IQ 124

A 124 is higher than 94.5% of people. In the UK alone, roughly 3.7 million people would score this high or higher, and the gifted line at 130 is 6 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.

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.

No job requires a 124, 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.

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.

Fields with long training, such as medicine or law, are well within reach at 124. Admissions and licensing depend on exams, grades and persistence, not on an IQ score.

Compared with someone at 100, a person at 124 is 1.60 standard deviations quicker on the kind of reasoning IQ tests sample. Day to day that usually looks like needing fewer examples to grasp a new idea, not like knowing things without effort.

• You tend to spot the pattern in a problem sooner, especially with numbers, diagrams or rules.
• Long instructions are easier to hold in mind without writing them down.
• Slow explanations can feel tedious, and you may prefer to skip ahead.

On a bell curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, about 5.5% of people score 124 or higher. Applied to whole populations:

An IQ of 124 or higher is 1.9 times rarer than 119 or higher, and 129 or higher is 2.1 times rarer again. At this point on the curve, each extra point makes a score about 15% rarer.

What your 124 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 124 really means somewhere from 119 to 129. 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 124 stands as it is. If the report used SD 16 it equals about 123, and if it used SD 24 about 115. 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 124. Every figure below is a retrospective estimate, not a measured score. Open a profile to see the evidence and how confident anyone can be.

A few degree, university and job profiles on this site carry IQ benchmarks close to 124. Treat the education figures as rough estimates from admissions-test data rather than measured IQs.

The scores one and five points either side of 124, plus the round numbers from 100 to 150, side by side. Tap any score for its full page.

People with an IQ of 124 typically score about 1340 on the SAT and about 27 on the ACT composite. Scores vary a lot from person to person, so the range shows where about four in five land.