Is 120 a good IQ?

Only about 1 in 11 people score 120 or higher. That puts you 5 points into the band between one and two standard deviations above the mean, where this site uses the label Superior.

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

Scores here are well within what standard tests measure precisely, so a 120 from a good, supervised test is a meaningful signal rather than noise.

Careers are chosen, not assigned by score. Research on general mental ability, summarised in work such as Schmidt and Hunter (1998), suggests a 120 helps most in complex roles and during training.

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.

In most careers the advantage shows most at the start, when there is a lot to learn quickly. Later on, experience and judgement matter more.

At 120, the edge over average is 20 points. In everyday terms it is subtle and shows up in small ways:

• 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.
• Skills such as writing, coding or playing an instrument still take years of practice to master.

On a bell curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, about 9.1% of people score 120 or higher. Applied to whole populations:

Compare the neighbours: 115 or higher is about 1 in 6, 120 or higher is 1 in 11, and 125 or higher is 1 in 21. Each point up here adds roughly 13% to the rarity.

What your 120 could really be. If you retook a well-made test, landing at 115 or at 125 would be unremarkable. That is the difference between beating 84.1% and 95.2% of people, and short online tests are noisier still.

Which scale was it on? A 120 reported on an SD 16 scale converts to about 119 on the usual SD 15 scale, and one from an SD 24 scale (seen in some Cattell-style results) to about 113. Check which scale your score report used.

Retrospective estimates for historical figures rarely go this low, because they are only made for people with exceptional achievements. A few sit near 120. 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 120. Treat the education figures as rough estimates from admissions-test data rather than measured IQs.

120 is about 1.33 standard deviations above the mean, roughly the top 9.1%. Older occupational studies often reported averages in the 110s and 120s for many professional groups, with wide spread inside every group.

Meta-analyses such as Schmidt and Hunter (1998) found general mental ability predicts job performance, especially in complex roles. Prediction is not destiny, though: occupational success cannot be read from IQ alone.

Nearby scores and the round-number landmarks, so you can see how quickly the percentile changes around 120. Every row links to that score's page.

People with an IQ of 120 typically score about 1280 on the SAT and about 25 on the ACT composite. Scores vary a lot from person to person, so the range shows where about four in five land.