Flesch Reading Ease Calculator

Flesch Reading Ease is a readability metric that rates how easy English text is to read on a scale where higher is easier. The formula is 206.835 minus 1.015 times the average words per sentence minus 84.6 times the average syllables per word. A score of 60 to 70 is plain English that most adults read comfortably, while scores below 30 read like dense academic writing.

Scores of 90 to 100 are very easy (around 5th grade), 60 to 70 is standard plain English (8th to 9th grade), 30 to 50 is difficult (college level), and 0 to 30 is very difficult (college graduate). For most web and business writing, aim for 60 or higher. The raw score can exceed 100 for very short, simple sentences or drop below 0 for very long, dense ones.

Both use the same two inputs, average words per sentence and average syllables per word, but they answer different questions. Reading Ease gives a 0 to 100 score where higher means easier. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level maps the same text to a U.S. school grade, so a score of 8.0 means an eighth grader can read it. This calculator shows both at once.

The original Flesch formulas were defined for hand counts and never fixed one algorithm. This tool estimates syllables with a standard English heuristic: it counts groups of vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y) in each word, drops a silent trailing e, and counts every word as at least one syllable. Because it is a heuristic and not a pronunciation dictionary, scores can differ by a point or two from tools that look words up.

Shorten your sentences and choose shorter words. Since the formula penalizes both long sentences and multi-syllable words, splitting one long sentence into two and swapping a word like "utilize" for "use" both raise the score. Break dense paragraphs into smaller ones and read your text aloud to catch sentences that run too long.

Flesch Reading Ease was calibrated for general English prose, so treat it as a guide, not a precise measurement. Code, lists, tables, abbreviations, and non-English text can skew the syllable and sentence counts and produce misleading scores. Use clean paragraphs of English writing for the most reliable result.