What was Ronald Reagan’s IQ?
The Reagan IQ of 105 comes from a 2001 hoax e-mail; the only peer-reviewed estimate averages 130.0 and is not a test either.
No IQ test result has ever been published for Ronald Reagan, so a Ronald Reagan IQ score is not a documented number, only an estimate. What is documented is a 1932 Eureka College B.A. in economics and sociology, a radio, film and Screen Actors Guild career, and eight years each as Governor of California and President; the 105 that circulates comes from a fabricated 2001 e-mail, with no test behind it.
Ronald Reagan’s estimated IQ
- Dean Keith Simonton’s 2006 study in Political Psychology (Table 1) gives Reagan four statistically reconstructed IQ values, 118.0, 127.9, 132.2 and 141.9, averaging 130.0 and ranking him 28th of 42 presidents on this site’s reading; they are built from two expert ratings, not from any test score.
- Eureka College, a small liberal arts college in Illinois, awarded him a B.A. in economics and sociology in June 1932; the Miller Center records a “C” average, and in 1982 Reagan said his grade average was closer to the C level required for eligibility than to straight A’s.
- WOC radio in Davenport, Iowa, hired him as a staff announcer in December 1932; he later worked at WHO in Des Moines, signed with Warner Bros. on April 20, 1937, and made films from Love Is on the Air (1937) to The Killers (1964), his last motion picture.
- He was president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 and again from 1959 to 1960, Governor of California from January 2, 1967, to January 6, 1975, and the 40th President from January 20, 1981, to January 20, 1989.
The range is an inference, not a measurement. Simonton calls his IQ values “more tentative and approximate” than his other measures and asks whether the corrected ones might be too high, so the band tops out at 135, below his highest value (141.9), and starts at 115, just under his lowest (118.0), because no test or class rank anchors either end. A grade average and a career record show performance in particular settings, not general ability, which is why Ronald Reagan’s estimated IQ is a wide band.
- Born
- February 6, 1911, Tampico, Illinois
- Died
- June 5, 2004, Los Angeles, California
- Education
- Dixon (Illinois) High School, 1928; Eureka College, B.A. in economics and sociology, June 1932
- Career
- Radio announcer (WOC, WHO); Warner Bros. film actor from 1937; Screen Actors Guild president, 1947–1952 and 1959–1960
- Military
- U.S. Army, 1942–1945: Army Air Forces public relations and the 1st Motion Picture Unit, Culver City, California; Captain from July 22, 1943
- Offices
- Governor of California, January 2, 1967 – January 6, 1975; 40th President of the United States, January 20, 1981 – January 20, 1989
- Documented IQ test
- None published
- Circulating IQ figure
- 105 (2001 hoax); Simonton’s 2006 average is 130.0, against an estimated range here of 115–135
What an IQ of 115–135 actually means
Set the claim aside for a moment. If someone genuinely scored in this range, here is what that would represent.
Average is 100 by construction, and about two-thirds of people fall between 85 and 115. Take the test to place your own score on this scale.
| Score range | Classification | Share of people | What it indicates |
|---|---|---|---|
| 85 – 114 | Average | ~68% | The range most people fall into. |
| 115 – 129 | Above average | ~13.6% | Roughly one person in seven. |
| 130 – 144 | Gifted | ~2% | The threshold most high-IQ societies use. |
| Above 144 | Highly gifted | ~0.1% | Figures above this range are extrapolated from the curve rather than measured. |
Percentages are approximate and describe a normal distribution. The same number means different things on tests with different standard deviations.
Thirty questions gives you a measured position on this exact scale — your score, your percentile and the ability breakdown behind it.
Find out in 30 minutes →Who Ronald Reagan was
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, and went to school in Dixon, Illinois, from 1921. He took part in basketball, drama, football and track at Dixon High School, graduated in June 1928, and entered Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, that fall. At Eureka he majored in economics and sociology, played guard on the 1930 and 1931 football teams, became interested in drama in his sophomore year, and served as student body president; he graduated in June 1932 with a B.A.
His first broadcasting job came in December 1932, when WOC in Davenport, Iowa, hired him as a temporary staff announcer and later brought him back as a full-time sports announcer; when WOC merged with WHO in Des Moines in April 1933 he moved there as chief sports announcer, narrating Chicago Cubs home games from telegraph reports. He took a screen test for Warner Bros. on March 15, 1937, signed as a contract player on April 20, 1937, and reported for his first picture, Love Is on the Air (1937). His films include Knute Rockne, All American (1940), Kings Row (1942) and Bedtime for Bonzo (1951); The Killers (1964) was his last motion picture.
