Flesch Reading Ease Calculator
The exact 1948 formula with nothing hidden: the raw score even outside 0 to 100, the syllable estimates flagged, and the sentences pulling your score down ranked for fixing.
Analysis runs in your browser and your text is never uploaded. By default the draft lives in this tab only and disappears when you close it. Ticking the box stores it in this browser's local storage on this device; Clear wipes it. Avoid the box on shared computers if the text is sensitive.
Type or paste text to compare it against your target grade.
The bar is capped at 0 and 100 for display. The number above is the raw formula value and can leave that range.
Formulas disagree because they weigh sentence length, syllables and letters differently. That spread is real information, so no synthetic average is shown.
Syllables are an English estimate from a heuristic, not a pronunciation dictionary. Possible passive is a be-verb plus participle pattern with common adjectives filtered out; review each match, it is a pointer and not a verdict.
Sentences to review
Ranked by how much each sentence adds to your scores. Click a sentence to select it in the editor. Dismiss anything you disagree with; dismissals last until you clear or reload.
Nothing flagged yet. Long sentences, complex-word clusters and possible passive constructions will appear here.
Reading the score bands
Flesch's own interpretation table maps 90 to 100 to very easy text a fifth grader handles, 60 to 70 to plain English for a general audience, 30 to 50 to college-level difficulty, and 0 to 30 to text best understood by graduates. The bands were calibrated on mid-century American English and remain a useful compass rather than a precise instrument: a score of 62 versus 65 means nothing, plain-English versus difficult means a lot.
A worked example: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." has 9 words in 1 sentence and 11 syllables. That is 206.835 minus 1.015 times 9 minus 84.6 times 1.22, a score of 94.3, squarely in the very easy band. The same arithmetic on a 40-word sentence of four-syllable words lands deep below zero, and this calculator will show you that raw number instead of silently clipping it to 0.
Flesch Reading Ease FAQ
What is the Flesch Reading Ease formula?
Score = 206.835 minus 1.015 times (words per sentence) minus 84.6 times (syllables per word). Rudolf Flesch published it in 1948 and it is still the most widely used readability measure, built into word processors and content tools. Higher scores mean easier text: shorter sentences and shorter words push the score up.
What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score?
Scores of 60 to 70 read as plain English and suit most web writing. 70 to 90 is easy, conversational copy. 30 to 60 is the fairly difficult to difficult zone where B2B and academic writing usually lives. Below 30 is very difficult. Which band you should target depends on your audience: set the target grade above and judge against that, not against a single universal number.
Can the Flesch score go above 100 or below 0?
Yes. The published formula has no caps: "Go. Run. Sit." scores about 121, and dense legal prose can go negative. Many tools silently clamp the result to 0 to 100, which hides what extreme text is doing. This calculator shows the raw value and only caps the visual gauge, with the cap labeled.
Why does my Flesch score differ between tools?
Syllable counting. The formula needs syllables per word, English syllables need a pronunciation dictionary to count perfectly, and every calculator approximates with slightly different rules. A point or two of drift between tools is normal. This page flags every word whose syllable count is a guess, like acronyms and numbers, so the estimation is visible instead of hidden.
More free tools: Readability Checker · Flesch-Kincaid Calculator · Reading Level Checker · Word Counter