Abstract The centrality of heavy-ion collisions is directly related to the created medium in these interactions. A procedure to determine the centrality of collisions with the LHCb detector is implemented for lead-lead collisions at √s NN = 5 TeV and lead-neon fixed-target collisions at √s NN = 69 GeV. The energy deposits in the electromagnetic calorimeter are used to determine and define the centrality classes. The correspondence between the number of participants and the centrality for the lead-lead collisions is in good agreement with the correspondence found in other experiments, and the centrality measurements for the lead-neon collisions presented here are performed for the first time...