Appointed a second lieutenant in the Cavalry’s Officers Reserve Corps on May 25, 1937, Reagan was ordered to active duty on April 19, 1942, and served in the United States: first as a liaison officer at Fort Mason, California, then with Army Air Forces public relations and the 1st Motion Picture Unit in Culver City. He was promoted to Captain on July 22, 1943, and separated from active duty on December 9, 1945; by the end of the war his units had produced some 400 training films for the Army Air Forces. He was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild in March 1947, re-elected for five more one-year terms, and elected again in November 1959. From September 26, 1954, he was host and occasional star of General Electric Theater and a spokesman for the company, and his autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me?, was published in 1965.
Reagan was elected Governor of California in November 1966, inaugurated on January 2, 1967, and left office on January 6, 1975. He was elected the 40th President of the United States in November 1980 and served from January 20, 1981, to January 20, 1989. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on January 13, 1993. He died in Los Angeles, California, on June 5, 2004.
By Elora Mercer, Celebrity Research WriterFigures checked by Leon Falkner, Data & Research AnalystReviewed by Aarav Vardhan, Editor-in-Chief · Last reviewed August 2026
Ronald Reagan: the documented record
The estimate above rests on this record. Every entry here is a matter of public fact, which is more than can be said for the number itself.
- 1911Born February 6 in Tampico, Illinois.
- 1932Graduates from Eureka College in June with a B.A. in economics and sociology, after entering in the fall of 1928; in December is hired as a staff announcer at WOC radio in Davenport, Iowa.
- 1937Screen test for Warner Bros. on March 15; signs as a contract player on April 20; first film Love Is on the Air.
- 1942Ordered to active duty on April 19; serves in the United States, mostly with the 1st Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, California; separated December 9, 1945.
- 1947Elected president of the Screen Actors Guild in March; serves until 1952 and again in 1959–1960.
- 1967Inaugurated Governor of California on January 2; leaves office January 6, 1975.
- 1981Inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States on January 20; leaves office January 20, 1989.
- 2001The fabricated “Lovenstein Institute” list that gives him 105 begins circulating in July.
- 2004Dies in Los Angeles on June 5.
- 2006Dean Keith Simonton’s statistical estimates for 42 presidents, averaging 130.0 for Reagan, are published in Political Psychology.
Where the 105 figure came from
Following a claim back to its first appearance is the part almost nobody does — and it is what most people are actually asking.
What was Ronald Reagan’s IQ? No test result has ever been published, and the number that answers the search, 105, was invented. It comes from an e-mail credited to a “Lovenstein Institute” of Scranton, Pennsylvania, which ranked twelve presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush; the same list gave Bill Clinton 182 and George W. Bush 91. It is a clean example of how celebrity IQ numbers spread: a precise-looking list, an authoritative-sounding institute, and no data, test or method anyone could check.
The only peer-reviewed estimate of Reagan’s IQ we found is not a test either. Dean Keith Simonton’s 2006 paper in Political Psychology reconstructs four IQ values for each of 42 presidents, and Table 1 gives Reagan 118.0, 127.9, 132.2 and 141.9: an average of 130.0, 28th of 42 on this site’s reading, between George H. W. Bush (130.1) and Herbert Hoover (129.8). Only eight presidents have original IQ values, from Catharine Cox’s 1926 study, and Reagan is not one of them: his four are imputed from two expert ratings, an Intellectual Brilliance z score of 0.4 (Simonton’s 1986 study of the presidents from Washington through Reagan) and an Openness score of 10.0 on a 0–100 scale (a 2004 biographer survey). Imputed values are pulled toward the mean by the method, and the paper calls them “more tentative and approximate” than its other measures; US presidents ranked by IQ sets out the full table.
Read this page beside George W. Bush’s and Jimmy Carter’s, which draw on the same two sources, and notice the direction of the error. Carter’s hoax figure of 175 sits far above his estimated 130–148; Reagan’s 105 and Bush’s 91 sit below the documented estimates, and 105 is lower than every one of Simonton’s four values for Reagan. On this site’s scale that places his estimated 115–135 between Bush’s 110–130 and Carter’s 130–148, the same order as Simonton’s averages (124.9, 130.0 and 145.1). The scale underneath those averages is itself loose: Cox used the old ratio definition of IQ, so the numbers carry no fixed standard deviation.
