Free Readability Checker
Paste your text and get its Flesch Reading Ease score, Flesch-Kincaid grade level and hard-word count instantly. No signup.
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A readability checker scores how hard your text is to read. Paste your writing and it returns the Flesch Reading Ease score, a 0 to 100 number where higher is easier, plus the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, the syllable count and how many hard words you used. For web content, aim for 60 to 70, roughly a grade 7 to 9 reading level.
Flesch Reading Ease
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Reads like —
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
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U.S. grade level
Lower is easier to read
Paste at least a paragraph for a reliable score.
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Words
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Sentences
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Syllables
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Hard words (3+ syllables)
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Avg words / sentence
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Avg syllables / word
What the Flesch Reading Ease score means
Flesch Reading Ease turns your text into a single number from 0 to 100, where a higher score means easier reading. It rewards short sentences and short words, so plain writing scores high and dense, jargon-heavy prose scores low. The scale maps to seven bands, each tied to a US reading level. 90 to 100 is very easy, around a 5th grade level. 80 to 89 is easy, 6th grade. 70 to 79 is fairly easy, 7th grade. 60 to 69 is plain English, 8th to 9th grade. 50 to 59 is fairly difficult, high school. 30 to 49 is difficult, college. Below 30 is very difficult, college graduate. Most quality web writing lands in the 60 to 70 band.
How is the Flesch reading ease score calculated
The score comes from one formula: 206.835 minus 1.015 times the average words per sentence, minus 84.6 times the average syllables per word. In plain terms, it punishes two things: long sentences and long words. That is why the two levers you actually pull are sentence length and word choice. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level uses the same two inputs but reports a US school grade instead: 0.39 times words per sentence, plus 11.8 times syllables per word, minus 15.59. This checker counts syllables with a vowel-group heuristic, so the numbers are consistent every time you paste the same text.
What reading level should content be for the web
Aim for a grade 7 to 9 reading level, which is a Flesch Reading Ease score of about 60 to 70. The average US adult reads at roughly an 8th grade level, and writing to that level does not dumb your ideas down, it just clears the path to them. If your grade level comes back at 12 or higher, your readers are working harder than they should. Bring it down by splitting long sentences, keeping most under 20 words, and swapping three-syllable words for shorter ones. Health and safety content should go lower still, around a 6th grade level, because comprehension matters most when the stakes are high.
Does readability affect SEO rankings
Readability is not a direct Google ranking factor. Google has said it does not score your reading level and rank you on it. It matters indirectly, and strongly: text people can read easily earns longer dwell time, lower bounce, more shares and more links, and those behaviours are signals search engines do reward. Readability also drives AI visibility. When an assistant like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity decides which passage to quote, it favours clean, self-contained, easy-to-parse sentences. A page written at a grade 7 to 9 level is both easier for people to finish and easier for an answer engine to lift and cite.
Questions, answered
What is a good Flesch reading ease score?
For most web content, a good Flesch Reading Ease score is 60 to 70, which reads at roughly an 8th to 9th grade level. Scores above 70 are fairly easy and suit a general audience. Scores below 50 are difficult and signal that your sentences or words are too long. The right target depends on your reader, but 60 to 70 is the safe default for blogs and marketing.
How do I know if my blog post is too hard to read?
Paste the post into a readability checker and look at two numbers. If the Flesch Reading Ease score is below about 50, or the Flesch-Kincaid grade level is above 12, the writing is harder than most readers want. Also watch the hard-word count and average words per sentence. Long sentences and three-syllable words are the two things dragging the score down, so those are the first to cut.
What is the difference between Flesch reading ease and Flesch-Kincaid grade level?
They use the same two inputs but report opposite scales. Flesch Reading Ease gives a 0 to 100 score where higher means easier, so 70 is very readable. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level gives a US school grade where lower means easier, so grade 7 is very readable. They correlate inversely: a Reading Ease around 70 lines up with a grade level near 7. Use whichever number your team finds more intuitive.
How is the Flesch reading ease score calculated?
The formula is 206.835 minus 1.015 times the average words per sentence, minus 84.6 times the average syllables per word. It rewards short sentences and short words and penalises long ones. Because it only measures sentence length and syllable count, you improve the score by breaking up long sentences and choosing simpler words, not by adding or removing content.
What counts as a hard or complex word?
In readability scoring, a hard or complex word is usually one with three or more syllables, such as opportunity or immediately. These words pull your syllables-per-word average up and lower your Reading Ease score. Common exceptions are proper nouns and familiar words that only reach three syllables through an ending like -ing or -ed. This checker counts every three-syllable-plus word so you can see how many you are leaning on.
Does the readability checker store or upload my text?
No. All scoring happens locally in your browser with JavaScript. Your text is never sent to a server, never stored and never logged, and the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded. That makes it safe for confidential drafts, client work and unpublished posts, and it is why the score updates instantly with no wait.
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