Audited —·Last updated 29 Jul 2026·6 citations·Tier 1·0 uses

PHQ-9 Depression Screening Score

Score the PHQ-9 depression screener (0-27) and see its severity band. A screening tool, not a diagnosis. In crisis? Call or text 988 in the US.

PHQ-9 Calculator

1. Little interest or pleasure in doing things
2. Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless
3. Trouble falling or staying asleep, or sleeping too much
4. Feeling tired or having little energy
5. Poor appetite or overeating
6. Feeling bad about yourself, that you are a failure, or that you have let yourself or your family down
7. Trouble concentrating on things, such as reading or watching television
8. Moving or speaking so slowly that others could have noticed, or being so restless that you have been moving around much more than usual
9. Thoughts that you would be better off dead, or of hurting yourself in some way — if this is you right now, call or text 988 (US) or your local crisis line before finishing this form
10. How difficult have these problems made it to do your work, take care of things at home, or get along with other people? (recorded, not added to the total)
PHQ-9 total (0-27)
12
Screening score for the last 2 weeks — not a diagnosis. Discuss it with a clinician.
Score range (suggests)
Moderate range (10-14)
Vs the 10-point screening cut-point
At or above 10
Item 9 — thoughts of self-harm
Not at all
If you need help now
Call or text 988 (US)
Item 10 — difficulty (not scored)
Somewhat difficult
Items above 'not at all'
7

Background.

If you are thinking about suicide, or about hurting yourself, please get help before you do anything else. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline; it is free, confidential and available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and you can also chat with a counsellor at chat.988lifeline.org. If you are outside the United States, contact your own country's crisis line or emergency number. If someone is in immediate danger, call your local emergency services. A questionnaire cannot help you in a crisis. A person can. This page will still be here afterwards.

The PHQ-9 is a screening questionnaire, not a diagnosis. It is nine questions about how often specific problems have bothered you over the last two weeks, each answered on a four-point scale, and the answers add to a whole number between 0 and 27. That number measures how many depressive symptoms you reported and how often you reported them. Nothing more. It cannot tell you whether you have major depressive disorder, it cannot rule it out, and it cannot tell you what to do next. Only a clinician who can talk with you, take a history and weigh the many other things that produce these same symptoms — thyroid disease, anaemia, sleep disorders, bereavement, medication side effects, chronic pain, substance use — can do that. Take the number to a clinician. Do not treat it as an answer.

The instrument comes from Kurt Kroenke, Robert Spitzer and Janet Williams, who published the PHQ-9 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2001 as a self-administered version of the depression module of the PRIME-MD diagnostic instrument. They studied 6,000 patients across primary care and obstetrics-gynaecology clinics, and assessed criterion validity in 580 of them against an independent interview by a mental-health professional. The nine items map one to one onto the nine DSM criteria for a major depressive episode. That is why the questionnaire is nine items long, and why item 9 asks about thoughts of death or self-harm: that symptom is one of the nine criteria, so a faithful instrument has to ask it.

The severity ranges shown on this page are the ones in that original paper. Scores of 5, 10, 15 and 20 mark the lower edges of the mild, moderate, moderately severe and severe ranges, which gives the five bands 0-4, 5-9, 10-14, 15-19 and 20-27. Read those labels as descriptions of the score, not of you. A total of 12 sits in the range the authors called moderate; it does not make a person 'moderately depressed'. The distinction matters, because the same total can be reached in very different ways — nine mild symptoms or four severe ones — and because one questionnaire taken in one bad week is a snapshot, not a trajectory.

The most-quoted threshold is 10, and the evidence for it is good but not as tidy as the round number suggests. The original paper reported that a score of 10 or more gave 88% sensitivity and 88% specificity for major depression. Independent work has not reproduced those figures exactly. Manea, Gilbody and McMillan's 2012 meta-analysis in CMAJ put pooled sensitivity at 0.85 and specificity at 0.89 at the same cut-off, and concluded that any cut-off between 8 and 11 has acceptable properties and that 'the same cut-off score might not be appropriate in all settings'. The US Preventive Services Task Force's 2023 evidence review, pooling 47 studies against semistructured interviews, reported 0.85 and 0.85. At any of these thresholds a substantial share of positive screens are false positives — which is exactly why a positive screen is a reason to be assessed, not a reason to conclude anything.

