Free IQ Test for Kids
Ages 4 to 18
A free IQ Test for kids, covering pattern recognition, visual puzzles, picture logic and number sense. Free versions for each age group, because a 5-year-old and a 10-year-old should never sit the same test.
Free Instant results · No email · 6 age-matched tests
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Pick your child’s age
Six age-matched tests: 4–5, 6–7, 8–9, 10–11, 12–14 and 15–18. Each one is written for how children actually think at that stage.
Solve visual puzzles
Four short sections of shape, logic and number challenges. The youngest tests need no reading at all, so pre-readers are not held back.
Get instant results
An estimated score range on a bell curve, a breakdown of all four sections, and a plain-English explanation of what it does and does not mean.
Plus an estimated score range plotted on a bell curve.
What is an IQ test for kids?
An IQ test for kids is a set of reasoning puzzles designed to estimate how a child solves problems compared with other children of the same age. The key phrase there is the same age. A score of 100 does not mean a child answered a fixed number of questions correctly; it means their performance sits near the middle for their own age group. That is why age matching matters so much, and why this site uses six separate tests rather than two or three broad ones.
Traditional intelligence tests measure several different kinds of thinking rather than one single ability. Pattern reasoning, spatial understanding, logical grouping and number sense all draw on different mental skills, and most children are stronger in some than others. A good IQ test for children samples across those areas instead of testing only one, which is why our test is divided into four separate sections.
It is worth saying clearly at the start: this is a free online activity, not a clinical assessment. A real psychological evaluation is delivered one-to-one by a qualified psychologist using standardised instruments and a normed comparison sample. What you get here is a well-designed indication, useful as a starting point, and nothing more than that.
How our free IQ test for children works
Every version of this IQ test for children follows the same structure, with difficulty and wording adjusted for the age band you choose. The test is made up of four sections, and each section contains six questions, giving twenty-four questions in total for the older bands.
| Section | What it looks at | Example task |
|---|---|---|
| Pattern Recognition | Spotting a repeating rule and continuing it | Choose the shape that comes next in a sequence |
| Visual Puzzles | Spatial reasoning and relationships between shapes | Work out how one pair changes, then complete a second pair |
| Picture Logic | Sorting, grouping and spotting what breaks a rule | Decide which picture does not belong with the others |
| Number Sense | Quantity, counting and numerical patterns | Find the rule in a number series and give the next number |
Time limits. Each section in the older tests has its own timer, which nudges children to keep moving without creating real pressure. The clock runs per section rather than per question, so a child can spend longer on a harder item and make it up on an easier one. The two youngest bands are untimed, because rushing a four-year-old measures nothing except how quickly they get flustered.
The whole test takes most children between eight and fifteen minutes. There is no account to create, no email address to hand over, and the results appear immediately on screen when the last section is finished.
Why an IQ test for kids should match your child’s exact age
This is the single biggest weakness in most free tests online, and the main reason this site exists. Many sites offer one test for ages four to seven and another for eight to twelve. That sounds reasonable until you think about what those ranges actually contain.
A four-year-old usually cannot read. A seven-year-old often reads fluently. Giving them the same paper means one of them is being tested on reading rather than reasoning. In the same way, an eight-year-old is still thinking in concrete, hands-on terms, while a twelve-year-old is beginning to handle abstract and hypothetical ideas. Put them on identical questions and the younger child can look far weaker than they are, purely because the questions were written for a stage of development they have not reached yet.
Children’s reasoning changes fastest in the early years and then settles, so our age bands are deliberately narrow at the young end and wider at the older end:
If your child is close to the edge of a band, pick the band that matches how they are working at the moment rather than their birthday alone. A young eight-year-old still finding reading hard may do better, and enjoy it more, on the six to seven test.
Understanding your child’s score on an IQ test for children
Scores on any IQ test for children are built around an average of 100. Roughly two out of every three children score somewhere between 85 and 115, and the further you move from 100 in either direction, the fewer children you find. That is why results are drawn on a bell curve: it shows at a glance that most people cluster in the middle and that scores at the edges are rare.
| Score range | Usual description | Roughly how common |
|---|---|---|
| Below 85 | Below average range | About 16 in 100 children |
| 85–99 | Low average to average | About 34 in 100 children |
| 100–115 | Average to high average | About 34 in 100 children |
| 116–130 | Above average | About 14 in 100 children |
| Above 130 | Well above average | About 2 in 100 children |
We deliberately show a range rather than a single confident number. Even proper clinical tests report a confidence band, because no test measures with perfect precision. A result shown as “104, estimated range 97 to 111” is far more honest than a flat “104”, and it makes it much harder to read too much into a couple of questions going one way or the other.
What an IQ test for kids cannot tell you
This matters more than the score itself, so please read it before you look at your child’s result.
