WHO-5: World Health Organization Well-Being IndexWHO-5
~2 min · 5 questions · Free partial report
This test contains sensitive content. Results are private and not shared with employers unless you explicitly consent.
Five statements about the last two weeks: you have felt cheerful and in good spirits, calm and relaxed, active and vigorous, you woke up feeling fresh and rested, and your daily life has been filled with things that interest you. For each one you say how much of the time it was true, from at no time to all of the time. That is the whole instrument. The WHO-5 was developed in the 1990s by Per Bech at a World Health Organization collaborating centre in Copenhagen, out of work by the WHO Regional Office for Europe, and the World Health Organization took over its copyright and republished it in 2024. What makes it unusual is what it never asks: there is not one symptom in it. It measures well-being by the presence of good states rather than by the absence of bad ones, which is why the result reads as how much of your fortnight was worth having rather than as a symptom count. Your score runs from 0 to 100, and the World Health Organization publishes one threshold for it: below 50 is suggested as poor mental well-being and as an indication that a fuller assessment may be worth doing. It is a screening signal, never a diagnosis.
Five questions about the last two weeks, none of them about symptoms, and the only threshold the World Health Organization publishes for its own well-being index.
- Put a number on how much of the last two weeks you actually spent feeling well, using the instrument the World Health Organization publishes for exactly that. You get the 0 to 100 score in the metric the source reports it in, its position against the published threshold of 50, and a reading of what the five states the scale asks about (mood, calm, energy, rest, interest) mean when they are present or missing together. Short enough to repeat, which is the point: one measurement is a photograph, two are a direction.
No signup required to start. The Partial Report is free at the end. The Complete costs $6.90, if and when you want it.
What this test measures
Mental well-being
How much of the last two weeks was spent in five positive states: cheerful and in good spirits, calm and relaxed, active and vigorous, waking up rested, and finding daily life filled with things that interest you. The scale contains no symptom of any kind, so it measures well-being by presence rather than by absence, and it reports on the 0 to 100 percentage metric the World Health Organization publishes. A current state tied to a two-week window, read against a published threshold and never as a diagnosis.
Below the well-being cutoff
At or above the well-being cutoff
Your result falls into one of these bands.
Discover where you stand on each dimension.
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From first click to report.
The process is simple: you respond, the system calculates, and the result appears. No prior signup, no form, no waiting.
- 1
Click "Start for free"
No signup required to start. You identify yourself at the end, when you want to save the result. The test opens immediately.
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Answer the questions
Likert 6-point scale (At no time to All of the time). Visible progress bar. You can pause and resume from any device after identifying yourself.
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Get the Partial Report
Immediate and free. A text summary of each dimension, with indication of high, medium, or low.
- 4
Decide if you want the Complete
The Partial already delivers value. The Complete adds percentiles, norm comparison, charts, applied recommendations, and a verifiable Certificate.
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Talk to an AI about your results. Ask how your profile applies to your career, what a high score means, or compare with other tests.
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| Free and paid, side by side | Partial Report (free, always) | Complete Report ($6.90) |
|---|---|---|
| Interpretive text per dimension, generated from your answers | ✓ | ✓ |
| Raw score for each dimension | ✓ | ✓ |
| One-paragraph overview reading | ✓ | ✓ |
| Everything in the Partial, expanded to 3–5 paragraphs per dimension | — | ✓ |
| Percentile per dimension, compared to reference norms | — | ✓ |
| Inter-dimensional chart with accessible data table | — | ✓ |
| Applied recommendations: career, relationships, self-care | — | ✓ |
| Certificate with public verification and PDF download | — | ✓ |
- ✓Everything in the Partial, expanded to 3–5 paragraphs per dimension
- ✓Percentile per dimension, compared to reference norms
- ✓Applied recommendations: career, relationships, self-care
- ✓Certificate with public verification and PDF download
You only pay after completing the test, if you want to go beyond the Partial.
- ✓Interpretive text per dimension, generated from your answers
- ✓Raw score for each dimension
- ✓One-paragraph overview reading
- ✓Free trial of the Integrative Chat, unlocked by your first test
Payment via PIX (instant) or credit card. Access for 1 year. After that, the report stays visible in read-only mode.
Why trust this instrument.
The WHO-5 (World Health Organization, 2024) measures positive mental well-being over a fixed two-week window: five positively worded statements answered on a 6-point proportion-of-time scale, each worth 0 to 5, for a raw score of 0 to 25. The published rule then multiplies the raw score by four to give the 0 to 100 percentage score the instrument is reported in, and this platform applies that conversion so that the score, the bands and the report all speak the metric the source uses. No item is reverse keyed, because none needs to be: every statement is positive and the official instruction says higher means better. There is no norm set and no percentile, because the World Health Organization publishes neither. It publishes one threshold, quoted verbatim on this page, and two bands are shown against it with nothing subdivided above it. The 2024 publication reports no reliability coefficient and no correlation with other measures; it refers to the systematic review by Topp and colleagues (2015) for the evidence base, and no number from that review is presented here as a property of this test. The items in all six languages are the versions the World Health Organization publishes, reproduced without modification, including the typographical errors present in the Spanish and French sheets.
- Authors:
- World Health Organization; Bech
- Year:
- 2024
- World Health Organization (2024). The World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5). Geneva: World Health Organization. WHO/UCN/MSD/MHE/2024.1. Topp, C. W., Ostergaard, S. D., Sondergaard, S., & Bech, P. (2015). The WHO-5 Well-Being Index: a systematic review of the literature. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 84(3), 167-176.
The theory behind this test.
