What is Tom Brady’s IQ?
A documented 33 on the Wonderlic. The IQ number next to it is somebody else’s arithmetic.
Brady really did score 33 out of 50 on the Wonderlic Personnel Test at the 2000 NFL Scouting Combine — a real, well-above-average result, reported at the time and repeated ever since. The “126” IQ figure attached to that score is not a separate invention the way most figures on this site are; it is that real number run through an arithmetic formula the test’s own publisher never endorsed, applied to an instrument the NFL itself stopped using in 2022 after concluding it did not predict what it was being used to predict.
Tom Brady’s estimated IQ
- Scored 33 out of 50 on the Wonderlic Personnel Test at the 2000 NFL Scouting Combine, a result reported at the time and repeated since on the Patriots’ own team site — well above both the general working-adult average of 21 and the commonly cited NFL quarterback average of 24.
- The Wonderlic correlates with Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) Full-Scale IQ at r = .91–.93 in the controlled study most often cited to connect the two scales at all (Dodrill, 1981, in a sample of 120 adults) — a real, replicated relationship, though measured under individually administered testing rather than a fifty-question timed group screening at an athletic tryout.
- Graduated the University of Michigan in December 1999 with a Bachelor of General Studies, concentrating in business and economics, after playing quarterback there from 1995 to 1999 — a solid, undistinguished academic record with no honors on file, offering little independent basis for an estimate beyond the test score itself.
No IQ test result for Brady exists on any record, and neither Wonderlic’s publisher nor any peer-reviewed equating study has published a formula for converting its raw 0–50 score onto an IQ scale — the double-it-and-add-60 conversion that produces 126 is football-commentary folklore, not psychometrics, and it does not appear in Dodrill’s study or anywhere else in the peer-reviewed literature. Even taking Dodrill’s real correlation at face value, r = .91–.93 falls short of the perfect 1.0 a straight linear rescaling silently assumes, which is one reason this range sits at and below the popular figure rather than centered on it.
- Born
- 3 August 1977, San Mateo, California
- Education
- University of Michigan — Bachelor of General Studies, 1999
- NFL draft
- 2000, 6th round, 199th overall, New England Patriots
- Career
- 23 NFL seasons — Patriots (2000–2019), Buccaneers (2020–2022); retired February 2023
- Documented test score
- Wonderlic Personnel Test, 33/50, 2000 NFL Scouting Combine
- Honors
- 7× Super Bowl champion (record); 5× Super Bowl MVP; 3× NFL MVP
What an IQ of 110–125 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 Tom Brady is
Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr. was born 3 August 1977 in San Mateo, California, and played quarterback at the University of Michigan from 1995 to 1999, sharing the starting job for much of his college career before taking it over as a fifth-year senior. He graduated in December 1999 with a Bachelor of General Studies, concentrating in business and economics. His measurable numbers at the 2000 Combine were weak for the position — a 5.28-second 40-yard dash and a 24.5-inch vertical jump among them — and he was picked 199th overall, in the sixth round, by the New England Patriots, a draft slot that has since become the standard reference point for evaluation misses in American sports.
He went on to play 23 NFL seasons — 20 with the Patriots, three with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — retiring in February 2023 with a record seven Super Bowl championships, five Super Bowl MVP awards and three NFL Most Valuable Player awards, the 2010 award decided by a unanimous vote for the first time in the poll’s history. Sports media routinely calls him the greatest quarterback, and often the greatest player, in NFL history. That reputation rests on two decades of results on the field, not on any cognitive test score — which is exactly the record this page is not the place to relitigate.
By Elora Mercer, Celebrity Research WriterFigures checked by Leon Falkner, Data & Research AnalystReviewed by Aarav Vardhan, Editor-in-Chief · Last reviewed August 2026
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Where the 126 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.
Almost every profile on this site opens with a number that has no real test behind it anywhere. Brady’s doesn’t. He sat for the Wonderlic Personnel Test at the 2000 NFL Scouting Combine along with every other prospect that year and scored 33 out of 50, a result that surfaced in draft coverage within days and has been repeated ever since, including on the Patriots’ own team site. Nobody had to invent that number — it may be the single most solidly sourced data point on this entire site. What happened to it afterward is a different story.
The “126” comes from one piece of arithmetic — double the Wonderlic score, add 60 — that circulates on IQ calculators, sports-trivia pages and “smartest athletes” roundups with no citation attached. It did not come from Wonderlic’s publisher, which has never released an official IQ-equivalent table for its own test. It also does not come from the one real peer-reviewed study behind the idea that a Wonderlic score says anything about IQ at all: Dodrill’s 1981 paper in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology measured Wonderlic-derived scores against Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Full-Scale IQ in 120 adults and found a real, replicated correlation of .91 to .93 — strong, but well short of the perfect one-to-one relationship a straight doubling-and-adding formula quietly assumes, and measured under individual testing conditions rather than a fifty-question group screen given in twelve minutes at a football tryout.
