Is My IQ Score Good?

Is 120 IQ good? What about 130 or 160? See exactly what percentage of the population you outrank using our detailed IQ percentile table.

Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist

Generally, a higher IQ is better for a person. Most beneficial life outcomes in employment, education, health, and everyday life are more common in higher-IQ people and less common in people with lower IQs. All things being equal, it is better to have a higher IQ than a lower IQ, and there is no known point at which this ceases to be true.

One way to determine how good an IQ score is to consider how it compares to other scores. IQ scores have an average of 100, and a standard deviation (which measures how spread out scores are) of 15. When graphed, they form a bell-shaped curve called a normal distribution, which is pictured below. These properties allow statisticians and psychologists to make some very accurate estimates of how a particular IQ score compares to the general population.

Because a higher IQ is almost always better to have, calculating the percentages of the population with a lower IQ is often a useful method of determining how “good” an IQ score is. For example, if someone has an IQ of 100, then their IQ is higher than 50% of the population. That’s better than having an IQ of 85, which is higher than 15.87% of the population, as shown in the image above.

Whether any one particular score is considered “good” also depends on what the score will be used for. The minimum IQ needed to participate in a given educational program, job, or other activity varies. This means that an IQ of 90 may be good in one environment (e.g., working at a grocery store) and very bad in another (e.g., working as a lawyer). Context matters when interpreting IQ scores.

Watch “What Is the Flynn Effect?” with Dr. Russell T. Warne on the Riot IQ YouTube channel to understand how shifting score norms affect how IQ results are interpreted over time.