What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score? (with concrete examples)

"What's a good Flesch Reading Ease score?" is the most common question we get. The honest answer is "it depends on your audience" — but that's not useful by itself. Here is what the bands actually mean, with examples from writing you've already read, and concrete targets for different kinds of content.

The official score bands

Score	Reading level	Audience
90–100	5th grade	Very easy. Children's books, simple instructions.
80–89	6th grade	Easy. Conversational English. Short stories.
70–79	7th grade	Fairly easy. Most marketing and web copy.
60–69	8th–9th grade	Plain English. News articles. Most blogs.
50–59	10th–12th grade	Fairly difficult. Quality journalism, magazine features.
30–49	College	Difficult. Academic writing.
0–29	College graduate	Very difficult. Scientific papers, legal documents.

What these scores look like in real writing

Numbers in isolation are useless — they only make sense compared to something. Here's where common publications land:

• Children's picture books: 95+. "The cat sat on the mat" territory.
• Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea": ~85. Famously simple prose; you don't need a college degree to read it.
• USA Today, BBC News headlines: 70–80. Designed for maximum reach.
• The Atlantic, The New Yorker: 50–60. Sophisticated but still readable for most adults.
• Harvard Business Review: 40–55. Assumes a business-school vocabulary.
• Nature, scientific abstracts: 20–40. Dense technical writing for specialists.
• Federal Reserve releases, Supreme Court opinions: 10–30. Legalese.

What you should aim for

Marketing copy and landing pages: 70+

Your reader is scanning, not reading. Every comprehension hiccup costs conversions. Aim for 70+ to maximise reach. The bar for marketing is the same bar as USA Today — get there.

Blog posts and content marketing: 60–70

You want sophistication without exhaustion. The Atlantic-to-news range. Below 50 you'll lose half your audience; above 80 your post starts to feel like clickbait.

SaaS and product documentation: 50–65

Technical documentation has unavoidable jargon. Don't fight it — define terms, use short sentences around the jargon, and accept that your score will be lower than a blog. The classic pattern: a single hard word per paragraph is fine; three is too many.

White papers and B2B reports: 45–55

Your audience is patient and specialist. They expect denser prose. But "specialist" is not an excuse for bad writing — even 45 is more readable than most corporate writing achieves.

Academic papers: 30–45

You're constrained by field conventions. Within that constraint, try to be at the top of your discipline's range. Reviewers and editors will thank you, and your citation count will too.

Patient-facing health information: 70+ (and use SMOG, not Flesch)

For health writing, switch tools. Use SMOG, not Flesch. The NIH recommends SMOG-6 to SMOG-8 (i.e., 6th–8th grade) for patient education. This is non-negotiable when the cost of misunderstanding is medical.

Why "easier is better" isn't always right

It's tempting to chase the highest possible score. Don't. Three reasons:

First, very high Flesch scores often correlate with simplistic content. If your blog post about React server components scores 90, you've probably stripped out the nuance that makes it useful. Stripping precision to game a number is the exact thing readability formulas are supposed to prevent.

Second, audience expectations matter. The Atlantic's readers like The Atlantic's reading level. Drop a 90-Flesch piece into the magazine and it'll feel like a child wandered into a dinner party. Match your register to your audience.

Third, scores above 90 often mean very short sentences, which produces choppy, immature prose. The five-word sentence has its place; nothing but five-word sentences gets exhausting fast.

How to interpret your score

Run your text through Flesch Reading Ease and locate yourself on the table. Then ask:

1. Does the band match my audience? If you're writing for plumbers but scoring 35 (college level), there's a mismatch.
2. Is the score lower than I expected? Run the sentence length analyzer to see if a few outlier sentences are pulling the average down.
3. Is the score higher than I expected? Check whether your sentences are unnaturally short, or whether bullet lists are inflating the apparent score.

The score is feedback, not a grade

A good Flesch score is the one that matches your audience. There is no universal "good number" — only "appropriate" and "not". If your score is in the right band for your context, the formula has done its job: it's confirmed that the mechanical aspects of your writing match your readers' expectations. The rest — clarity, structure, argument, voice — is on you.