Was Ronald Reagan smart? What the record contains is academic and professional rather than psychometric. Reagan entered Eureka College in the fall of 1928 and graduated in June 1932; the Miller Center records that he graduated with a “C” average, and in 1982 he told Eureka’s graduates that football and other activities had eaten into his study time. In 1986 he added that someone had told him, to his surprise, that he finished with a B-minus, so the exact average is not settled, and no transcript or class rank appears in any source checked. A degree and a grade average are achievement evidence, not an IQ test, which is why the estimate here is a wide band.
How we read a number →Prints the full e-mail under the editor’s note “Below is the text of a hoax.” Gives Reagan 105, between Carter 175 and George H. W. Bush 98; the text says the report was published “Monday, July 9, 2001” by a Scranton, Pennsylvania institute and claims its figures are accurate to within five percentage points.
Two more copies of the same twelve-president list. Both print 105 for Reagan. The 2003 copy is a forwarded e-mail with no disclaimer; the 2007 copy is wrapped in “Begin Hoax” and “End Hoax” markers and says the text “has widely been reported as a hoax.”
Records that the institutions quoted do not exist, that The Guardian quoted the report in its diary section on July 19, 2001, and that it published a retraction after the Associated Press drew attention to the error. Does not mention Reagan.
Read in the JSTOR copy. Table 1 (p. 516) prints Reagan’s row: Intellectual Brilliance 0.4 and Openness 10.0 (original), IQ 118.0, 127.9, 132.2 and 141.9 (imputed). The IQ values are described as “more tentative and approximate” than the other two measures (p. 518). No test score for Reagan appears.
Prints “15: Ronald Reagan, Iq estimat: 130” and credits Dean Simonton’s 2006 study. It gives no test, only the study’s estimate, and shows the paper’s average traveling as a plain number.
Dixon High School, June 1928; Eureka College, fall 1928 to June 1932, B.A. in economics and sociology; WOC (December 1932) and WHO; Warner Bros. screen test March 15 and contract April 20, 1937; Army dates, units and Captain’s rank; Screen Actors Guild terms; governorship from January 2, 1967; leaving the White House January 20, 1989; death in Los Angeles on June 5, 2004.
Gives the Eureka economics major and “C” average in 1932, football, swimming and the student council, WOC and WHO, the Warner Bros. contract and early films; the overview page gives the presidency as January 20, 1981 to January 20, 1989 and the 40th.
Reagan’s own account of his grades: football and extracurricular activities cut into study time and his average was closer to the C level required for eligibility than to straight A’s (1982); someone told him he finished with a B-minus (1986).
Corroborate the birth in Tampico, the 1932 B.A., the 1930–31 football seasons, the Screen Actors Guild terms and the governorship of January 2, 1967 to January 6, 1975; Wikidata Q9960 is the 40th President (1911–2004), not a namesake.
Searched the Reagan Library pages, the Miller Center, Eureka College’s museum page, Wikipedia, Simonton’s paper and the hoax pages above; none contains an administered IQ, SAT, entrance-exam or Army test score for Reagan, and none gives a Eureka transcript or class rank.
The sources behind our estimate
The figures that circulate for Ronald Reagan, what we were able to confirm, and where the two diverge.
105 is the figure that circulates for Reagan. It sits on a list of twelve presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt through George W. Bush, in an e-mail credited to a “Lovenstein Institute” of Scranton, Pennsylvania. The text dates itself July 9, 2001; the e-mail spread that summer and still turns up in searches for his IQ. A second number, 130, is the average of Simonton’s 2006 estimates; a 2016 Romanian news ranking prints it as his estimated IQ.
No published IQ test result exists for Ronald Reagan. The 105 appears on three pages checked for this profile: History News Network’s “Media Watch” page (October 31, 2004), which prints the e-mail under the editor’s note “Below is the text of a hoax”; a University of California San Diego mailing-list archive page (a forwarded copy dated February 22, 2003, headed “if this is true ….”); and a University of California San Diego faculty page whose 2007 note says the list has widely been reported as a hoax. All three print 105 for Reagan, between Jimmy Carter’s 175 and George H. W. Bush’s 98. The e-mail names no test: it claims a rating of achievements and other factors, including voice-stress and sentence-structure analysis, and says its figures are accurate to within five percentage points. Wikipedia records that the institutions and sociologists quoted do not exist and that The Guardian quoted the report in its diary section on July 19, 2001, before retracting it.
