Mensa IQ Requirement: The Score You Need on Each Accepted Test

Mensa's IQ requirement is the 98th percentile of the general population on an approved, supervised test, not one number. American Mensa's own table, read on 13 October 2026, turns that into a full-scale IQ of 130 on the Wechsler scales (WAIS, WISC and WPPSI), 130 on the Stanford-Binet 5, a composite standard age score of 132 on the CogAT, 132 on the OLSAT and the NNAT2 and NNAT3, and 148 on the Cattell. All of them are the same requirement, the top two per cent, written on a different scale. This article gives the table, the arithmetic behind it, and the rules about which old test scores still count.

The actual rule

Mensa admits people who score at or above the 98th percentile on an approved standardised intelligence test — the top two per cent of the general population, as represented by that test's reference sample. The society was founded in Oxford in 1946 by Roland Berrill and Lancelot Ware, and the top-two-per-cent criterion has been the entry rule throughout. Everything else — which tests count, what figure each one requires, how old a score may be — is administration built on top of that one sentence.

The distinction is not pedantry, because a percentile and a score are different kinds of thing. A percentile is a position in a reference sample. A score is that position printed on whatever scale the test happens to use. Move to a test with a different scale and the position stays exactly where it was while the printed number moves.

What the 98th percentile is worth in points

Modern tests are scored so that the average is 100 and the spread is fixed by a chosen standard deviation — a measure of how far apart people's results fall. The 98th percentile sits about 2.05 standard deviations above the mean. Multiply that by the standard deviation in use and add 100:

• Standard deviation 15 — the Wechsler scales and most contemporary tests. The 98th percentile falls at roughly 131.
• Standard deviation 16 — some Stanford-Binet forms and a number of older instruments. Roughly 133.
• Standard deviation 24 — the Cattell scale, long used by British Mensa for its own supervised test. Roughly 149.
• Ratio IQ — the obsolete mental-age formula. It has no fixed standard deviation at all, which is one reason no serious admissions process uses it.

Now set the arithmetic against the cut scores American Mensa publishes: 130 for the Wechsler scales, 132 for the 16-point tests and 148 for the Cattell. Each is exactly two standard deviations above 100 on its own scale. Two standard deviations is the 97.7th percentile, a shade under the 98th, which the strict arithmetic puts at about 131, 133 and 149. The published cut scores are therefore the familiar round figures, a point below the formula, and the page does not say why. What matters is that they are the figures Mensa applies: a 130 on a Wechsler test is a qualifying score, and a 130 on a test with a 16-point spread is not.

Mensa qualifying scores by test

American Mensa says it accepts scores from approximately 200 standardised intelligence tests and publishes a partial list of the ones applicants ask about most. The figures below come from its Qualifying Test Scores page, read on 13 October 2026. School-district tests first:

• Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT): composite standard age score of 132
• Differential Ability Scales (DAS): general conceptual ability of 132, and 130 for the DAS-II
• Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test: a nonverbal ability index of 130 or above for the NNAT, and 132 or above for the NNAT2 and NNAT3
• Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT): total school ability index of 132. The Otis-Gamma test needs an IQ of 131
• Stanford-Binet: IQ 132, and IQ 130 for the Stanford-Binet 5
• Woodcock-Johnson tests of cognitive abilities (not the achievement tests): IQ 132 for editions I to III and 131 for edition IV

Tests given by a private psychologist:

• Wechsler scales (WAIS to WAIS-IV, WISC to WISC-V, WPPSI to WPPSI-IV): full-scale IQ 130, with the whole battery given. For the WISC-IV alone, the general abilities index is accepted when two index scores differ by 1.5 standard deviations or more
• Wechsler Nonverbal Scale of Ability: full-scale IQ 130, accepted only for hearing-impaired candidates
• Cattell: IQ 148
• Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales: IQ 130
• California Test of Mental Maturity: IQ 132, and the DAS and Stanford-Binet scores above

The CogAT, Stanford-Binet and OLSAT figures show the point of this article. The Wechsler scales and the Stanford-Binet 5 use a standard deviation of 15, so their cut is 130. The CogAT standard age score has a standard deviation of 16 by its publisher's own definition, so its cut is 132. Our guides to CogAT and NNAT scores, the OLSAT, Stanford-Binet 5 scores and WAIS-IV index scores cover each test.