Guideline bodies do not even agree on the band structure. NICE, in the 2022 English guideline NG222, dropped the four-level severity scheme it had used previously and replaced it with a two-way split at a PHQ-9 of 16: below 16 is 'less severe depression', 16 or above is 'more severe depression'. This page shows the original five bands because those are the ones the instrument was validated with and the ones the manifest for this project requires, but a reader in England whose clinician talks about 'less severe' and 'more severe' depression is hearing the NICE scheme, not this one. Both are conventions laid over the same continuous score.

Item 9 deserves its own paragraph. It asks how often you have had thoughts that you would be better off dead, or of hurting yourself in some way. Any answer other than 'not at all' is worth telling someone about today. Simon and colleagues linked 207,265 PHQ-9 questionnaires from 84,418 outpatients to what happened next, and found that the one-year cumulative risk of a suicide attempt rose from 0.4% among people answering 'not at all' to 4% among people answering 'nearly every day', with the excess risk emerging over several days and continuing to grow for several months. A tenfold difference is a real signal. It is also not a prediction about any one person: most people who answer item 9 positively do not attempt suicide, and some people who answer 'not at all' are nonetheless at risk. The right response to a positive item 9 is a conversation, not a calculation. Separately, and worth knowing, the USPSTF concluded in 2023 that the evidence is currently insufficient to recommend screening adults for suicide risk as a population measure — which is a statement about screening programmes, not a reason to ignore your own answer.

This page deliberately does not do two things. It does not run the PHQ-9's 'major depressive syndrome' algorithm, because handing an anonymous visitor a pseudo-diagnosis is precisely the failure a screening instrument exists to prevent, and because published descriptions of that algorithm disagree about whether item 9 counts at any frequency or only at 'more than half the days'. And it does not store, transmit or compare your answers; the arithmetic runs in your browser. The score is yours. What it means is a conversation with someone who can actually help.

What is phq-9 calculator?

The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 is a nine-item self-report screening instrument for depressive symptoms. Each item names one of the nine DSM criteria for a major depressive episode and asks how often it has bothered the respondent over the previous two weeks. The four responses are scored 0 for 'not at all', 1 for 'several days', 2 for 'more than half the days' and 3 for 'nearly every day', so the total runs from 0 to 27. A tenth question, about how difficult the reported problems have made work, home life and relationships, is part of the published instrument but is not added to the total; this calculator records it and shows it beside the score, because a total of 14 with 'not difficult at all' and a total of 14 with 'extremely difficult' are not the same clinical picture.

What the PHQ-9 is not is a diagnostic test. Screening instruments are built to be over-inclusive on purpose: they are tuned to miss few people who do have the condition, which necessarily means flagging many who do not. A score above the usual threshold of 10 means 'this deserves a proper assessment', and nothing more specific than that. Diagnosis requires a clinician, an interview, a history, and the exclusion of medical and substance-related causes that can imitate depression almost exactly. The PHQ-9's real strengths are that it is short, free to use, sensitive to change over time, and comparable between visits — which is why it is used far more often to track whether something is getting better or worse than to decide what it is.

How to use this calculator.

  1. Answer each of the nine items for the last two weeks — not for today alone, and not for the past year.
  2. Use the four options as the instrument defines them: not at all (0), several days (1), more than half the days (2), nearly every day (3).
  3. Answer item 9 honestly. If your answer is anything other than 'not at all', tell someone today — in the United States call or text 988; elsewhere, contact your local crisis line.
  4. Answer question 10 about how difficult these problems have made daily life. It is part of the instrument but is deliberately not added to the 0-27 total.
  5. Read the total together with the band, the item 9 answer and the difficulty rating. The total on its own is the least informative thing on the page.
  6. Take the result to a clinician. A score is the start of a conversation, not a diagnosis, and never a treatment decision.