The stronger objection arrived in January 2022, when the NFL removed the Wonderlic from the Scouting Combine after decades of use in the league’s pre-draft evaluation process. The league’s own explanation was that its evaluation methods were overdue for an update; as Robert O’Connell wrote in the New York Times, “no statistically significant correlation between a player’s Wonderlic score and his on-field performance” has ever been documented, echoing a 2009 peer-reviewed study that found Wonderlic scores did not predict NFL performance, draft position or games started at any position. An organization that tested this exact population for five decades, then walked away from the instrument for that reason, is a harder objection to wave off than a missing citation. Brady shares this shape of page with only one other subject here: Ryan Fitzpatrick’s real 48-out-of-50 gets run through the same kind of arithmetic and comes out lower than a strict conversion would actually produce — the opposite direction of error, from a test with the same validity problem underneath it.
How we read a number →Independently report Brady’s 33-out-of-50 Wonderlic score from the 2000 NFL Scouting Combine, and the NFL quarterback-position average of 24 it is generally compared against.
The actual peer-reviewed source behind the Wonderlic’s reputation as IQ-correlated — r = .91–.93 against WAIS Full-Scale IQ in 120 individually tested adults. The double-and-add-60 formula that produces 126 for Brady’s score does not appear in it.
Applies the double-the-Wonderlic-and-add-60 formula directly to Brady’s 33 to produce approximately 126, while its own text flags the conversion as an unofficial approximation with no published study behind it.
Confirms the league removed the Wonderlic from the Combine after the 2021 season and cites the absence of any documented statistical link between Wonderlic score and on-field performance.
Lists an IQ of 150 with no source, test or methodology cited — not even the Wonderlic — under a standing site-wide disclaimer that none of its listed scores are guaranteed accurate.
The sources behind our estimate
The figures that circulate for Tom Brady, what we were able to confirm, and where the two diverge.
A formula circulating on IQ-calculator sites, sports-trivia pages and “smartest athletes” roundups converts Brady’s real Wonderlic score into an IQ of “126,” presented as though it were a measured result.
The 33-out-of-50 Wonderlic score is real and well documented, dating to the 2000 NFL Scouting Combine and repeated since on the Patriots’ own team site. The “126” is arithmetic applied to it afterward — double the Wonderlic score, add 60. That rule of thumb has no source in Wonderlic’s own publisher materials and appears in no peer-reviewed equating study; sites that use it, including at least one that applies it directly to Brady’s score, acknowledge it as an unofficial approximation rather than a published conversion. The deeper problem sits underneath the arithmetic: the Wonderlic was built and normed as a twelve-minute hiring screen, not an IQ test, and the NFL itself removed it from the Combine after the 2021 season, following decades of published research — including a 2009 study covering multiple positions — finding it did not predict on-field performance.
The first number is the one fact on this page nobody disputes — a real, reported test score. The second is what an unofficial formula turns it into. The third belongs to a site that lists Brady’s IQ as 150 with no reference to the Wonderlic, or to any test at all, under a standing disclaimer that none of its listed scores are guaranteed to be accurate.
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.
Tom Brady — frequently asked
What is Tom Brady’s IQ?
No IQ test result for Tom Brady has ever been published. What’s documented is a Wonderlic Personnel Test score of 33 out of 50 from the 2000 NFL Scouting Combine — a real, well-above-average result on a different kind of test, not a measured IQ.
Where does the 126 IQ figure for Tom Brady come from?
From an informal formula — IQ equal to twice the Wonderlic score plus 60 — applied to his real 33. The formula circulates widely on sports and IQ-calculator sites but was never published by the Wonderlic test’s own publisher, and it does not appear in the peer-reviewed study most often cited to connect the two scales.
Is the Wonderlic test the same thing as an IQ test?
No. It’s a twelve-minute, fifty-question test created in 1936 to screen job applicants, scored on its own 0–50 scale with no built-in IQ equivalence. It correlates with WAIS IQ scores at r = .91–.93 in one controlled 1981 study — a real but imperfect relationship, not an equivalence, and one measured under different conditions than a football tryout.
Did the NFL stop using the Wonderlic test?
Yes. The league removed it from the Scouting Combine after the 2021 season. NFL executive Troy Vincent described the league’s evaluation methods as overdue for an update, and reporting on the decision pointed to years of research finding no documented link between Wonderlic scores and on-field performance.
How good is a 33 on the Wonderlic, really?
Genuinely strong — comfortably above both the general working-adult average of 21 and the commonly cited NFL quarterback average of 24. The dispute on this page is about what that score can responsibly be converted into, not about whether it’s real.
How does Tom Brady’s case compare to other athletes on this site with a Wonderlic score?
He’s one of two. Ryan Fitzpatrick’s real 48-out-of-50 gets run through the same kind of arithmetic and comes out lower than a strict conversion would produce — the opposite direction of error. John Urschel has no Wonderlic or IQ figure attached to him at all; his page rests on a completed MIT mathematics doctorate instead.
How does my IQ compare with Tom Brady?
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 athletes profiles, starting with Magnus Carlsen.
- 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 athletes profiles — same field, same method
More athletes
Photograph by Wolfgang Jekel (London Chess Classic, 2016), CC BY 2.0. Background removed for the portrait above. · Photograph by Frans Peeters (Tata Steel Chess Tournament, January 2024), CC BY-SA 2.0. Background removed for the portrait above. · Photograph by Bryan Berlin (13 June 2026), CC BY-SA 4.0. Background removed for the portrait above.
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