The jet energy scale (JES) and its systematic uncertainty are determined for jets measured with the ATLAS detector using proton–proton collision data with a centre-of-mass energy of s=7  TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.7 fb-1 . Jets are reconstructed from energy deposits forming topological clusters of calorimeter cells using the anti- kt algorithm with distance parameters R=0.4 or R=0.6 , and are calibrated using MC simulations. A residual JES correction is applied to account for differences between data and MC simulations. This correction and its systematic uncertainty are estimated using a combination of in situ techniques exploiting the transverse momentum balance between a jet and a reference object such as a photon or a Z boson, for 20≤p<1000<4.5 . The effect of multiple proton–proton interactions is corrected for, and an uncertainty is evaluated using in situ techniques. The smallest JES uncertainty of less than 1 % is found in the central calorimeter region ( , the uncertainty is about 3 %. A consistent JES estimate is found using measurements of the calorimeter response of single hadrons in proton–proton collisions and test-beam data, which also provide the estimate for p>1  TeV. The calibration of forward jets is derived from dijet p jets at