burnout test
Six questions about how worn out you are. A minute, scored in your browser, and nothing goes anywhere.
This is the personal burnout scale from the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory — the part that measures exhaustion itself, with no questions about your manager or your hours. It doesn’t diagnose; burnout isn’t a diagnosis, it’s a state described through tiredness, distance and a drop in what you can give.
scored in your browser · answers go nowhere
0 of 6 answered — the result appears on its own once everything is answered
your result
0 of 100
about this questionnaire
The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory was built in the early 2000s as a replacement for an earlier, licensed instrument. Its authors released it into the public domain — it can be used freely, which is why it is here.
It has three scales: personal burnout, work-related burnout, and burnout related to the people you work with. This is the first — it measures exhaustion itself, without asking about managers or hours, so it fits anyone: employed, self-employed, or caring for someone.
The six items are averaged and mapped onto a scale from zero to a hundred. Fifty is the mark research uses to start talking about burnout.
What it can’t do. It doesn’t separate burnout from depression — they overlap heavily and want different help. It doesn’t see causes: the same number comes from overwork, from meaningless work, and from looking after a sick relative. And it isn’t about today; it’s about what has accumulated.
short answers
- Is burnout a diagnosis?
- No. The World Health Organization classes it as a factor influencing health and describes it as a work-related phenomenon. You can’t take sick leave for it as such, but a doctor can find what sits behind it: depression, an anxiety disorder, thyroid trouble.
- Do my answers go anywhere?
- No. Everything is scored in your browser: neither your answers nor the result reach a server, we don’t ask for an email, and the result disappears with the tab. Like any site, we run web analytics; what it collects is set out in the privacy policy.
- How is burnout different from depression?
- Roughly: burnout is attached to the work. On holiday, or in another part of life, some energy comes back, even briefly. Depression doesn’t let go anywhere and takes the pleasure out of everything. The border is blurry, they often travel together, and a questionnaire can’t draw it — that’s a job for a clinician.
- Will a holiday fix it?
- It helps for a while. If everything is back where it was two weeks after you return, the problem isn’t tiredness — it’s how the weeks are built, and those are what need changing.
- My score is high but I love my job. Is that possible?
- That’s the usual case. It isn’t the indifferent who burn out — it’s the people who pour themselves in. Where the energy feels worth spending, it gets spent to the end.
read next
burnout how to unwind after work can’t focus
what we read
- Kristensen T. S., Borritz M., Villadsen E., Christensen K. B. The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory: A new tool for the assessment of burnout. Work & Stress, 2005;19(3):192–207 — the original inventory and its scales.
- World Health Organization, ICD-11: burnout as a factor influencing health status, not as a medical condition.
There’s tiredness — everyone has that — but on this scale it hasn’t reached the exhaustion people mean by burnout.
If you came looking for this test for a reason, it may be worth looking elsewhere. Feeling that everything is pointless while your energy holds up is usually something other than burnout: low mood, anxiety, or work that has simply stopped fitting.
Fifty is where research starts calling this burnout. You’re in that zone, and it has probably been going on for more than a month.
The awkward truth here: burnout doesn’t clear on a weekend. It built up from how your weeks are arranged and it goes when something in them changes. A holiday buys a pause, not a solution — and that isn’t your failing, it’s how the state works.
What actually shifts it: sleep first, dropping at least one obligation, and a conversation with whoever can change the load. Breathing and pauses through the day help you reach those changes; they don’t replace them.
These are high numbers. In this range it usually isn’t "work is hard" any more — everything is hard: getting up, replying, starting.
The first thing worth ruling out is depression. It looks very similar, it wants different help, and delaying that help costs more. The depression test takes two minutes and will at least show which way to look.
Second: in this range it’s worth seeing a doctor even if it feels like the job is the whole story. Long exhaustion shows up in the body — blood pressure, sleep, how often you get ill — and sorting it out alone tends to cost more.