The formula.

PHQ-9 total = item₁ + item₂ + … + item₉
0 · not at all1 · several days2 · more than half the days3 · nearly every daytotal · 0–27bands · 0–4 / 5–9 / 10–14 / 15–19 / 20–27

The arithmetic is a plain sum. Each of the nine items contributes a whole number from 0 to 3, and the nine contributions are added, so the total is an integer between 0 and 27. Item 10, the functional-difficulty question, is not included; the published instrument records it separately and so does this calculator. There is no weighting, no reverse-scored item and no adjustment for age, sex or anything else — every item counts the same.

Because every input is an integer, there is no rounding at any stage, intermediate or final. This matters more than it sounds: a score cannot drift across a band boundary through accumulated floating-point error, and there is no 'rounds to 10' case to argue about. A total is either 9 or it is 10. The band boundaries are applied with inclusive lower bounds — 0-4, then 5 and above is the mild range, 10 and above the moderate range, 15 and above the moderately severe range, 20 and above the severe range — which is exactly how Kroenke, Spitzer and Williams stated them when they wrote that scores of 5, 10, 15 and 20 represent the lower limits of those four levels.

The 10-point screening cut-point is a separate convention layered on the same score, and it is reported separately here for that reason. In the 2001 validation study a total of 10 or more had 88% sensitivity and 88% specificity for major depression in 580 patients assessed by an independent mental-health professional. The two largest independent syntheses since then are close but not identical: Manea and colleagues pooled sensitivity 0.85 and specificity 0.89 in CMAJ in 2012 and judged any cut-off from 8 to 11 acceptable; the USPSTF's 2023 evidence review pooled 47 studies and reported 0.85 and 0.85. Nothing here resolves that spread, and nothing should — a screening threshold is a policy choice about how many false positives are worth tolerating to miss fewer true cases, and the right choice differs between a primary-care clinic, a cardiology ward and an anonymous web page. On an anonymous web page the honest reading of a score at or above 10 is 'get this assessed'.

A worked example.

Example

Someone answers the nine items 2, 1, 3, 2, 1, 2, 1, 0 and 1 — reporting, for example, loss of interest and low energy more than half the days, sleep problems nearly every day, and thoughts of being better off dead on several days. Adding the nine gives 2 + 1 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 0 + 1 = 13. Thirteen falls in the 10-14 range that Kroenke, Spitzer and Williams labelled moderate, and it is at or above the 10-point screening cut-point, so the honest reading is that these symptoms warrant a proper assessment. Eight of the nine items were answered above 'not at all', and question 10 was answered 'somewhat difficult', so daily functioning is affected but not yet severely. The single most important line in this result is not the 13: it is that item 9 was answered 'several days'. That answer alone is a reason to speak to a clinician now, or to call or text 988 in the United States, regardless of what the total came to. A 13 does not diagnose depression, and a 13 that fell to 8 next month would not cure it either — the number is a way to describe and track symptoms, and the decision about what to do belongs to a clinician who can talk with this person.

item21
item12
item80
item71
item91
item42
item33
item62
functional Difficultysomewhat-difficult
item51

Frequently asked questions.

