Is 115 a good IQ?

A 115 is higher than 84.1% of people. In the UK alone, roughly 11 million people would score this high or higher, and the gifted line at 130 is 15 points further up.

At this level the advantage is consistent rather than dramatic. Unfamiliar puzzles, dense reading and new systems are likely to feel a little easier for you than for most people around you.

Most people at 115 were never labelled gifted at school, and many never took a formal test. It is the kind of score people underrate because it does not come with a label.

No job requires a 115, and no score guarantees one. What research does show is that general reasoning ability predicts training speed and job performance, most strongly in complex roles. Large meta-analyses such as Schmidt and Hunter (1998) are the usual reference.

Fields that reward this profile include engineering, analysis, teaching, nursing, law, finance, software and skilled technical trades, where learning new material is part of the job.

If you are choosing a path, treat 115 as a reason to take on demanding material, not as a filter on which options are open to you.

Here is how a 115 tends to show up outside a test, bearing in mind that plenty of people at this level notice none of it:

• You tend to spot the pattern in a problem sooner, especially with numbers, diagrams or rules.
• New tools and apps feel intuitive faster, because you infer how they work.
• Quick reasoning does not protect against bias. It can make a confident wrong answer more persuasive.

Scoring 115 or higher is a 16% share of everyone. Scaled up to whole populations, that works out as:

Going from 110 to 115 makes a score 1.6 times rarer, and going on to 120 multiplies the rarity by another 1.7. Near 115, each single point adds about 11% to the rarity.

What your 115 could really be. If you retook a well-made test, landing at 110 or at 120 would be unremarkable. That is the difference between beating 74.8% and 90.9% of people, and short online tests are noisier still.

Which scale was it on? Most modern tests use a standard deviation of 15, which is what this page assumes. If your 115 came from a test using an SD of 16, it is about 114 on the SD 15 scale. From an SD 24 scale, used by some Cattell-style reports, it is about 109.

Retrospective estimates for historical figures rarely go this low, because they are only made for people with exceptional achievements. A few sit near 115. Treat these as informed guesses from biographies rather than results. Each profile sets out what its estimate rests on.

A few degree, university and job profiles on this site carry IQ benchmarks close to 115. Treat the education figures as rough estimates from admissions-test data rather than measured IQs.

115 is exactly one standard deviation above the mean (100 + 15), higher than about 84.1% of people. In a class of 30, around 5 would typically score this high or higher.

It marks the upper edge of the range where two in three people land. An IQ score cannot be converted reliably into a single SAT or GCSE result, because those tests also measure taught knowledge.

How 115 stacks up against the scores just around it and the round numbers people usually ask about. Each score links to its own page.

People with an IQ of 115 typically score about 1210 on the SAT and about 23 on the ACT composite. Scores vary a lot from person to person, so the range shows where about four in five land.