IELTS Band Score Chart 2026: How Raw Scores & Overall Bands Work

Your overall band is the average of your Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking bands, rounded to the nearest half band. Each individual skill is reported from 0 to 9 in 0.5 steps, so the overall figure depends entirely on how those four numbers average and round, not on any additional weighting between skills.

The general rounding pattern is straightforward once you see it laid out: an average ending near a quarter rounds up to the nearest half band, and an average ending near three-quarters rounds up to the next whole band. This is why two candidates with the same overall band can have quite different skill profiles underneath it.

Listening and Reading each have 40 items. Your raw score (the number correct out of 40) is converted into a band using an official conversion table, not a simple percentage. This matters because the mapping is not linear: a handful of extra correct answers near the middle of the range can shift your band more than the same handful would at the very top or bottom.

We deliberately do not publish a single fixed raw-to-band table here, because the exact conversion can shift slightly from test to test to keep difficulty fair across different exam versions - a table copied from one past paper will not always match another. DailyEnglishPro's Score Calculator embeds the current conversion logic so you get a reliable estimate after every practice set instead of relying on a static number that may already be out of date.

Listening uses the same conversion approach for both Academic and General Training, since the audio content and question difficulty are shared. Reading is different: because General Training texts are generally shorter and more accessible in the early sections, its conversion table typically requires more correct answers to reach the same mid-range band compared with Academic Reading.

This is a common source of confusion when candidates compare raw scores with a friend sitting the other module. A General Training candidate scoring 32/40 and an Academic candidate scoring 30/40 are not automatically on the same band - always use the calculator's module-specific table rather than assuming the two modules behave identically.

Writing and Speaking have no raw score at all. Instead, an examiner (or in some Speaking formats, a recorded assessment process) rates four separate criteria from 0 to 9, and the average of those four criteria becomes the skill band, following the same half-band rounding logic used for the overall score.

Because the band is an average of four criteria, improving only one - say, vocabulary - while the other three stay flat often fails to move the overall Writing or Speaking band at all. Balanced improvement across all four criteria is usually what unlocks the next half band, not deep mastery of a single one.

Many universities, professional bodies and visa pathways set a minimum for each individual skill, in addition to a minimum overall band. Hitting an overall 6.5 with a Writing band of 5.5 can still fall short of a programme that separately requires Writing 6.0, even though the overall figure looks sufficient at first glance.

Requirements vary widely by institution and by visa stream, and they change over time, so treat any number here as a planning pattern rather than an exact figure - always confirm the current requirement on the official offer letter, regulator page, or visa checklist before you book a test date.

The three tools referenced throughout this guide work best used together, in sequence, after every practice session rather than only before booking the real exam.