Does a high PHQ-9 score mean I have depression?
No. The PHQ-9 is a screening instrument, and a screening instrument is deliberately built to over-refer: it is tuned to miss few people who do have the condition, which necessarily means flagging many who do not. A score at or above 10 means the symptoms you reported are the kind that warrant a proper assessment. It does not establish a diagnosis, because a diagnosis requires a clinician who can interview you, take a history and exclude the many medical and substance-related conditions that produce the same nine symptoms — thyroid disease, anaemia, obstructive sleep apnoea, bereavement, chronic pain and several common medications among them. Take the score to a clinician and let them do the part a questionnaire cannot.
What should I do if I answered anything other than 'not at all' to item 9?
Tell someone today. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, which is free, confidential and staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year; you can also chat at chat.988lifeline.org. Outside the United States, contact your own country's crisis line, and if anyone is in immediate danger call your local emergency number. This is not a formality. Simon and colleagues followed 84,418 outpatients who completed 207,265 PHQ-9s and found the one-year cumulative risk of a suicide attempt rose from 0.4% among those answering 'not at all' to 4% among those answering 'nearly every day'. That is a real difference, and it is a reason to talk to a person rather than to a web page.
Where do the severity bands 0-4, 5-9, 10-14, 15-19 and 20-27 come from?
From the original validation paper. Kroenke, Spitzer and Williams wrote in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2001 that PHQ-9 scores of 5, 10, 15 and 20 represent the lower limits of mild, moderate, moderately severe and severe depression respectively, which produces those five ranges. They are conventions laid over a continuous score, not natural boundaries, and other bodies cut the same score differently. NICE's 2022 English guideline NG222 abandoned the four-level scheme entirely in favour of a two-way split at 16: below 16 is 'less severe depression', 16 or above is 'more severe depression'. This page shows the original bands and names the NICE split so you can recognise it if your clinician uses it.
How accurate is the cut-off of 10?
It is well studied and imperfect, and different high-quality syntheses give different numbers. The 2001 validation study reported 88% sensitivity and 88% specificity for major depression at a score of 10 or more. Manea, Gilbody and McMillan's 2012 CMAJ meta-analysis pooled 0.85 sensitivity and 0.89 specificity at the same cut-off, and concluded that cut-offs between 8 and 11 all had acceptable properties and that 'the same cut-off score might not be appropriate in all settings'. The USPSTF's 2023 evidence review, pooling 47 studies against semistructured diagnostic interviews, reported 0.85 and 0.85. Taken together: a positive screen is a genuine signal, and a meaningful minority of positive screens will turn out not to be major depression on assessment.
Why does this calculator not tell me whether I 'meet criteria' for depression?
Two reasons, and both are deliberate. First, the PHQ-9 has a published symptom-count algorithm for 'major depressive syndrome', but running it for an anonymous visitor amounts to handing out a pseudo-diagnosis with no clinician anywhere in the loop — exactly the harm a screening tool is supposed to prevent. Second, published descriptions of that algorithm do not agree with each other about whether item 9 counts at any frequency or only when answered 'more than half the days', and this project's rules forbid guessing a clinical rule that cannot be pinned to a primary source. So the page reports the score, the band, the cut-point position and your item 9 answer, and leaves the judgement to a clinician.
What is question 10 for if it is not added to the score?
It measures functional impact, which is a different thing from symptom count and often a more useful one. The published PHQ-9 asks how difficult the reported problems have made it to do your work, take care of things at home, or get along with other people, with four options from 'not difficult at all' to 'extremely difficult'. It is not part of the 0-27 total, and it should not be — two people can report the same nine symptoms at the same frequencies while one is still working and the other cannot leave the house. This calculator shows the answer beside the total for exactly that reason, so that the number is never read alone.
Can I use the PHQ-9 to track whether treatment is working?
Yes, and this is arguably what it is best at. The PHQ-9 is short, free, sensitive to change and comparable between visits, so repeating it at intervals gives a usable picture of direction and pace that a single administration cannot. Clinicians commonly use a fall of five points or more, or a drop below 5, as markers of response and remission respectively. Two cautions. Compare like with like: answer for the same two-week window each time and in the same setting, because context shifts answers. And remember that the score tracks symptoms, not the underlying condition — a lower score is good news about how you feel, not proof that something has been cured.
Are my answers stored, sent anywhere, or shared?
No. The scoring runs in your browser, and this page holds no record of what you entered. Nothing is transmitted to a server for the calculation, nothing is written to an account, and refreshing the page discards everything. That is a deliberate design decision for this particular calculator: a depression screener is among the most sensitive things a person can type into a website, and the safest data is the data that was never collected. If you want to keep a record — which is genuinely useful for tracking change over time — write the total, the date and the item 9 answer down somewhere you control.
Can the PHQ-9 be wrong about me?
Easily, in both directions. It can read high when something other than depression is producing the symptoms: a thyroid disorder, sleep apnoea, anaemia, chronic pain, grief, the side effects of a medication, or simply an unusually bad fortnight. It can read low when someone under-reports, when symptoms are masked by irritability or physical complaints rather than sadness, or when the two-week window happens to have been a good one. It was validated in adult primary-care and obstetrics-gynaecology populations in the United States, so its accuracy in other settings, languages and age groups is a separate empirical question with its own literature. Treat the number as one piece of evidence among several.
Is the PHQ-9 the same as the PHQ-2?
No, but they are related. The PHQ-2 is the first two items of the PHQ-9 — loss of interest and depressed mood — scored 0 to 6, and is used as an ultra-short first pass in busy settings. A positive PHQ-2 is normally followed by the full PHQ-9 rather than acted on directly. Because the PHQ-2 omits item 9, it asks nothing about thoughts of self-harm, which is one reason services that use it need a separate route to that question. If you have completed a PHQ-2 and were told to complete the longer form, the nine items on this page are that longer form.