An IQ test for kids taken at home on a screen is not a measurement of your child’s worth, their future, or their potential. It is a snapshot of how they handled a particular set of puzzles on a particular day, in whatever mood and state of tiredness they happened to be in. Children’s scores genuinely move around between sittings, and they move around more the younger the child is.
Things that can pull a score down on any given day include poor sleep, hunger, illness, anxiety about being tested, unfamiliarity with this style of question, difficulty with the language used, or simply losing interest halfway through. None of these say anything about the child’s underlying ability.
Children also develop in bursts rather than at a steady rate. It is completely normal for a child to seem to plateau for a year and then leap forward. A single low result is not a ceiling, and a single high result is not a guarantee.
IQ, ADHD and autism: what the evidence actually says
Parents often arrive at an IQ test for kids because they are wondering about ADHD or autism, so it is worth being direct about this.
ADHD is not linked to lower intelligence. Children with ADHD are found right across the whole range of scores, including the very top. What ADHD can affect is test performance, because sustained attention and working memory influence how well anyone does on a timed set of puzzles regardless of their underlying reasoning ability. A distracted child may score well below what they are actually capable of, which is a statement about the testing conditions, not about them.
Autistic children also span the full range of scores. What is more characteristic is an uneven profile: unusually strong performance in some kinds of reasoning alongside much weaker performance in others. This is precisely why a single averaged number can be so misleading for an autistic child. Averaging a very high section score with a very low one produces a middling figure that describes nobody accurately, which is one reason we show each of the four section results separately rather than only a total.
If autism is what is actually on your mind, a reasoning test is the wrong tool and a screening questionnaire is the right one. There are good free resources for exactly that: you can take a free autism test designed around the standard screening questions, and for older teenagers and grown-ups there is a dedicated autism test for adults. Neither of those diagnoses anything either, but they ask the right sort of questions and will give you a far more relevant starting point than an IQ score would.
In short, a score from this test should not be read as evidence for or against either condition in either direction. Only a qualified professional can assess for ADHD or autism, and they do so using a great deal more information than a set of puzzle answers.
Getting the best out of a free IQ test for children
If you want the result to be as fair a reflection as possible, a few simple things help:
- Pick a good moment. Not straight after school when they are drained, and not right before dinner when they are hungry.
- Keep it low-key. Call it a puzzle game rather than a test. Children who feel they are being judged perform worse, which is well established.
- Remove distractions. A quiet room, no television, phone out of reach.
- Let them work alone. It is tempting to help, but a prompted answer tells you nothing. Sit nearby by all means, especially with the youngest children, but let them choose.
- Use a proper screen if you can. The shapes are easier to compare on a tablet or laptop than on a small phone.
- Do not re-test immediately. Repeating the same questions measures memory, not reasoning.
Above all, keep the conversation afterwards positive and curious. The most useful thing you can take from any IQ test for children is not the number but the pattern: which kinds of thinking your child clearly enjoys, and which ones they might want more practice with.
The main types of IQ tests for children and adults
Before looking at any online result, it helps to know what the professional landscape actually looks like. Formal intelligence testing is a well-established field with a handful of dominant instruments, most of them grouped by the age of the person being tested. The list below covers the tests you are most likely to come across if your child is ever assessed at school or privately.
IQ tests used with children
WISC-V — Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition. Typically used with ages 6 to 16, and probably the most widely recognised clinical IQ test for children of school age. It is administered individually by a psychologist over roughly an hour, and produces a Full Scale IQ alongside separate index scores for verbal comprehension, visual-spatial ability, fluid reasoning, working memory and processing speed. Most school-based gifted and special-education decisions in English-speaking countries lean on the WISC.
WPPSI-IV — Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence. The younger sibling of the WISC, covering roughly ages 2 years 6 months to 7 years 7 months. The tasks are shorter, far more play-like, and designed around the attention span of a preschooler. It is the standard instrument when a very young child is assessed for early intervention or early school placement.
Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition (SB5). One of the oldest names in the field and still in active clinical use, spanning from very young children all the way through adulthood. The Stanford–Binet 5 measures five factors in both verbal and nonverbal form: fluid reasoning, knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing and working memory. It has a particularly high ceiling, which is why it is often chosen when a child is being assessed for exceptional giftedness.
KABC-II — Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children. Roughly ages 3 to 18, with a deliberate emphasis on cognitive processing and problem-solving rather than acquired knowledge. It was designed to reduce the influence of cultural and language background on the score, so it is frequently used with bilingual children or children from varied educational backgrounds.
DAS-II — Differential Ability Scales, Second Edition. Used with children and adolescents, and common in educational and psychological assessment. Its strength is in producing a detailed profile of specific abilities rather than leaning heavily on one overall number, which makes it useful when the question is about a particular learning difficulty rather than general ability.
