Surface plasmons in metallic nanostructures can confine the optical field within the region of subwavelength, even nanometer scale, and thus enhance the light-matter interaction and other physical processes, which will lead the plasmon optics to possess attractive applications in many areas. However, the " mode volume” often used to characterize field confinement in plasmonic structures is only defined phe-nomenologically and suffers ambiguity when applied to complex structures. In this work, we develop a theoretical method to characterize the field confinement based on quasi-normal mode analysis. We recognize the fact that a plasmonic resonance may result from many eigen-modes, which together contribute to the observed field confinement. An effective mode volume is introduced for quasi-normal modes and used to characterize the field confinement when the plasmonic resonance is dominated by a single quasi-normal mode. Two typical kinds of plasmonic structures are systematically examined, and the field confinement on the order of 10 nm ³–100 nm ³is confirmed. In pursuit of the ultimate field confinement, we revisit the so-called " pico-cavity” formed by an atomistic protrusion in the nano gap of the particle-on-mirror configuration. The apparent hot spot is shown to have contributions from several quasi-normal modes. The dominant one exhibits a further squeezed mode volume compared with the scenario without the protrusion, but is still well above 10 nm ³.