Positive Mental Well-Being
Framework that measures mental health by the presence of positive states rather than by the absence of symptoms. Developed at the WHO Regional Office for Europe (DepCare Project, 1998) and consolidated by Per Bech, it asks how much of a recent period was spent feeling cheerful, calm, energetic, rested and interested in daily life, and treats that proportion as the measurement itself. Two properties follow from that design. The window is short and explicit, so the reading is a current state that moves with circumstances rather than a trait. And because the scale never mentions a symptom, a low reading is not a symptom count: it is an absence of positive states, which is read as an indication that a fuller assessment may be worth doing, never as a diagnosis.
Learn more about this theory →Target Audience
Adults who want a fast, serious read on their current well-being, and anyone who would rather answer five questions about feeling good than twenty about feeling bad.
Recommended ages: 18+
Questions the report answers.
How much of the last two weeks did you actually spend feeling well?
Read the score as a proportion, not as a grade: 100 would mean all five states were present all of the time, and 0 that none of them ever was. Below 50 is what the World Health Organization publishes as poor mental well-being and as a reason to consider a fuller assessment, and it is worth noticing which of the five dragged it down, because mood, calm, energy, rest and interest fail for different reasons and respond to different things. Above 50 the number stops being a warning and starts being a baseline, which is the more useful way to use it: the next reading is what tells you the direction.
Who benefits most.
Someone who wants a number to check back against
A single reading of well-being is almost useless and two readings are not. Five questions and two minutes is short enough that taking it again in a month is realistic, and the difference between the two scores says more than either one alone.
Someone tired of being asked about symptoms
Depression screeners ask what is wrong, one item at a time, and answering twenty of them is its own small ordeal. This one asks whether you have felt cheerful, calm, energetic, rested and interested. Same territory, opposite direction, and for some people that is the difference between answering honestly and closing the tab.
Someone measuring whether a change worked
New job, new city, treatment started, load finally lifted. The two-week window is short enough to catch the change and the score is sensitive to it. Take it before if you can, and after either way.
Frequently asked questions
Does a score below 50 mean I have depression?
No. The World Health Organization publishes that threshold as an indication for further assessment for the possible presence of a mental health condition, which is a reason to look closer, not a finding. Five questions cannot diagnose anything, and this one does not even ask about symptoms: a low score says that little of your last two weeks was spent feeling well, and there are many reasons for that. A diagnosis requires a clinical evaluation by a professional, and if your score is low and has stayed low, that conversation is what the number is pointing at.
Does the World Health Organization endorse NOESIS?
No, and it is worth stating plainly. The World Health Organization granted NOESIS written permission to reproduce the WHO-5 on this platform, under Permission Request No. MRR-048859. Permission to use an instrument is not approval of the platform that uses it. The World Health Organization does not endorse, sponsor, certify or recommend NOESIS, its reports or its other tests, and it has not reviewed any of them. What comes from the World Health Organization is the questionnaire, its scoring rule and its threshold, reproduced as published. Everything else on this page is ours.
How is the 0 to 100 score calculated?
Each answer is worth 0 to 5, from at no time to all of the time, so the five items add up to a raw score between 0 and 25. The published rule then multiplies that raw score by four, which gives the 0 to 100 percentage score the instrument is reported in. It is not a percentile and it is not a comparison with other people: it is the proportion of the maximum well-being the scale can register. A raw 12 becomes 48 and a raw 13 becomes 52, which is why the threshold of 50 sits in a gap that no answer can land on.
Why does the Portuguese version sound European, and why is there a typo in the Spanish one?
Because both are exactly what the World Health Organization publishes, and the permission requires using the published version rather than a better one. The Portuguese sheet is European Portuguese, with forms like activo and dia-a-dia. The Spanish sheet has descandado where descansado was meant, and the French one capitalises Temps in one answer option. We could fix all three in a minute, and fixing them would mean shipping a text the World Health Organization never published. The World Health Organization itself notes that these translations were made before it took over the copyright, that it is not responsible for their accuracy, and that the English version is the authentic one.
Can five questions measure anything?
They measure one thing, narrowly and repeatedly, which is what makes the WHO-5 useful. It asks about mood, calm, energy, rest and interest over a fixed two-week window, and it returns a single number. It will not tell you which part of your life is doing the damage, it will not separate a rough fortnight from a long stretch, and it is easy to answer the way you would like to be. What it does well is show movement: take it now, take it again after something changes, and the difference between the two numbers is the measurement that matters.
Who can see my results?
This test is flagged as sensitive in NOESIS. Your results belong to you. If you ever take it inside a corporate program, individual results of sensitive tests are never shown to your employer without your explicit per-test consent, which defaults to off. That is a platform rule, not a courtesy.
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Start for free →WHO-5: World Health Organization Well-Being Index
No signup, no time limit. The Partial is free at the end.
The Complete costs $6.90, if and when you want it.
This test is a self-knowledge tool for informational purposes. It does not constitute a psychological or clinical diagnosis and does not replace evaluation by a qualified professional. The report indicates the AI model used in text generation.
The WHO-5 Well-Being Index is copyright World Health Organization. The items, the scoring and the threshold are reproduced from The World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5), Geneva, World Health Organization, 2024 (WHO/UCN/MSD/MHE/2024.1), published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO licence. NOESIS reproduces the instrument commercially under written permission from the World Health Organization, Permission Request No. MRR-048859. The items in all six languages are the versions the World Health Organization publishes, reproduced without modification. The World Health Organization states that it is not responsible for the content or accuracy of the translated versions and that the English version is the binding and authentic one. The World Health Organization does not endorse, sponsor, certify or recommend NOESIS, this platform, its other assessments or its interpretations, and this permission is not an endorsement, certification or accreditation. Results obtained here are not a clinical diagnosis and do not replace assessment by a professional.