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READING LEVELS | GRADE 1 TO COLLEGE

Reading levels by grade

Every US school grade maps to a rough readability band. The two numbers people quote most are the Flesch reading-ease score, where a higher number means easier text, and the Flesch-Kincaid grade, where a higher number means harder text. Pick a grade below to see what writing at that level looks like, with example sentences and tips for hitting it.

The Flesch reading-ease scale from 0 to 100, with the standard difficulty bandsA horizontal scale from 0 (very difficult) to 100 (very easy), split into the standard Flesch reading-ease bands: very difficult, difficult, fairly difficult, standard, fairly easy, easy, and very easy.HarderEasier0305060708090100
  • Very difficult 0-30
  • Difficult 30-50
  • Fairly difficult 50-60
  • Standard 60-70
  • Fairly easy 70-80
  • Easy 80-90
  • Very easy 90-100
Flesch reading ease runs 0 to 100: 0 is the hardest prose, 100 the simplest.

These bands come from the standard Flesch reading-ease table. The simplest early-reader text scores in the nineties and above, ordinary adult writing sits in the sixties and seventies, and dense academic prose drops into the thirties and forties. The average adult in the United States and the United Kingdom reads comfortably at around an eighth-grade level, which is why so much public writing aims there. None of these numbers is a hard cut-off; they are a guide to where a piece of text will feel easy or hard for a given reader.

To measure a real passage rather than guess, paste it into the reading level analyzer, which reports the Flesch score, the Flesch-Kincaid grade, and several other readability measures at once.