IQ 86

If you lined up 100 random adults by score, a 86 would put you at about position 18 from the bottom. That is inside the 85 to 115 band that roughly 46 million people in the UK share.

Within this range, scores a few points apart are closer together than the test's own margin of error. A 83 and a 89 could easily be the same person on different days.

This is the shared result of most of the people you know, from colleagues to friends to family. Nothing about it is a barrier to the things people usually care about.

Put 86 next to 100 and the difference is 0.93 of a standard deviation. On timed abstract puzzles that shows as being a touch slower or less accurate; outside the test, other things matter far more.

School results in this range depend heavily on teaching, effort and interest. The same score turns up in students with top grades and in students who struggle.

Being in the average range says nothing about ambition. Careers, qualifications and creative work are open across it, and many people in it are highly skilled in their field.

An overall 86 can hide a very uneven profile. Two people with the same total can be strong at quite different things, so the useful question is which kinds of question went well for you.

• Lean on structure. Checklists, notes and routines free up working memory for the hard part of a problem.
• Protect sleep and focus. Both beat cramming for anything you need to remember.
• Play to your pattern. If visual puzzles felt easier than number ones, that is useful information about how you learn.

If IQ follows the standard bell curve, 18% of people score 86 or lower. Here is what that share means across whole populations:

Scoring 86 or lower is about 1 in 6. At 91 or lower it becomes 1 in 4, and at 81 or lower 1 in 10, which shows how quickly the curve fills up towards the middle.

What your 86 could really be. If you retook a well-made test, landing at 81 or at 91 would be unremarkable. That is the difference between beating 10.3% and 27.4% 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 86 came from a test using an SD of 16, it is about 87 on the SD 15 scale. From an SD 24 scale, used by some Cattell-style reports, it is about 91.

Nobody famous has a verified IQ in most cases, and retrospective estimates are only made for a narrow group.

The estimates on our historical profiles run from 115 to 250, so none lands close to 86. Historians only estimate IQs for people who did something extraordinary, which skews the list. It says nothing about what famous people could actually score.

Nearby scores and the round-number landmarks, so you can see how quickly the percentile changes around 86. Every row links to that score's page.

People with an IQ of 86 typically score about 820 on the SAT and about 14 on the ACT composite. Scores vary a lot from person to person, so the range shows where about four in five land.