The degree of mixing was first proposed by Danckwerts and further discussed by Zwietering more than 50 years ago to measure mixing performance of a continuous flow system. Although the measure has been widely discussed in mixing literature, there has never been a method to compute its value for a general continuous flow. In this paper, a method is developed to compute this measure for a general steady continuous flow system for the first time. The method is based on the recently developed mean age theory. The governing equations for the mean age and higher moments of age are also derived for different types of tracer introduction other than pulse input in the current mean age theory. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.