Woodcock–Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities. A broad cognitive battery used with both children and adults. It is built explicitly on the Cattell–Horn–Carroll model of intelligence and is often paired with its sister achievement battery, which lets an assessor compare what a child can reason with against what they have actually learned — the standard way of identifying a specific learning disability.
Leiter-3 — Leiter International Performance Scale. Almost entirely nonverbal: no spoken instructions are required, and the child does not need to speak to answer. This makes it the instrument of choice where language would otherwise get in the way, including children who are deaf, non-speaking, autistic, or being tested in a language that is not their first.
Raven’s Progressive Matrices. A pure nonverbal reasoning test built around matrix puzzles, with versions suitable for children (Coloured Progressive Matrices) and for adults and older teenagers (Standard and Advanced). It measures fluid reasoning specifically rather than general knowledge, and because it needs no reading at all it travels across languages and cultures better than most.
IQ tests used with adults
WAIS — Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. The adult member of the Wechsler family and the most widely used adult IQ test in clinical practice. Like the WISC, it produces a Full Scale IQ plus separate index scores, and it is the usual instrument in adult neuropsychological assessment.
Stanford–Binet 5. Also used with adults, with the same five-factor structure as the child version.
Woodcock–Johnson Cognitive. Equally valid for adults, and often used in educational or vocational assessment.
Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Widely used in research and occupational settings where a quick, language-free measure of reasoning is wanted.
Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test. Designed specifically to minimise the influence of language, schooling and cultural background, relying on shapes and figural reasoning rather than words.
KAIT — Kaufman Adolescent and Adult Intelligence Test. Covers ages 11 upwards and separates fluid reasoning from crystallised knowledge more explicitly than most, which makes it useful when the question is whether someone’s learned knowledge has kept pace with their reasoning ability.
Also worth knowing: the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (NNAT) and the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT) are group-administered tests used very widely in schools for gifted-program screening, and the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT) is another fully nonverbal option. These are not usually administered one-to-one by a psychologist, but a great many parents first encounter a cognitive score through one of them.
The Wechsler family is the easiest way to picture the whole lifespan: WPPSI for preschool children, then WISC for school-age children, then WAIS for adults. One consistent approach, re-normed for each stage of life.
One more point that is often missed. Modern intelligence tests do not measure a single thing. A current assessment typically reports separate scores for verbal comprehension, visual-spatial ability, fluid reasoning, working memory and processing speed, alongside an overall Full Scale IQ. Those sub-scores are frequently more informative than the headline number, especially when they are uneven.
Which method this IQ test for kids uses, and why
Our test is built on nonverbal fluid reasoning — the same family of tasks used by Raven’s Progressive Matrices, the Leiter-3, the Cattell Culture Fair test and the nonverbal portions of the Stanford–Binet 5. Every question is a visual puzzle: sequences, matrix analogies, odd-one-out grouping and numerical patterns. We chose this approach deliberately, for four reasons.
It works without reading. A test that depends on written instructions measures reading as much as reasoning, and that is catastrophic for a four- or five-year-old. Because our questions are shape-based, the youngest children are tested on thinking rather than literacy, which is the whole point.
It travels across languages and backgrounds. Nonverbal reasoning tasks are the least affected by vocabulary, schooling and cultural background of any item type. A child whose first language is not English is not penalised for that here.
Fluid reasoning is the best single proxy for general ability. Of all the sub-abilities a full battery measures, fluid reasoning correlates most strongly with the general factor underlying intelligence. If you only have ten minutes rather than the ninety a clinical battery takes, this is the most informative thing to measure.
It is fast and repeatable. Four short sections of six questions keeps a child engaged, which matters more than people realise. A bored or tired child produces a meaningless score, so a shorter test that holds attention is often more accurate in practice than a longer one that does not.
What we deliberately do not do is claim this is equivalent to a WISC-V or an SB5. Those use a standardised administration procedure and a normed sample of thousands of children. Our score is an estimate derived from difficulty-weighted performance, presented as a range, and clearly labelled as a screening-style indication. Within those limits, it is an honest and well-constructed measure of exactly the thing it tests.
Frequently asked questions
Is this IQ test for kids really free?
Yes. Every age band is completely free, there is no account to create, and we do not ask for an email address to show the results. The score appears on screen the moment the last section is finished.
What does an IQ test for a 4-5 year old include?
An IQ test for a 4 year old has to work without any reading at all, so this band is entirely picture-based and completely untimed. Questions use large, bright shapes and very short sequences: matching a shape to its partner, continuing a simple two-item pattern, spotting which of four pictures is different, and counting small groups of dots up to about five. Instructions are spoken aloud by the parent or shown as a single clear picture. IQ tests for 5 year olds use the same format with slightly longer sequences and a few more options per question. Expect the whole thing to take five to eight minutes, and expect to sit alongside your child rather than leave them to it.
