Wolfgang Amadeus MozartComposer
Cox rated him 155 for ages 17 to 26, 2 points above 153. Cox's childhood rating for him was 150.
IQ 153: meaning and percentile
An IQ of 153 means scoring higher than about 99.98% of people: roughly 1 in 4,874. It is a modern deviation score, which makes it very different from the eye-catching childhood IQs of the early 1900s.
99.979thpercentile
1 in 4,874score 153 or higher
Highly giftedlevel of giftedness
153IQ scoreTop 0.021%
Where 153 sits on the bell curve
An IQ of 153 is 53 points above the average of 100, or 3.53 standard deviations. That is so far into the right-hand tail of the bell curve that the people scoring this high barely show up: about 0.021% of the population, the orange sliver below.
153 is more than three and a half standard deviations above average, deep in the part of the curve where each point counts for thousands of people.
A closer look at an IQ of 153
If you have seen family records or old newspaper stories with childhood IQs of 160, 180 or more, 153 may look modest beside them. It isn't. Those older numbers were calculated a different way and were not tied to a fixed standard deviation, so they can't be lined up against a modern score.
On today's scale, 153 is about 1 in 4,900: across the world that is around 1.7 million people, and in a country the size of the United Kingdom roughly 14,000. Gifted education researchers place it in the "highly gifted" band.
How many people have an IQ of 153?
On the bell curve, about 1 person in 4,874 scores 153 or higher. The animation builds a crowd until you would expect to find one.
A crowd of 4,874 people
4,874
Each dot is one person. In a crowd this size, on average, just one would score 153 or above: the orange dot.
People scoring 153 or higher, by population
| Worldwide (8.2 billion people) | about 1,690,000 |
| India | about 300,000 |
| United States | about 70,100 |
| United Kingdom | about 14,300 |
| Canada | about 8,550 |
| Australia | about 5,670 |
Population: World Bank, total population, 2025. Counts assume the same bell curve in every country and are rounded. Real tests can't sort people this finely, as the next sections explain.
Which high-IQ societies accept an IQ of 153?
High-IQ societies set entry as a percentile, then print the matching score for each test they accept. A supervised 153 would meet 4 of the 6 bars; the next, Prometheus Society, needs about 160.
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MensaTop 2% (98th percentile) on an approved, supervised test130met
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IntertelTop 1% (99th percentile); lists a Wechsler full-scale IQ of 135135met
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Triple Nine Society99.9th percentile; lists a WAIS full-scale IQ of 146146met
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International Society for Philosophical Enquiry99.9th percentile; lists a WAIS-III or WAIS-IV full-scale IQ of 146146met
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Prometheus Society1 in 30,000 (99.997th percentile), four standard deviations above average160not met
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Mega SocietyOne in a million, beyond the range of standard tests171not met
Scores for Mensa, Intertel, Triple Nine and ISPE are the Wechsler figures those societies list or that match their percentile. Prometheus and Mega give only a rarity; the scores shown are the matching points on the standard scale. Prometheus says no test currently being given is approved for its entry. Online test results are not accepted by any of them.
Can an IQ test measure 153?
Most professional tests stop at a full-scale score of 160, so 153 is 7 points below where they stop. The bars show the highest full-scale score each test can report.
Even inside that range, the very top is thinly measured. Tests are scored against a norm sample: for the adult Wechsler test, the WAIS-IV, that sample was 2,200 people aged 16 to 90. On the bell curve, you would expect about 0.45 of those people to score 153 or higher, fewer than one. Scores this high are projected from the shape of the curve rather than compared with many real people.
Every score also carries measurement error. A professional report gives a range, typically about five points either way, so 153 is best read as roughly 148 to 158. Online tests are rougher still; ours reports up to 145. How accurate are online IQ tests?
Sources: WAIS-IV range and norm sample from Canivez (2010), Mental Measurements Yearbook review; Stanford-Binet 5 and its Extended IQ from PRO-ED; WISC-V extended norms from Pearson Technical Report #6 (2019). Striped bars are extended scales, used only when a person hits the normal ceiling.
153 IQ on other scales
The same performance gives different numbers on scales with a different standard deviation, and the gap is widest at the top.
153standard scale (SD 15), used by Wechsler tests and on this page
157older Stanford-Binet scale (SD 16)
185Cattell scale (SD 24), used by some older and online tests
It works the other way too. A 153 quoted from a Cattell-scale test equals only about 133 on the standard scale, and a 153 on an SD 16 test equals about 150. How IQ standard deviations work.
Famous people with an estimated IQ near 153
No historical genius took an IQ test. These figures come from Catharine Cox's 1926 study, which estimated IQs from records of each person's early life, with one rating for childhood and one for ages 17 to 26.
Charles DickensNovelist
Cox rated him 155 for ages 17 to 26, 2 points above 153. Cox's childhood rating for him was 145.
George Frideric HandelComposer
Cox rated him 155 for ages 17 to 26, 2 points above 153. Cox's childhood rating for him was 145.
Source: Cox, C. M. (1926), Genetic Studies of Genius, Vol. II: The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses, Stanford University Press. Cox stressed that thin records pull estimates down. Read more in where the historical genius IQ estimates came from.
Famous people said to have an IQ of 153: real or myth?
Lists of celebrity IQs put many famous names at or near 153. We traced each figure to its earliest source, and none comes from a published IQ test.
