Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Calculator
US school grade level for a pasted text using Flesch-Kincaid, with the band, the working and a cross-check.
What is Flesch-Kincaid Grade?
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is Flesch Reading Ease rearranged to answer a more concrete question: what US school year is this written for? The output is a grade rather than an index — 8 means an eighth-grader should follow it, 13 is a newspaper — which makes it the practical choice when a text has to hit a stated reading age, as plain-language standards and many style guides require. It can legitimately return a negative number, meaning easier than grade 1.
How it works
The score is 0.39 times the average sentence length plus 11.8 times the average syllables per word, minus 15.59 — the same two measurements Reading Ease uses, with the vocabulary term now weighted about thirty times the sentence term. It is calibrated on US Navy technical manuals, which is why it reads a little low on narrative prose and a little high on text with long technical nouns. Because syllables are a heuristic rather than a dictionary lookup, the result carries that approximation; the tool labels the band an estimate and shows the counts the formula was given so the figure can be traced.
- Enter your input. Type or paste your input into the field above — the tool responds instantly.
- Review the result. Output updates live as you type. Everything runs entirely in your browser.
- Copy or download. Use the Copy button to grab the result, or Download to save it as a file.
Examples
Realistic sample
Type or paste any realistic input — the tool computes the result locally and instantly.
Common mistakes
Expecting a server round-trip
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