IELTS to CEFR: the official conversion table (and what it will not tell you)

If you have landed here, you almost certainly want one number turned into one letter. Here is the table, taken from the diagram IELTS itself publishes, and then the part that most pages leave out.

What is the official IELTS to CEFR conversion table?

This is the alignment printed on page 12 of the Guide to IELTS scores, 2025 edition, published by IELTS.

Three things in that table contradict what is written on a large number of competing pages.

Band 6.5 is B2, not C1. It is the top of B2. Since 6.5 is the single most requested university entry score in the English-speaking world, this means the standard offer from a great many universities is a high B2, not a C1.

Band 8 is C2, not C1. Plenty of conversion tables stretch C1 to cover 7.0 through 8.0. The official diagram does not: the 8 sits in the C2 row.

The scale stops at band 4. There is no IELTS band aligned with A2 or A1. The red bar in the official diagram simply ends.

Why does IELTS say the conversion is not possible?

Directly under that diagram, in the same document, IELTS writes:

IELTS and the CEFR are designed for different purposes (IELTS is a standardised test with a proficiency scoring system and the CEFR is a framework), so it is not possible to make one-to-one comparisons.

This is worth sitting with, because it is the exam board undercutting the exact table it has just printed. It is not a legal disclaimer. It is a description of what the two systems are.

The CEFR is a set of descriptions of what a person can do with a language — it was written to help teachers and syllabus designers talk to each other. IELTS is a nine-band scoring system attached to a specific three-hour exam. One describes ability; the other measures performance on one morning. They were built by different organisations for different jobs, and neither was designed with the other in mind.

So the table above is a published alignment. It is the best-sourced one available, and it is the one to use. It is not an equals sign, and anyone presenting it as one is overselling it.

Which number is actually being converted?

Here is the trap that the table hides, and it is the most consequential thing on this page.

An IELTS result is not one number. It is five: Listening, Reading, Writing, Speaking, and an overall band that is the average of the other four, rounded. IELTS states the rule as follows:

The overall band score is the average of the four section band scores rounded to the nearest half band.

If the average of the four sections ends in .25, the overall band score is rounded up to the next half band, and if it ends in .75, the overall band score is rounded up to the next whole band.

That rounding is generous, and averaging hides shape. Because the scoring space is finite — four skills, nineteen possible half-point values each — it can be enumerated exactly. There are 130,321 possible IELTS score reports. We enumerated all of them.

4,255 different score reports produce an overall band of exactly 7.0. They are not remotely alike. Among them are reports with a 9.0 in one skill and a 0.0 in another. Every one of those 4,255 people can truthfully say “I got a 7.0”, and by the table above, every one of them can write “aligned to C1” on a CV.

Only some of them can actually do a C1 job in all four skills.

This is why the conversion table, used alone, is a bad tool for the decision most readers are actually making. If you are converting a score for curiosity, the table is fine. If you are converting it because an employer, a university or a regulator is going to accept or reject you, the overall band is the wrong number to be looking at — they will almost always be reading your four skill scores instead. We break that down in what counts as a good IELTS score, and the professional-registration version of the same problem in IELTS for nurses.

Does the alignment hold for the four skills separately?

The published diagram maps overall band scores. It does not give a separate alignment per skill, and you should be careful about assuming it transfers cleanly.

In practice, treating each skill score as if it sat on the same ladder is the least-bad approach, and it is roughly what institutions do when they set per-skill floors. A regulator asking for 7.0 in Listening, Reading and Speaking and 6.5 in Writing is, in CEFR terms, asking for C1 in three skills and top-of-B2 in the fourth — which is a deliberately uneven profile, and a realistic one. Writing is usually the last skill to arrive.

What does this mean for how you should read your own score?

Read the four numbers, not the average.

If your four skill scores are within half a band of each other, your overall band is an honest summary and the CEFR row it lands in is a fair description of you. If your scores are spread across two bands or more, the overall band is a statistical artefact and the CEFR level attached to it is describing a person who does not exist.

The practical version: find your lowest skill score, and read the CEFR row that one lands in. That is the level at which you will be able to operate without preparing in advance — and it is closer to what a demanding institution is really assessing.

If that lowest score is in reading, the fix is not a conversion table. It is volume: consistent contact with English at a level just above what is comfortable, which is what the CEFR level pages on this site are built around, and what Leo is designed to make sustainable.

Where do these numbers come from?

Every figure on this page comes from one of two places, and neither is our opinion:

• The alignment table and the two quotations: Guide to IELTS scores, IELTS, 2025 edition, page 12, and the official IELTS scoring in detail page. Checked 29 August 2026.
• The count of 130,321 possible score reports and the 4,255 reports behind a 7.0: our own exhaustive enumeration of the scoring space, using the rounding rule quoted above. The method is a complete four-way product over the nineteen possible half-point values, computed in integer half-points so the .25 and .75 cases are exact.

Exam boards revise their guidance. This page carries the edition and the date it was checked so that you can tell when it has gone stale — which is a courtesy the pages ranking above us for this query do not extend to you.