What Is a Good Readability Score?
3 min read
Short answer
The bands
Flesch Reading Ease runs from 0 to 100. Higher is easier.
| Score | Level | Typical writing |
|---|---|---|
| 90–100 | Very easy | Children’s books |
| 80–90 | Easy | Conversational English |
| 70–80 | Fairly easy | Popular fiction, good web copy |
| 60–70 | Standard | Newspapers, most business writing |
| 50–60 | Fairly difficult | Trade press, long-form journalism |
| 30–50 | Difficult | Academic and technical writing |
| 0–30 | Very difficult | Legal and specialist documents |
The companion figure, Flesch–Kincaid, converts the same measurements into a US school grade. Grade 8 to 10 corresponds roughly to the 60–70 band.
A good score depends on who is reading
The honest answer to “what is a good score” is a question back: good for whom?
Writing for a general audience — marketing pages, support documentation, public-sector information, journalism: 60–70. Plain-language guidance in both the UK and US government converges on roughly this range, and it is the target worth defaulting to.
Writing for practitioners — trade publications, developer documentation, industry analysis: 50–60 is normal and appropriate. Your reader knows the vocabulary, and simplifying it costs precision for no gain.
Academic and legal writing: 30–50, often lower. A journal article scoring 70 would probably be imprecise. This is the case where a low score is not a problem to fix.
Writing for children or for readers in a second language: 80 and up.
A low score is only a defect if your reader did not sign up for it. An insurance policy at 25 is a genuine failure. A physics paper at 25 is not.
What the formula actually measures
Flesch Reading Ease combines exactly two things and nothing else:
206.835 − 1.015 × (words ÷ sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables ÷ words)Average sentence length, and average syllables per word. That is the whole formula, and it explains both its usefulness and its limits.
It has no opinion about whether your argument holds, whether the jargon was necessary, whether the structure makes sense, or whether the piece is any good. A page of eight-word sentences made of one-syllable words scores brilliantly and may be unreadable in every way that matters.
Which is why the score is a starting point, not a target.
How to raise a score honestly
The formula responds to structure, so change the structure.
Split the long sentences. This has the largest effect by far, because sentence length is one of only two inputs. Our readability checker lists your longest sentences with their word counts so you can work down the list instead of re-reading everything. Anything over 30 words is worth a second look.
Cut the wind-ups. “It is important to note that”, “in order to”, “due to the fact that” — deletable or shorter, every time.
Use the plain word where it means the same thing. “Use” not “utilise”, “help” not “facilitate”, “about” not “approximately”. Where the longer word is more precise, keep it; precision beats a score.
Break the long paragraphs. This does not move the number at all, but it changes whether anyone reads the page, which is the actual goal.
Vary the length. A run of same-length sentences reads flat whatever the average. The checker shows the spread of your sentence lengths for exactly this reason.
The mistake to avoid
Writing to hit a number produces worse prose than writing well and then measuring. Chop every sentence to twelve words and the score climbs while the writing turns into a series of unconnected statements.
Use the score the way you would use a spell-checker: to find the passages that need a look, not to decide whether the piece is finished.
Frequently asked questions
Is Flesch Reading Ease the same as the Flesch–Kincaid grade level? They use the same two inputs, arranged differently. Reading ease gives a 0–100 score where higher is easier; the grade level gives a US school year where higher is harder.
Why does my short text get a strange score? Both formulas average across sentences, so with only one or two a single long sentence skews everything. Below about 100 words, read the flagged sentences rather than the number.
Does Word give the same score? Microsoft Word uses the same formulas, so the numbers should be close. Small differences come from how each tool counts syllables and decides where a sentence ends — ours are documented on the readability checker and the sentence counter.
Does readability affect SEO? Not as a ranking factor. It affects whether people finish reading and whether they come back, which search engines do measure indirectly.