SS
154Reported, no test shown
Sharon Stone
Printed in the introduction to a 1992 Playboy interview, not in her own words. Mensa said in 2002 she had never been a member.
LK
154No evidence of a test
Lisa Kudrow
The figure traces only to online discussion threads.
MZ
152No evidence of a test
Mark Zuckerberg
No interview, test record or published estimate could be found.
Elon Musk
No test result has ever been published. The figure circulates on websites without a source.
Sources for every claim are listed in our celebrity IQ list.
Why old childhood IQs can't be compared with 153
The first IQs were ratio scores: mental age divided by real age, times 100. A six-year-old who passed the items for a nine-year-old scored 150. In their 1937 revision of the Stanford-Binet, Lewis Terman and Maud Merrill found that these ratio IQs had a standard deviation "slightly in excess of 16 points", and that a fixed IQ only has a consistent meaning if the spread is the same at every age. Otherwise "a given I.Q. at one age might be equivalent to a much higher or lower I.Q. at another age."
Modern tests use deviation IQs instead: a score is placed directly on a bell curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 for each age group. A ratio IQ of 170 from the 1920s and a deviation IQ of 153 today don't sit on the same scale, so the older number may look rarer than it really was.
Source: Terman, L. M. and Merrill, M. A. (1937), Measuring Intelligence, Houghton Mifflin, pp. 38 to 40.
What does an IQ of 153 mean?
A score of 153 means a modern, age-normed test ranked your reasoning in the top 0.03%. It's a strong sign of unusual speed and depth in abstract thinking. It does not measure everything: creativity, judgement and expertise are separate, and they are built over years.
Where 153 falls among the levels of giftedness
115–129Mildly gifted
130–144Moderately gifted
145–159Highly gifted
160–179Exceptionally gifted
180+Profoundly gifted
Levels and ranges from Gross, M. U. M. (2000), "Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted Students: An Underserved Population", Understanding Our Gifted. They are a guide for education, not a ranking of people.
How far 153 is from other milestones
23 points above the usual Mensa level (130)a score of 153 is about 111 times rarer than 130
7 points above the Triple Nine and ISPE bar (146)a score of 153 is about 5.3 times rarer than 146
7 points below the ceiling of most professional tests (160)reaching 160 is about 6 times rarer than 153
3.53 standard deviations above averageaverage is 100 and one standard deviation is 15 points
IQ 153 compared with nearby scores
| IQ | Percentile | Rarity | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 149 | 99.945th | 1 in 1,838 | Highly gifted |
| 151 | 99.966th | 1 in 2,968 | Highly gifted |
| 153 | 99.979th | 1 in 4,874 | Highly gifted |
| 155 | 99.987th | 1 in 8,139 | Highly gifted |
| 157 | 99.9927th | 1 in 13,822 | Highly gifted |
Questions about an IQ of 153
Is 153 a high IQ?
Yes. 153 is a very high IQ: about 1 person in 4,874 scores this high or higher, which puts it at the 99.979th percentile. It is above the 130 that most definitions use for a high IQ, and at or above the 146 used by the Triple Nine Society for its 99.9th percentile entry.
Can you join Mensa with an IQ of 153?
Yes. Mensa accepts the top 2% on an approved, supervised test, which is about 130 on the standard scale. A supervised 153 would also meet the bar for Intertel, Triple Nine Society and International Society for Philosophical Enquiry. Online test results are not accepted.
What does 153 IQ mean?
It means a result 53 points, or 3.53 standard deviations, above the average for your age. On the levels used by gifted education researchers, 153 is highly gifted (145–159).
Is 153 a genius IQ?
There is no official genius score. Lewis Terman's early Stanford-Binet labels put scores over 140 in a "near genius or genius" group, but modern tests dropped the word. 153 is very rare, yet achievements, not test scores, are what usually earn the word genius.
Can an online IQ test show a score of 153?
Some can show the number, but very few can measure it. Our own test reports up to 145, because a short online test doesn't have enough very hard questions, or enough high scorers in its data, to separate 153 from nearby scores. A supervised Wechsler or Stanford-Binet assessment is needed to confirm it.
Is a 153 IQ the same as a childhood IQ of 153?
Only if both come from modern, deviation-scored tests. Old childhood scores worked out as mental age divided by real age used a different and less consistent scale, so an old 153 and a modern 153 don't describe exactly the same standing.
Related: what counts as a good IQ score, the highest IQ in the world, famous people's IQs and the full IQ scale and range chart.
A full IQ score of 153 combines several skills. Our guides explain each one: verbal reasoning, processing speed, fluid vs crystallized intelligence, abstract reasoning and spatial reasoning, or try the free pattern recognition test.
Famous names are often linked to scores like 153, with or without a source. We checked the evidence behind Isaac Newton's IQ, Nikola Tesla's IQ, Stephen Hawking's IQ, Bill Gates' IQ, Elon Musk's IQ, Garry Kasparov's IQ, Terence Tao's IQ and Einstein's IQ.
Curious where you'd land?
The free Assessivo IQ test gives an estimated IQ and percentile in about 25 minutes. It reports scores up to 145; for anything higher, a supervised professional assessment is the only reliable route.
Take the free IQ testPortraits are pencil-style sketches by Assessivo, based on: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart after Barbara Krafft (1819), public domain. Charles Dickens after a photograph by Jeremiah Gurney (1867), public domain. George Frideric Handel after a portrait attributed to Balthasar Denner (about 1727), public domain. Elon Musk sketch adapted from a photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0.