The hoax figure sits below the whole estimated range and below the lowest of Simonton’s four values (118.0), the reverse of the usual pattern in which an invented number inflates. The 130 is the average of those four reconstructions: it falls inside the range here, but an average of statistical estimates is not a measurement.
Want a number that does hold up? Every figure on this page is somebody’s claim. Take the 30-question test and get a percentile you can check rather than a figure you have to trust.
Ronald Reagan — frequently asked
What is Ronald Reagan’s IQ?
No IQ test result has been published for Ronald Reagan, so his IQ is not a documented number. The 105 that circulates comes from a fabricated 2001 e-mail, and the 130.0 in a 2006 peer-reviewed study is an average of four statistical estimates; this site’s estimate, based on his record, is 115–135.
What is Ronald Reagan’s estimated IQ?
This site estimates Ronald Reagan’s IQ at 115–135, an inference from his documented record rather than a test score: a 1932 Eureka College B.A., a radio, film and Screen Actors Guild career, and eight years each as California governor and President. The band is wide because the only peer-reviewed estimate is statistical and no test exists.
Is Ronald Reagan’s IQ 105?
No. The 105 comes from a fabricated e-mail dated July 9, 2001, crediting a “Lovenstein Institute” of Scranton, Pennsylvania, which does not exist, with IQs for twelve presidents. It describes no test, and it sits below all four of Simonton’s 2006 estimates for Reagan, which run from 118.0 to 141.9.
Did Ronald Reagan ever take an IQ test?
No IQ test score for Ronald Reagan has been published or reliably reported. None appears in the Reagan Library’s biographical pages, the Miller Center, Wikipedia or Simonton’s 2006 paper, and no SAT or entrance-exam score was found either. What survives is a 1932 degree, a grade average and a career record.
Was Ronald Reagan smart?
Ronald Reagan’s documented record includes a B.A. in economics and sociology (Eureka College, 1932, with a “C” average per the Miller Center), a radio and film career, the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, eight years as California’s governor and eight as President. Opinions about anyone’s intelligence are not test results, and no test result exists for him.
Is Ronald Reagan’s IQ 130?
Not as a test result. The 130 that appears in ranking pages, such as a 2016 Romanian news list, is the average of four statistical estimates in Dean Keith Simonton’s 2006 study, which ranks Reagan 28th of 42 presidents on this site’s reading, with a range of 118.0 to 141.9. Simonton called the paper’s IQ values “more tentative and approximate” than its other measures.
How does Ronald Reagan’s estimated IQ compare with George W. Bush’s?
This site estimates 115–135 for Reagan and 110–130 for George W. Bush. In Simonton’s 2006 study Reagan’s four estimates average 130.0 and Bush’s 124.9. Bush’s range is also anchored to a reported SAT score, while Reagan has no equivalent score, so the two ranges overlap heavily but are not built the same way.
How does my IQ compare with Ronald Reagan?
You can find out in about fifteen minutes. The IQ Metrics assessment is 30 questions, scored on the same 100-mean scale used throughout this page, so your result and the estimate above are at least expressed in the same units — one measured, one inferred. Once you have a number, the leaderboard shows where it would sit, and how we score and norm it explains the benchmarking.
Where does this estimate come from?
From the documented record rather than a test — the method is named above and set out in full under how we read a number. Compare it against the other politics profiles, starting with Thomas Jefferson.
- Take the 30-question IQ test — get a measured score and percentile of your own
- Average IQ by country — how the scale behaves across populations
- How IQ Metrics scores its assessment — the method behind our own number
- More on how IQ testing works — reliability, error and what a score can and cannot say
- More politics profiles — same field, same method
More politics
Photograph by Rob Bogaerts, Nationaal Archief, CC0. Background removed for the portrait above. · Official U.S. government portrait (Department of Defense / Department of the Navy, 1977), via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Background removed for the portrait above. · Photograph by Eric Draper, White House, public domain. Background removed for the portrait above.
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