The abstract definition of chemical potential given above—total change in free energy per extra mole of substance—is more specifically called total chemical potential. If two locations have different total chemical potentials for a species, some of it may be due to potentials associated with "external" force fields (electric potential energy, gravitational potential energy, etc.), while the rest would be due to "internal" factors (density, temperature, etc.) Therefore, the total chemical potential can be split into internal chemical potential and external chemical potential:
where
i.e., the external potential is the sum of electric potential, gravitational potential, etc. (where q and m are the charge and mass of the species, V and h are the electric potential and height of the container, respectively, and g is the acceleration due to gravity). The internal chemical potential includes everything else besides the external potentials, such as density, temperature, and enthalpy.  This formalism can be understood by assuming that the total energy of a system, , is the sum of two parts: an internal energy, , and an external energy due to the interaction of each particle with an external field, .  The definition of chemical potential applied to  yields the above expression for .
The phrase "chemical potential" sometimes means "total chemical potential", but that is not universal. In some fields, in particular electrochemistry, semiconductor physics, and solid-state physics, the term "chemical potential" means internal chemical potential, while the term electrochemical potential is used to mean total chemical potential.