Net atomic charges (NACs) are widely used in all chemical sciences to concisely summarize key information about the partitioning of electrons among atoms in materials. Although widely used, there is currently no atomic population analysis method suitable for being used as a default method in quantum chemistry programs. To address this challenge, we introduce a new atoms-in-materials method with the following nine properties: (1) exactly one electron distribution is assigned to each atom, (2) core electrons are assigned to the correct host atom, (3) NACs are formally independent of the basis set type because they are functionals of the total electron distribution, (4) the assigned atomic electron distributions give an efficiently converging polyatomic multipole expansion, (5) the assigned NACs usually follow Pauling scale electronegativity trends, (6) NACs for a particular element have good transferability among different conformations that are equivalently bonded, (7) the assigned NACs are chemically consistent with the assigned atomic spin moments, (8) the method has predictably rapid and robust convergence to a unique solution, and (9) the computational cost of charge partitioning scales linearly with increasing system size. Across a broad range of material types, the DDEC6 NACs reproduced electron transfer trends, core electron binding energy shift trends, and electrostatic potentials across multiple system conformations with excellent accuracy compared to other charge assignment methods. Due to non-nuclear attractors, Baders quantum chemical topology could not assign NACs for some of these materials. The DDEC6 method alleviates the bifurcation or runaway charges problem exhibited by earlier DDEC variants and the Iterative Hirshfeld method. These characteristics make the DDEC6 method ideally suited for use as a default charge assignment method in quantum chemistry programs.
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