The Flesch Reading Ease score measures how easy a piece of English text is to read, on a scale from 0 to 100, where higher numbers mean easier reading. For most web content, aim for a score between 60 and 70. Below, you will find the exact formula, a worked example you can replicate on your own writing, and the specific edits that move the number.
TL;DR:
- Scores below 60 indicate long sentences or complex words that hinder understanding for most readers, requiring simplification for clarity.
- Shortening sentences to around 8 words and replacing multisyllabic words with simpler alternatives can significantly improve the score.
- Automated tools should be complemented with a human read-aloud to identify rhythm issues that formulas cannot detect.
- Chasing a score of 60-70 alone can mask muddled arguments or unclear points, so focus on structure and clarity first.
- For general web content, a Flesch reading ease score of 60 to 70 offers a good balance between readability and accessibility.
Table of Contents
- What does the Flesch reading ease score actually measure?
- How do you calculate a Flesch reading ease score by hand?
- What score ranges mean for different audiences
- When should you use Flesch reading ease, and where does it fall short?
- How do you actually raise your Flesch score?
- What tools can check your Flesch reading ease score?
- Why chasing the number alone is a mistake
- Sources
- FAQ
What does the Flesch reading ease score actually measure?
Rudolf Flesch developed the formula in 1948, building it around two simple ideas: shorter sentences are easier to follow, and shorter words are easier to decode than long, syllable-heavy ones. The score does not judge your argument, your grammar, or whether your point makes sense. It counts.
The formula is:
206.835 − 1.015 × (words ÷ sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables ÷ words)
Two components drive everything: ASL (average sentence length, meaning total words divided by total sentences) and ASW (average syllables per word, meaning total syllables divided by total words). Push either number up and the score falls. A text stuffed with 30-word sentences and words like "conceptualisation" will score low no matter how clear the ideas inside it are. This is exactly why the Flesch–Kincaid readability tests treat sentence length and word complexity as the only two variables that matter.
How do you calculate a Flesch reading ease score by hand?
Take this sample paragraph: "The cat sat on the mat. It watched the birds outside. Then it fell asleep in the sun." Three sentences, 19 words, 22 syllables. Here is the process:
- Count sentences by counting full stops, question marks, and exclamation marks. This sample has 3.
- Count words the normal way, treating hyphenated compounds as one word. This sample has 19.
- Count syllables by counting vowel sounds per word (not letters). "Outside" has 2, "asleep" has 2, most others have 1. Total: 22.
- Calculate ASL: 19 ÷ 3 = 6.33 words per sentence.
- Calculate ASW: 22 ÷ 19 = 1.16 syllables per word.
- Plug both into the formula: 206.835 − (1.015 × 6.33) − (84.6 × 1.16) = 206.835 − 6.42 − 98.14 = 102.28, capped at 100 since the scale tops out there.
That result confirms what your ear already told you: short, plain sentences score near the ceiling. The usual pitfalls are abbreviations (does "e.g." count as one word or two syllables?) and hyphenated compounds, which most calculators treat as a single word regardless of length. When you are counting by hand, be consistent rather than perfectly precise; the formula is a diagnostic, not a laboratory measurement.
What score ranges mean for different audiences
Flesch's original bands still hold up, and each maps loosely to a US school grade level, which is genuinely useful for gauging who can read a piece comfortably.
- 90 to 100: Very easy. Understood by an average 11-year-old. Grade 5 or below.
- 70 to 89: Easy to fairly easy. Comfortable for most adults with no specialist knowledge. Grade 6 to 7.
- 60 to 69: Standard. The benchmark for general web content and mainstream journalism. Grade 8 to 9.
- 50 to 59: Fairly difficult. Suits readers with some post secondary education. Grade 10 to 12.
- 30 to 49: Difficult. Best reserved for specialist or academic material. College level.
- 0 to 29: Very confusing. Dense legal, scientific, or highly technical writing. Graduate level.
Marketing copy and landing pages should sit at the top of that scale, often 70 or above, because attention spans there are short and stakes for clarity are high. General web content does well around 60 to 70. Technical documentation for an expert audience can justifiably sit lower, since the readers already carry the vocabulary the formula penalises.
When should you use Flesch reading ease, and where does it fall short?
The formula's biggest strength is speed. It gives you an instant baseline without reading the whole piece line by line, which is why it remains embedded in nearly every major SEO plugin and word processor. Practitioners still lean on it heavily alongside Flesch–Kincaid grade level, and Yoast recommends treating the score as one diagnostic signal rather than a standalone rule.
Its limitations matter just as much:
- It has no idea whether your words are familiar to the reader. "Cat" and "cataract" get scored purely on syllable count, not on how common either word actually is.
- It ignores logical structure, so a text can score well while still being confusing to follow.
- Syllable counting software occasionally miscounts unusual words, skewing results on shorter samples.
