Passer Rating Calculator (NFL and NCAA)

Background.

This passer rating calculator implements two formulas that share a name and share almost nothing else. Pick the NFL system and you get the rating the league has used to crown its passing leader since 1973, bounded between 0 and 158.3. Pick the NCAA system and you get college football's pass-efficiency rating, which is unbounded, routinely produces numbers above 200, and is built from a completely different set of multipliers. Feeding a college stat line into an NFL calculator, or the reverse, produces a number that means nothing — which is exactly why this page makes you choose first.

The NFL formula is the one people get wrong. It has four components: completion percentage, yards per attempt, touchdown percentage and interception percentage. Each is converted to a point value, and each of those four point values is then clamped into the range 0 to 2.375 before anything is added up. That clamping is not an optional refinement. The league's own Record & Fact Book spells out the floor and the ceiling for every component — award zero points below 30.0% completions, award 2.375 above 77.5%; award zero below 3.0 yards per attempt, award 2.375 above 12.5; award 2.375 above an 11.875% touchdown rate; award zero once the interception rate passes 9.5%. A calculator that skips those caps agrees with the official number for an ordinary season and disagrees violently for a single game, which is precisely when people reach for a calculator. A quarterback who goes 4-for-4 for 120 yards and 2 touchdowns has an uncapped score well past 200; his actual passer rating is the perfect 158.3, because all four components are pinned at the maximum.

The reason the caps exist at all is the reason the whole formula exists. In 1971 the league asked a committee led by Don Smith of the Pro Football Hall of Fame to replace a ranking system that scored passers relative to their peers each season, which made cross-era comparison impossible. The replacement fixed the standard permanently against the statistical achievements of qualified passers from 1960 onward: 1.000 in a category is average, 2.000 is exceptional, and 2.375 is the most any one category can contribute. Fixing the scale is what lets you say that a 122.5 season in 2011 and a 119.6 season in 2024 are directly comparable, and capping the categories is what stops one freak number in one column from carrying a bad passing line to a good rating.

The NCAA took the opposite design decision. Its pass-efficiency rating, defined in the NCAA Football Statisticians' Manual, is a straight weighted sum: completion percentage, plus 8.4 times yards per attempt, plus 3.3 times touchdown percentage, minus 2.0 times interception percentage. Nothing is capped and nothing is floored, so a quarterback who throws four touchdowns on eight attempts posts a rating that would be arithmetically impossible in the NFL system. The multipliers were chosen so that 100.0 lands on the average FBS quarterback, and the manual says so explicitly. The consequence is that the two scales are not convertible: there is no multiplier that turns an NCAA rating into an NFL rating, because the NFL formula throws away information the NCAA formula keeps.

Below the widget you will find the full derivation of both formulas with every constant sourced to the governing body that published it, a worked example reproducing the NFL's own 2011 Aaron Rodgers calculation step by step, an explanation of what a perfect 158.3 actually requires, the reason 66.7 rather than 100 is the NFL's average, an honest account of what passer rating leaves out — sacks, rushing, drops, pressure, game situation and every yard gained after the catch — and where the modern box-score alternatives such as adjusted net yards per attempt pick up the slack. The calculator is dispatched at passerRating.calculate inside the Quanta engine and is covered by unit tests pinned to the league's published figures, so the number here is the number the NFL prints.

What is passer rating calculator?

Passer rating is a single number summarising a quarterback's box-score passing line. In the NFL it is the league's official measure for determining the annual passing champion and has been since 1973. It takes exactly five inputs — attempts, completions, passing yards, touchdown passes and interceptions — and returns a value between 0 and 158.3. The four rate statistics derived from those inputs (completion percentage, yards per attempt, touchdown percentage, interception percentage) are each converted to a point score in which 1.000 represents the fixed historical average, 2.000 represents exceptional performance, and 2.375 is the hard maximum. The four point scores are averaged, then multiplied by 100 and divided by the average of 1.5 that would produce 100 — in practice, summed, divided by six, and multiplied by one hundred. The NCAA's pass-efficiency rating answers the same question with the same five inputs but a different arithmetic: it adds completion percentage to 8.4 times yards per attempt, adds 3.3 times touchdown percentage, and subtracts 2.0 times interception percentage, with no bounds at either end. It is calibrated so that 100.0 is the average. Both systems are deliberately narrow. Neither counts sacks, rushing yards, fumbles, dropped passes, throwaways, defensive pass interference, or anything about the game situation in which a pass was thrown. The NFL Record & Fact Book is blunt about the limitation in the same section that defines the formula: the system rates passers, not quarterbacks, and statistics do not reflect leadership, play-calling and other intangible factors.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Choose the rating system first. Use NFL for any professional line and for high-school or fantasy contexts that copy the NFL scale; use NCAA for college football. A number produced by the wrong system is not a rescaled version of the right one — it is a different statistic.
2. 02Enter pass attempts. Sacks are never pass attempts. Spikes to stop the clock and intentional throwaways both count as attempts (and as incompletions), which is why a quarterback's completion percentage is always slightly lower than the share of catchable balls his receivers caught.
3. 03Enter completions and passing yards. Use gross passing yards; an NFL individual passing line already excludes yards lost on sacks, so no adjustment is needed.
4. 04Enter touchdown passes and interceptions. The calculator rejects lines that cannot happen — more touchdowns than completions, or more interceptions than incompletions — because those are the two most common data-entry slips.
5. 05Read the primary result against the band text underneath it. For the NFL, 66.7 is the fixed average standard and 133.3 is the level the league itself calls exceptional; for the NCAA, 100.0 is the designed average.
6. 06Use the four component percentages to see which category is actually driving the rating. If any of them is already outside the NFL's cap range — under 30% or over 77.5% completions, under 3.0 or over 12.5 yards per attempt, over 11.875% touchdowns, over 9.5% interceptions — then improving that category further cannot move the rating at all.

