IQ 118

Only about 1 in 9 people score 118 or higher. That puts you 3 points into the band between one and two standard deviations above the mean, where this site uses the label High Average.

This is a common range among people in academic and professional work, but it is far from a requirement. Plenty of people outside it do the same jobs well.

The gap between you and the average person is real but modest. On any single task, effort, experience and knowledge can easily outweigh it.

Careers are chosen, not assigned by score. Research on general mental ability, summarised in work such as Schmidt and Hunter (1998), suggests a 118 helps most in complex roles and during training.

Where you end up depends heavily on interest, persistence and people skills. None of those is measured by an IQ test.

If you are choosing a path, treat 118 as a reason to take on demanding material, not as a filter on which options are open to you.

At 118, the edge over average is 18 points. In everyday terms it is subtle and shows up in small ways:

• Slow explanations can feel tedious, and you may prefer to skip ahead.
• Quick reasoning does not protect against bias. It can make a confident wrong answer more persuasive.
• Skills such as writing, coding or playing an instrument still take years of practice to master.

Scoring 118 or higher is a 12% share of everyone. Scaled up to whole populations, that works out as:

Going from 113 to 118 makes a score 1.7 times rarer, and going on to 123 multiplies the rarity by another 1.8. Near 118, each single point adds about 12% to the rarity.

What your 118 could really be. Treat any single score as the centre of a range. For a good supervised test, about 5 points either side is typical, so 118 really means somewhere from 113 to 123. Online tests are less precise than that.

Which scale was it on? Score reports do not always say. On the common SD 15 scale your 118 stands as it is. If the report used SD 16 it equals about 117, and if it used SD 24 about 111. The percentile follows the converted number.

Retrospective estimates for historical figures rarely go this low, because they are only made for people with exceptional achievements. A few sit near 118. None of these are test scores. They are estimates from biographical evidence, and each profile explains its basis.

A few degree, university and job profiles on this site carry IQ benchmarks close to 118. Treat the education figures as rough estimates from admissions-test data rather than measured IQs.

Nearby scores and the round-number landmarks, so you can see how quickly the percentile changes around 118. Every row links to that score's page.

People with an IQ of 118 typically score about 1250 on the SAT and about 24 on the ACT composite. Scores vary a lot from person to person, so the range shows where about four in five land.