When you need a grade level figure specifically, run Flesch-Kincaid alongside it. For technical or medical content aimed at general readers, SMOG is often more reliable because it was built for that use case. Gunning Fog is worth checking when you suspect complex, multi-syllable jargon is the real problem rather than sentence length.
How do you actually raise your Flesch score?
Start by diagnosing which input is dragging your score down: are your sentences too long, or are your words too complex? Most low scoring drafts suffer from one far more than the other, and fixing the wrong one wastes time.
- Split long sentences. Anything over 25 words is a candidate. Comprehension drops sharply once sentences cross that line, which is exactly the threshold W3C's WCAG guidance uses for accessible writing, and it matches what research summarised by the UK government's digital team found: sentences of around 8 words are understood by nearly all readers, while anything past 25 to 30 words loses people fast.
- Swap complex words for plain ones. "Utilise" becomes "use." "Facilitate" becomes "help." Every syllable you remove nudges ASW down.
- Favour active voice. "The team completed the report" reads shorter and clearer than "The report was completed by the team."
- One idea per sentence. If you find yourself reaching for a semicolon or a third comma, that is usually a sign the sentence should split in two.
- Cut nominalisations. "Conduct an investigation into" becomes "investigate." These bloated noun phrases quietly inflate both word count and syllable count.
- Format for scanning. Short paragraphs, subheadings, and bullet lists do not change the formula's arithmetic, but they make a technically dense score feel far more readable in practice.
Pro Tip: Read your draft aloud before you touch the formula at all. If you run out of breath mid sentence, your reader's attention has already run out too, and no amount of syllable trimming fixes a sentence that never should have existed.
For a deeper walkthrough of sentence trimming with worked examples, this guide on shortening sentences covers five specific edits worth building into your process.
What tools can check your Flesch reading ease score?
Most word processors, including Microsoft Word and Google Docs add ons, calculate Flesch scores automatically under their readability statistics. Single metric calculators give you a fast number and nothing else, which is fine for a quick gut check but tells you nothing about why the score is low.
Multi-formula checkers are more useful for actual editing, because they show Flesch alongside Flesch-Kincaid, SMOG, and Gunning Fog side by side. When those formulas disagree sharply, that gap usually tells you whether your problem is sentence length or word complexity, since tools that surface several formulas at once make that distinction visible rather than hidden inside one blended number.
Whatever tool you use, treat the output as a starting point, not a verdict. Read the flagged sentences aloud, check whether a human reader would actually stumble there, and cross-reference with this guide to readability checker tools if you want a broader comparison of which formula suits which content type. This SEO readability tips also walk through how score improvements tend to affect search performance, not just reader comprehension.
Why chasing the number alone is a mistake
The mistake I see most often is writers treating 60 to 70 as a finish line rather than a symptom checker. A paragraph can hit 68 and still read like it was assembled by committee, because the formula cannot detect a muddled argument or a buried point. It only counts syllables and full stops.
My rule of thumb: fix structure first, score second. Get your main point into the first sentence. Cut every sentence down to one idea. Then run the formula, and use whatever it flags as a prompt to read that specific sentence aloud, not as an instruction to mechanically shorten every word in the document. A read-aloud pass catches rhythm problems, like a sentence that is grammatically fine but exhausting to say, that no formula will ever flag.
Automated scoring and human judgement are not competing methods; they are two different checks that catch different failures. Run the number, then read the piece the way an actual reader will encounter it. If you want a second pass on grammar, tone, and phrasing without your draft being fed into someone else's AI training set, that combination of privacy and speed is precisely what Inspirowrite was built to handle. For a structured way to work both checks into your revision routine, Inspirowrite's checklist for revising blog posts efficiently lays out the order worth following, and readability and clarity carry through to conversion in ways content strategists writing for consulting audiences have long argued matters as much as the pitch itself. For how Inspirowrite handles your text and data during that process, its privacy policy sets out the specifics.
— Mike
Sources
- Flesch–Kincaid readability tests — Wikipedia
- Sentence length: why 25 words is our limit (Inside Gov UK blog)
- Flesch reading ease score in Yoast SEO • Yoast
FAQ
Is a 37 readability score good?
Scores between 30 and 49 fall in the "difficult" band, comparable to college level reading. This is not unusual for academic or legal writing, but for general web content it signals sentences or vocabulary that need simplifying.
What is a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 14?
A Flesch-Kincaid grade level corresponding to university-level reading usually pairs with a Flesch Reading Ease score in the range indicating long sentences and multisyllabic vocabulary.
What is a good Flesch reading ease score?
For most general web content, a score between 60 and 70 is the practical target, since it maps to an eighth or ninth grade reading level that a broad adult audience can follow comfortably. Marketing copy often aims higher, closer to 70 or above.
Is a readability score of 60 considered good?
Yes. A score of 60 sits at the lower edge of the "standard" band and is considered acceptable for general audiences, roughly equivalent to eighth or ninth grade reading level. It is a reasonable baseline, though pushing toward 70 usually widens your potential readership further.