What does an IQ test for a 6-7 year old include?
By this stage most children are reading simple words, so an IQ test for a 6 year old can carry short written prompts alongside the pictures, though the reasoning itself is still entirely visual. Patterns run to three repeating elements rather than two, the odd-one-out questions start using rules based on colour, fill and size rather than shape alone, and number questions move into simple counting sequences and basic addition patterns. IQ tests for 7 year olds introduce the first true analogies — working out how one pair of shapes changed and applying that same change to a second pair. This band is still untimed.
What does an IQ test for an 8-9 year old include?
This is where the full four-section structure and the section timer begin. An IQ test for an 8 year old assumes confident reading and concrete logical thinking: children at this stage can classify, order and compare reliably, so questions involve multi-step patterns, rotation of shapes, analogies with two simultaneous changes, and number series using multiplication and subtraction rules. IQ tests for 9 year olds use the same twenty-four-question format with a slightly higher proportion of two-rule items. The timer runs per section rather than per question, so there is no pressure on any single item.
What does an IQ test for a 10-11 year old include?
An IQ test for a 10 year old sits right at the edge of concrete and abstract reasoning. Questions become less about what shapes look like and more about the relationships between them: matrices where two separate rules operate at once, sequences that change in two dimensions simultaneously, and number patterns involving squares or alternating operations. IQ tests for 11 year olds push further into multi-step inference, where the child has to hold one rule in mind while testing another. This is also the band that most closely resembles standard school-based cognitive screening tests like the CogAT.
What does an IQ test for a 12-14 year old include?
From twelve onwards, genuine abstract reasoning is available, and the test changes character accordingly. An IQ test for a 12 year old introduces three-by-three matrices, conditional rules, and analogies where the relationship itself is abstract rather than visual. IQ tests for 13 year olds and IQ tests for 14 year olds add progression rules that compound across a sequence and number series requiring two operations to be identified together. Compared with the ten to eleven band, the difference is less about difficulty and more about the kind of thinking required: hypothesis-testing rather than pattern-spotting.
What does an IQ test for a 15-18 year old include?
This band uses near-adult items, closely comparable to the Standard and Advanced forms of Raven’s Progressive Matrices. An IQ test for a 15 year old or an IQ test for a 16 year old involves complex matrices with three or more interacting rules, abstract analogies, spatial transformations including reflection and rotation in combination, and number series with non-obvious underlying structures. An IQ test for a 17 year old or an IQ test for an 18 year old uses the same item pool, since reasoning ability changes comparatively little across these years — which is exactly why the band is wider here than at the younger end. Older teenagers generally find the timer the hardest part rather than the questions themselves.
How long does the test take?
Most children finish in eight to fifteen minutes. The older tests have twenty-four questions in four timed sections; the younger tests are shorter and untimed.
Does my child need to be able to read?
Not for the youngest bands. The 4–5 test is entirely picture-based, and the 6–7 test uses only simple words alongside the pictures. Older bands include short written instructions.
Is this the same as a real IQ test?
No, and we would not claim otherwise. A formal assessment is administered individually by a qualified psychologist using standardised instruments and a normed comparison group. This is a free online screening-style activity that gives an indication. Treat the two very differently.
Can my child take the test more than once?
They can, but the second score will be inflated because they have seen the questions before. If you want a fresh look, leave a good gap, or try the next age band up if they are close to the boundary.
My child scored lower than I expected. Should I worry?
Not on the basis of one online test. Tiredness, distraction, unfamiliarity with the question style, or simply a bad day will all move a score. If you have ongoing concerns about your child’s learning or development, the right step is a conversation with their school or your doctor, not a repeat of an online quiz.
Do you store my child’s answers?
The test runs in your browser and the result is shown to you directly. We do not ask for your child’s name, detailed age, or any contact information in order to show the score.
Research and further reading
If you want to go beyond the summary above, these two peer-reviewed studies are a good place to start. Both are long-term studies rather than one-off snapshots, which is what makes them worth reading.
- Shaw et al. — “Intellectual ability and cortical development in children and adolescents”
Published in Nature. This longitudinal brain-imaging study examined how intellectual ability relates to cortical development in children and adolescents. It is a particularly useful reference because it links intelligence to measurable developmental changes in the brain, and because it shows that the trajectory of development matters as much as any single measurement.
PubMed — Intellectual ability and cortical development - Fergusson et al. — “Show me the child at seven II: Childhood intelligence and later outcomes in adolescence and young adulthood”
This longitudinal study followed a birth cohort and examined childhood IQ in relation to later educational, occupational and social outcomes. It found particularly strong relationships between childhood intelligence and later academic achievement and occupational outcomes, while also showing how much variation remains unexplained by IQ alone.
PubMed — Childhood intelligence and later outcomes