The formula.

The NFL formula, exactly as the league's Record & Fact Book sets it out, runs in four steps and then a fifth.

Step one, completions. Take completion percentage, subtract 30, multiply by 0.05. Equivalently, ((completions ÷ attempts) − 0.3) × 5. If the result is below zero — completion percentage under 30.0 — award zero. If it is above 2.375 — completion percentage above 77.5 — award 2.375.

Step two, yards. Take yards per attempt, subtract 3, multiply by 0.25. If the result is below zero — under 3.0 yards per attempt — award zero. If it is above 2.375 — above 12.5 yards per attempt — award 2.375.

Step three, touchdowns. Multiply touchdown percentage by 0.2, equivalently (touchdowns ÷ attempts) × 20. If the result exceeds 2.375 — a touchdown rate above 11.875% — award 2.375.

Step four, interceptions. Multiply interception percentage by 0.25 and subtract the result from 2.375. If that goes below zero — an interception rate above 9.5% — award zero. A passer with no interceptions at all receives the full 2.375.

Step five. Add the four capped values, divide by six, multiply by one hundred. Six is not arbitrary: four categories each averaging 1.000 sum to 4.000, and 4 ÷ 6 × 100 = 66.7, which is the average passer rating by construction. Four categories at the 2.375 maximum sum to 9.5, and 9.5 ÷ 6 × 100 = 158.33, published as 158.3 — the perfect rating.

The NCAA formula is a single expression with no branching. Rating = completion percentage + 8.4 × (yards ÷ attempts) + 3.3 × (touchdown percentage) − 2.0 × (interception percentage). Expanded over a common denominator it is the familiar (8.4 × yards + 330 × touchdowns + 100 × completions − 200 × interceptions) ÷ attempts, which is the same thing written differently. The manual notes that the multipliers 8.4, 3.3 and 2.0 were chosen to make 100.0 the average quarterback or team rating. One practical consequence of having no floor is that the NCAA rating can be negative: a quarterback who throws one completion and ten interceptions on twenty attempts rates −92.9, a number the NFL system cannot produce because it stops at zero.

One precision note. The NCAA manual's own sample calculation rounds each of its four factors to two decimal places before summing, and prints 161.71 for its example line. Carrying full precision through and rounding once at the end gives 161.7036, which displays as 161.70. This calculator carries full precision — the 0.01 difference is the manual's intermediate rounding, not a disagreement about the formula.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]National Football League (2025). 2025 NFL Record & Fact Book, 'Inside the Numbers' (p. 314). The league's own definition of the passer rating system: the four categories, the 0.05 / 0.25 / 0.2 / 0.25 multipliers, the explicit zero floor and 2.375 ceiling for each component, the 1.000 average and 2.000 exceptional standards, the 158.3 maximum, and the worked Aaron Rodgers 2011 example reproduced on this page.
2. [2]NCAA (2009). Official 2009 Football Statistics Rules (Football Statisticians' Manual), rule 16 'Pass Efficiency'. Source of the NCAA formula implemented here — 'multiply a player's yards per attempt by 8.4, add his completion percentage, add his touchdown percentage multiplied by 3.3, then subtract his interception percentage multiplied by 2' — together with the sample compilation (166 attempts, 98 completions, 1,567 yards, 16 TD, 7 INT) and the note that the multipliers make 100.0 the average rating. Wording is identical in the 2005 and 2008 editions.
3. [3]NCAA. Policies and Guidelines — Statistics. Source of the qualifying-minimum rules that govern published passing-efficiency leaderboards, including the adjustment applied when a passer falls short of the attempt minimum (add the shortfall in attempts and the same number of interceptions).
4. [4]National Football League (2025). Official Playing Rules of the National Football League, Rule 11 Section 1 Article 2 (value of scores: touchdown 6 points, field goal 3, safety 2, try 1 or 2) and Rule 4 Section 1 Article 1 (60-minute game). Used for the scoring context in which a passing touchdown is worth 20 attempt-equivalents in the rating's weighting.
5. [5]Sports Reference LLC. Pro-Football-Reference glossary, entries for AY/A, NY/A and ANY/A — the box-score successors to passer rating that fold sacks into both the numerator and the denominator. Archived snapshot cited because the live page returns HTTP 403 to non-browser clients.
6. [6]Katz, S. & Burke, B. (ESPN Stats & Information). 'How is Total QBR calculated? We explain our (improved) QB rating.' Source for the comparison between passer rating and Total QBR, including the charted inputs (air yards, drops, pressure), the division of credit, the garbage-time adjustment and the logistic scaling — none of whose coefficients ESPN publishes.