Ten questions about the last month. Measures not how much happened, but how uncontrollable it felt.
10 questions across 1 scale, about 4 minutes|Published scoring key from Perceived Stress Scale, 10-item version, not invented
Authors: Cohen, S., Kamarck, T. & Mermelstein, R. (1983)
Licence: Free for non-commercial research and educational use
How much of the last month felt unpredictable, uncontrollable and overloading.
High. You have been running on the edge of what you can absorb, and the sense of control has been thin.
Low. You have mostly felt able to handle what the month brought.
Question 1 of 10
In the last month, how often have you…
…been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly?
Cohen, Kamarck and Mermelstein published the Perceived Stress Scale in 1983, and it became the most widely used psychological instrument for measuring the perception of stress. The design decision that made it useful is what it leaves out.
The scale asks nothing about events. No list of life changes, no count of deadlines, no severity ratings. It asks how unpredictable, uncontrollable and overloading the last month felt. Two people in identical circumstances can therefore score very differently, and that difference is what the instrument exists to capture.
Four of the ten items are positively worded and reverse-scored, which stops the questionnaire from collapsing into a straight line of agreement.
10 answers
Each answer you give is a number on the published response scale.
One scale
Answers belonging to the same scale are added together.
A band
Each total is read against the bands printed for that scale.
Each item scores 0-4. Items 4, 5, 7 and 8 are reverse-scored (4 minus your answer) before the ten are summed, giving a total from 0 to 40.
Scoring runs in your browser from your own answers. It is deterministic, so the same answers always produce the same result, and no part of it is generated, estimated or inferred.
Each item scores 0-4 and the ten sum to a total of 0-40. Items 4, 5, 7 and 8 are reversed before summing, which is why agreeing with everything does not produce a maximum score.
The bands in common use, 0 to 13 low, 14 to 26 moderate and 27 to 40 high, are a convention from the literature rather than a clinical cut-off. They describe where samples tend to fall, not a threshold at which something becomes a disorder.
The scale covers one month and moves with it. Perceived stress is a state, and measuring it twice across a changed situation tells you far more than a single reading does.
Worth taking if
Not the right tool for
Perception, not exposure. A high score does not establish that your circumstances are objectively harder than someone else's.
One month only. It is a snapshot of a period, and it moves.
The band boundaries are conventions from the literature rather than diagnostic thresholds.
This is a self-assessment questionnaire, not a diagnostic instrument and not medical advice.
10 questions, about 4 minutes. Your answers are scored on this device and stored on this device. There is no account to create and nothing is sent to a server. Progress saves as you go, so a long assessment can be finished across more than one sitting.
No sign up, ever. Every item in this assessment comes from Perceived Stress Scale, 10-item version, and the page above tells you exactly how each score is worked out before you answer anything.
How unpredictable, uncontrollable and overloaded your life has felt in the last month. It measures perception rather than exposure, which is exactly what it was designed to do.
A total of 27 or above is conventionally described as high, 14 to 26 as moderate and 13 or below as low. These are descriptive bands from the literature, not diagnostic thresholds.
Items 4, 5, 7 and 8, the positively worded ones about feeling confident, feeling things were going your way, controlling irritations and being on top of things.
About four minutes for ten questions. Every one opens the same way, with the phrase “in the last month, how often have you”, so the pace picks up after the first couple.
Yes, for non-commercial research and educational use, which is what this is.
Standard PSS-10 wording; reverse-scored items 4, 5, 7 and 8 per Cohen's scoring instructions. Check the source.