacitance methods to measure the effective channel length in deep-submicron MOSFETs has been made in detail. Since the reduction of the overlap capacitance in the accumulation region is smaller than the addition of the inner fringe capacitance at zero gate voltage, the capacitance method removing the parasitic capacitance in the accumulation region extracts a more accurate effective channel length than the method removing that at zero gate voltage.