The ground and excited states of neutral and cationic PuO and PuO2 have been studied with multiconfigurational quantum chemical methods followed by second order perturbation theory, the CASSCF/CASPT2 method. Scalar relativistic effects and spin–orbit coupling have been included in the treatment. As literature values for the ionization energy of PuO2 are in the wide range of B6.6 eV to B10.1 eV, a central goal of the computations was to resolve these discrepancies; the theoretical results indicate that the ionization energy is near the lower end of this range. The calculated ionization energies for PuO, PuO+ and PuO2+ are in good agreement with the experimental values.