What Does My IQ Score Mean?

An IQ of 70 sits two standard deviations below the average of 100. It is the top of the Borderline band on the Wechsler scale.

Seventy is the number clinicians watch, because a diagnosis of intellectual disability needs a low score together with clear evidence of difficulty in everyday life. The score on its own is not a diagnosis. Current diagnostic guidance leans on adaptive functioning, meaning how someone actually manages daily tasks, rather than on the number alone.

It is also the score most distorted by test conditions. Language, schooling, hearing, attention and simple unfamiliarity with test formats all push it down. A 70 from a short online test is a reason to seek a proper assessment, never a finding in itself.

An IQ of 75 falls in the Borderline band, below the average range but above the level usually associated with intellectual disability.

Learning at this level tends to work better from worked examples than from rules stated first. Extra time, shorter steps and concrete language change outcomes far more than the number does.

Plenty of adults who test here hold jobs, run households and are indistinguishable in conversation from people who score much higher. The test samples a narrow slice of thinking, and it samples it under pressure.

An IQ of 80 is in the Low Average band, which covers 80 to 89 on the Wechsler scale.

About one person in eleven scores at or below 80, so this is common rather than remarkable. The gap shows up most in speed and in dense, unfamiliar written material.

It shows up much less in practical skill, in judgement built from experience, and in anything already done many times. Those are the parts of competence an IQ test never looks at.

An IQ of 85 is exactly one standard deviation below the mean, at the lower edge of the middle two thirds of the population.

Eighty-five is a boundary the scale invented, not one anybody feels. Outside a testing room, a person at 85 and a person at 95 are hard to tell apart.

The practical reading is that new abstract material needs more structure and more repetition. Once something is learned, the score stops predicting how well it is done.

An IQ of 90 sits in the lower quarter of scores, but still inside the Average band of 90 to 109.

A quarter of people score at or below 90, so this is an ordinary result rather than a warning. Most schooling and most jobs sit comfortably within reach.

Where it bites is timed, abstract, unfamiliar work. Where it does not bite at all is anything that has been practised.

An IQ of 95 is a fully average score, five points below the centre of the scale.

Five points is inside the measurement error of almost every test, including supervised clinical ones. So 95 and 100 describe the same performance recorded on two different days.

The honest reading of a single 95 is "about average". Reading it as "slightly below average" gives the number more precision than it has.

An IQ of 100 is the 50th percentile by definition. Half the reference group scores higher and half scores lower.

One hundred is not a number anyone earns. It is where the test authors placed the middle when they built the norms, which is why tests have to be renormed every decade or two.

That also means a 100 today is not the same raw performance as a 100 in 1980. Average moved. The score kept its name.

An IQ of 105 is in the upper half of the Average band, a third of a standard deviation above the middle.

The step from 100 to 105 is real but small, and it is smaller than the swing one bad night of sleep produces on a single sitting.

Read it as average with a slight lean upward. Nothing in ordinary life reliably separates 105 from 100.

An IQ of 110 is the 75th percentile, so roughly three quarters of people score at or below it. The Wechsler label for 110 to 119 is High Average.

This is the score most often searched together with a percentile, because "IQ 110" and "75th percentile" are almost the same statement. The exact figure is 74.75%.

New material tends to land faster here, particularly when it is verbal or numerical. The advantage is genuine and it is also modest. It predicts learning speed better than it predicts what a person actually does with the time saved.

An IQ of 115 sits exactly one standard deviation above the mean, the mirror image of 85.

About one person in six scores at or above 115, which is five or six people on a full bus. It is a comfortable score for degree-level study.

It is also the point where the symmetry of the scale becomes useful. A 115 is as far above the middle as an 85 is below it, and neither is unusual.

An IQ of 120 opens the Superior band, which runs from 120 to 129 on the Wechsler scale.

Twenty points above the mean is where people start reaching for the word "gifted", usually too early. Gifted programmes generally start at 130.