References& sources.

  1. [1]Kroenke K, Spitzer RL, Williams JBW. "The PHQ-9: Validity of a Brief Depression Severity Measure." Journal of General Internal Medicine. 2001;16(9):606-613. doi:10.1046/j.1525-1497.2001.016009606.x. Original validation paper — source of the 0-3 item coding, the 0-4/5-9/10-14/15-19/20-27 bands, and the 88%/88% figures at a cut-off of 10. Open access via PubMed Central; retrieved 29 July 2026.
  2. [2]Manea L, Gilbody S, McMillan D. "Optimal cut-off score for diagnosing depression with the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9): a meta-analysis." CMAJ. 2012;184(3):E191-E196. doi:10.1503/cmaj.110829. Independent meta-analysis; pooled sensitivity 0.85 (95% CI 0.75-0.91) and specificity 0.89 (95% CI 0.83-0.92) at a cut-off of 10, with cut-offs 8-11 judged acceptable. Open access via PubMed Central; retrieved 29 July 2026.
  3. [3]Simon GE, Rutter CM, Peterson D, Oliver M, Whiteside U, Operskalski B, Ludman EJ. "Does response on the PHQ-9 Depression Questionnaire predict subsequent suicide attempt or suicide death?" Psychiatric Services. 2013;64(12):1195-1202. doi:10.1176/appi.ps.201200587. Source of the item 9 risk gradient (one-year cumulative suicide-attempt risk 0.4% to 4%) across 207,265 questionnaires from 84,418 outpatients. Abstract open on PubMed (PMID 24036589); full text paywalled. Retrieved 29 July 2026.
  4. [4]US Preventive Services Task Force. "Depression and Suicide Risk in Adults: Screening." Final Recommendation Statement, 2023. Grade B for depression screening in adults; Grade I (insufficient evidence) for suicide-risk screening in adults; PHQ-9 pooled sensitivity 0.85 and specificity 0.85 at a cut-off of 10 across 47 studies. Retrieved 29 July 2026.
  5. [5]988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (United States). "The 988 Lifeline is available 24/7/365. Your conversations are free and confidential." Call or text 988; chat at chat.988lifeline.org. Retrieved 29 July 2026.
  6. [6]National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. "Depression in adults: treatment and management." NICE guideline NG222, 2022. Defines 'less severe depression' as a PHQ-9 score below 16 and 'more severe depression' as 16 or above, replacing the earlier four-level severity scheme. Full text via NCBI Bookshelf NBK583074; retrieved 29 July 2026.
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