The most direct way of measuring the activity of a volatile species is to measure its equilibrium partial vapor pressure. For water as solvent, the water activity a is the equilibrated relative humidity. For non-volatile components, such as sucrose or sodium chloride, this approach will not work since they do not have measurable vapor pressures at most temperatures. However, in such cases it is possible to measure the vapor pressure of the solvent instead. Using the Gibbs–Duhem relation it is possible to translate the change in solvent vapor pressures with concentration into activities for the solute.
The simplest way of determining how the activity of a component depends on pressure is by measurement of densities of solution, knowing that real solutions have deviations from the additivity of (molar) volumes of pure components compared to the (molar) volume of the solution. This involves the use of partial molar volumes, which measure the change in chemical potential with respect to pressure.
Another way to determine the activity of a species is through the manipulation of colligative properties, specifically freezing point depression. Using freezing point depression techniques, it is possible to calculate the activity of a weak acid from the relation,
where  is the total equilibrium molality of solute determined by any colligative property measurement (in this case ),  is the nominal molality obtained from titration and  is the activity of the species.
There are also electrochemical methods that allow the determination of activity and its coefficient.
The value of the mean ionic activity coefficient  of ions in solution can also be estimated with the Debye–Hückel equation, the Davies equation or the Pitzer equations.