What 120 signals reliably is that abstract, unfamiliar problems cost less effort here than they cost most people. What it does not signal is output. Persistence and interest do more of that work than the score does.

An IQ of 125 is the 95th percentile, the line a great many selection processes quietly use.

From here upward the population thins fast. Every further five points removes roughly half the people still above you.

That thinning is also why scores in this range are harder to measure. A test needs enough hard items to separate 125 from 135, and short online tests rarely have them.

An IQ of 130 is the standard gifted and Mensa threshold, marking the top 2% of the population.

The same rank carries three different numbers depending on the test. It is 130 on a Wechsler test with a standard deviation of 15, 132 on the older Stanford-Binet with a standard deviation of 16, and 148 on the Cattell scale with a standard deviation of 24. Check which scale produced yours before comparing it with anyone.

A 130 from a supervised clinical test and a 130 from a free online test are not the same claim. Our own retake figures below show how far scores in this band travel between two sittings.

MensaMensa admits the top 2%. It accepts 130 on a Wechsler test, 132 on Stanford-Binet form L-M, and 148 on Cattell III B.

An IQ of 132 is the top-2% line on the older Stanford-Binet scale, where the standard deviation is 16. It is the same rank as 130 on a Wechsler test.

If a test reported 132, find out which scale it used before treating it as higher than 130. Very often it is the identical rank wearing a different number.

It is also one of the 33 values our own test can return, where it means the same thing as any other 132: the top two per cent of the reference group, measured with a short instrument.

An IQ of 135 is around the 99th percentile, so roughly one person in a hundred scores at or above it.

Above 130 the classification labels stop doing useful work and the arithmetic takes over. From 135, each further five points halves the number of people above you.

This is also where a short online test becomes least trustworthy. Separating 135 from 145 needs items hard enough that almost nobody gets them right, and a 33-item test does not carry many of those.

An IQ of 140 is around the 99.6th percentile. On a standard scale that is roughly one person in 261.

The 1916 Stanford-Binet classification called 140 and above "near genius or genius". Modern publishers dropped the word, partly because the long follow-up of Terman's high-scoring children turned up ordinary careers about as often as extraordinary ones.

Treat 140 as a rare test result rather than a category of person. It says the items ran out before the ability did.

An IQ of 141 is around the 99.7th percentile. If the number came from this site, it is the second-highest score our test reports.

Our test returns one of 33 values between 55 and 150, in steps of three. That is why so many people search an oddly specific number such as 141 or 147 rather than a round one.

The step size comes from having 33 items, not from precision. Among people who first scored in the 140s and then took the test again, the second score was on average 9 points lower.

An IQ of 145 is three standard deviations above the mean, around one person in 741.

Very few tests are normed well enough this high to tell 145 from 155. The standardisation samples simply do not contain enough people who score there.

The fair reading of a 145 from a short test is "very high, measured with a ruler that runs out at about this point".

An IQ of 148 means two completely different things depending on the test. On the Cattell III B scale it is the top-2% Mensa line, equal to 130 on a Wechsler test.

The Cattell scale uses a standard deviation of 24, so its numbers spread much wider around 100 for the same rank.

On a standard scale with a standard deviation of 15, by contrast, 148 is roughly one person in 1,455. Read the scale, not just the number.

An IQ of 150 is around the 99.96th percentile, roughly one person in 2,330. It is also the highest score our test reports, and the ceiling on many online tests.

Because 150 is a ceiling rather than a measurement, it is far more common as a search than as a real result. It usually means "almost everything correct", which a short test cannot separate from 160 or 170.

Our own data makes the point bluntly. Of the people who first scored 150 and then took the test again, 67.6% scored lower the second time, and their second score averaged 130. That is regression to the mean, and it is the strongest argument for reading a high online score as a wide band rather than a number.

CeilingA score at a test's maximum is a lower bound, not a point estimate. It tells you the test ran out of hard questions.