CFPB Financial Skill Scale

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Complete the 10 official CFPB scale items, followed by 2 clearly labeled scoring-context questions for age group and administration mode. Only the first 10 responses contribute to the raw total.

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Choose the exact response that best matches your current financial decision-making experience.

Scoring context only: this response selects the official lookup column and never contributes to the 10-item raw total.

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A financial decision often becomes difficult before any arithmetic begins. The useful information may be hard to find, the tradeoffs may not be obvious, or a good plan may be difficult to carry through when circumstances change. Financial skill is the ability to manage that whole path rather than a test of how much money or technical knowledge someone has.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Financial Skill Scale measures perceived, transferable decision-making skill among adults. Its ten statements cover three connected abilities:

finding trustworthy information or advice when a decision is unfamiliar;
processing that information in light of personal needs and tradeoffs; and
acting on a decision, following through, and adapting when plans need to change.

This focus makes the scale relevant to decisions as different as choosing credit, planning for retirement, comparing an investment, or controlling day-to-day spending. It does not ask for balances, income, debts, or credit history. A person may have strong decision-making habits while facing financial hardship, or have substantial resources while feeling unsure about unfamiliar choices.

The result is a self-report estimate, not a pass mark. Mood, recent experiences, reading support, and how a person sees their own abilities can affect answers. CFPB does not define a good-or-bad cutoff, and the score must not be used to decide creditworthiness, employment, eligibility, investment suitability, or personalized financial advice.

How to Use This Tool:

Answer from your current decision-making experience and record the two scoring-context answers exactly.

Select Start assessment and answer all ten scale statements. Choose the option that best describes you rather than the answer that sounds most financially responsible.
Answer the age-group question and say whether you read and answered the questionnaire yourself or someone else read it and recorded your answers. These two answers choose the official score-conversion column; they do not add points to the ten-item total.
Use the review step to correct any response. The official score is unavailable until all twelve required responses are complete.
Read the Financial Skill Scale score with its national-reference position, then inspect the answer review if one response does not fit your intended meaning.

Interpreting Results:

The official score runs from 0 to 100, with higher values representing more perceived financial skill. The value comes from the ten-item total plus a lookup for age group and administration mode. It is not a percentage correct, and a score of 60 does not mean that 60% of decisions will be good.

CFPB Financial Skill Scale national reference positions
Official score	Reference position	Meaning
Below 42	Below the national lower-quartile reference	Below the 25th-percentile reference in CFPB's 2016 U.S. adult distribution.
42 to 57	Within the national middle half	Between the lower- and upper-quartile references, including both endpoints.
Above 57	Above the national upper-quartile reference	Above the 75th-percentile reference in the national distribution.

These positions describe a reference distribution, not competence levels or recommendations. Small changes can reflect measurement error. For a later comparison, keep the standard form, age category, administration mode, and answering conditions consistent, and look for a pattern across time rather than treating one-point movement as proof of change.

Technical Details:

Seven statements use the response scale from Not at all = 0 to Completely = 4. Two frequency statements use Never = 0 through Always = 4. The statement about struggling to understand financial information is keyed in the opposite direction, so Never contributes 4 and Always contributes 0.

Formula Core:

The ten keyed response values are added without weighting. A complete response set can therefore produce an integer total from 0 to 40.

T = \sum_{i = 1}^{10} s_{i}, 0 \leq T \leq 40

T is the total response value and s_i is the keyed value for item i. No average or intermediate rounding is used. The raw total is not the reported 0–100 score.

Lookup Core:

The raw total selects a row in the official CFPB worksheet. Age and administration mode select one of four columns. The lookup is exact and produces an integer standardized score.

Complete CFPB Financial Skill Scale standard-form conversion lookup
Raw total	Self-administered		Administered by someone else
Raw total	Age 18–61	Age 62+	Age 18–61	Age 62+
0	5	3	3	6
1	8	6	7	9
2	11	9	9	12
3	13	12	11	14
4	15	14	14	16
5	18	16	16	18
6	20	18	18	20
7	22	20	19	22
8	23	22	21	23
9	25	24	23	25
10	27	26	25	27
11	29	27	27	29
12	30	29	28	30
13	32	31	30	32
14	33	32	31	33
15	35	34	33	35
16	36	35	34	36
17	38	37	36	38
18	39	38	38	40
19	41	40	39	41
20	42	42	41	43
21	44	43	42	44
22	46	45	44	46
23	47	46	45	47
24	49	48	47	49
25	50	49	49	51
26	52	51	50	52
27	54	53	52	54
28	55	55	54	56
29	57	56	56	58
30	59	58	58	60
31	61	60	60	62
32	63	62	62	64
33	65	64	64	66
34	67	66	66	68
35	69	68	69	71
36	72	71	71	74
37	74	74	75	77
38	77	77	78	80
39	81	80	82	84
40	85	85	88	89

Worked Examples:

A total response value of 20 becomes 42 for a self-administered respondent in either age group, 41 for an 18–61-year-old when someone else administered the questions, and 43 for an administered respondent aged 62 or older. Those differences come from the official conversion columns, not from extra points for age or administration. Scores 42 and 43 sit inside the national middle-half reference, while 41 is below the lower-quartile reference.

Privacy Notes:

Responses remain in memory while the assessment is open. A copied result link includes all ten raw answers plus the age and administration responses in the link itself; the link is neither encrypted nor access-controlled. Review the confirmation message and share it only with someone who should see those answers. Restarting clears the in-memory session and removes the shared result fragment.

References:

Measuring financial skill: A guide to using the Financial Skill Scale, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, September 2018.
Financial Skill Scale questionnaire and scoring worksheet, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, June 2018.

CFPB Financial Skill Scale — Standard Form

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CFPB Financial Skill Scale — Standard Form

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