Do old SAT, ACT and GRE scores count for Mensa?

Some do, if they were taken before a cutoff date. American Mensa's page says the date that counts is the date you took the test, not the date you join, and that the later versions no longer correlate with an IQ test:

• SAT: 1300 if taken before 30 September 1974, 1250 from then until 31 January 1994, and not accepted after that
• ACT composite: 29 if taken before September 1989, and not accepted after
• GRE: 1250 (quantitative plus verbal) before May 1994, 1875 (adding analytical) from May 1994 to 30 September 2001, and not accepted after
• LSAT: 662 before 1982, and a total percentile rank of 95 after, with the report mailed from the Law School Admission Council
• PSAT: 180 in junior year or 195 in senior year if taken before May 1993, and not accepted after
• Henmon-Nelson: IQ 132

Military results follow the same pattern. The AFQT counts only if taken before October 1980, at a score of 98, and the ASVAB is not accepted, because the newer military tests are vocational aptitude tests. A recent SAT or ACT score therefore cannot be used, whatever the number. Our conversions for the SAT and ACT explain why those scores stopped tracking IQ.

Two ways in, and one that does not count

• Prior evidence — a qualifying result from an approved test that was administered under controlled conditions by someone qualified to give it, submitted for review.
• Mensa's own supervised admission test, sat at a scheduled session under proctored conditions.
• Neither route accepts an unsupervised online score. Mensa's at-home or practice test is offered as an indicator of whether the supervised test is worth booking, not as a qualification in itself.

The reason is not gatekeeping for its own sake. A score means what it claims to mean only if the conditions match the ones the norms were collected under: the same time limits, the same instructions, no interruptions, no second attempt, nobody else in the room. Remove that and the result is still a number, but it is no longer a percentile against the reference sample — which is the only thing Mensa is asking for. Our note on what separates a well-built online test from a bad one works through the same problem from the other end.

The cutoff is administrative, not natural

A threshold has to be somewhere, and the top two per cent is as defensible a line as any. What it is not is a boundary between two kinds of person. Every score carries measurement error, and test manuals publish a figure — the standard error of measurement — describing how far a result bounces around a person's true standing between sittings. On a Wechsler-type scale that error is large enough that a reported 129 and a reported 132 are not reliably different results. One of them is admitted and the other is not, and the honest description of that difference is that it is administrative.

The caution runs in the other direction too. Someone who qualifies has produced one estimate above a line on one day. That is a real result, and it is still an estimate with a range around it. The one Reynolds test on the list, the RIAS, is explained in RIAS-2 scores explained.

What membership does and does not tell you

• It tells you that one supervised test placed someone in the top two per cent of a reference sample, on a stated date.
• It does not tell you which abilities were strong. A qualifying total can be reached by very different profiles across the subtests.
• It does not predict any individual outcome. Score-to-outcome relationships in education and work are group averages with wide spread around them.
• It does not expire in any psychometric sense, but the norms behind it do — a score from decades ago was measured against a sample that no longer represents anyone.
• Roughly one adult in fifty meets the criterion by construction. Mensa International's site puts its worldwide membership at around 150,000, though it says 170,000 elsewhere on the same page, with American Mensa near 50,000. That is a small fraction of everyone who qualifies, because qualifying and joining a society are unrelated decisions

The useful takeaway is not the number. It is the habit the number should teach: when someone quotes a threshold, ask which scale it is on, and if they cannot say, they are quoting folklore. That applies to Mensa, to the figures attached to famous names, and to any score handed to you without its scale. For what one study of 617 Mensa members found about personality, see our guide to MBTI type and IQ. For how Mensa compares with the other societies, see our guide to high-IQ societies, and for a shorter explainer on the same rule, what IQ score you need for Mensa. To see where a score sits, use the IQ percentile calculator, or take the IQ Metrics test.

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