An average of 6.25 across your four skills becomes an overall band of 6.5. An average of 6.75 becomes 7.0. But an average of 6.125 becomes 6.0 — the rounding that felt generous a moment ago now goes against you. These are not folklore: they are the official rules on ielts.org, complete with worked examples, and they routinely decide whether a score report clears an institution's cut-off. Almost no prep site quotes them. Here they are, verbatim, walked through line by line.
The failure
The mistake this page prevents is simple: assuming the overall band is a plain average. It is not — it is the average rounded to the nearest half band, with two special rules that always round in your favour at .25 and .75. Test takers who do not know this misjudge what a retake needs to achieve. Some sit the whole test again to chase an overall 6.5 they would already have reached by lifting one skill a single half band. Others assume they are safe at an average of 6.1 and are not.
The scale itself
IELTS reports each of the four skills — Listening, Reading, Writing, Speaking — on a scale that runs from 0 to 9, in whole and half bands (6.0, 6.5, 7.0 and so on). The official skill labels run from 9 "Expert" down through 7 "Good", 6 "Competent" and 5 "Modest" to 1 "Non-user", with 0 reserved for "Did not attempt the test".
One footnote worth knowing, because ielts.org's own pages disagree with each other: the scoring page presents the scale as 0–9, while the format pages say "Your final score is given as a band score from 1–9 in whole or half bands." Read them together: 0–9 is the reported scale, and 0 simply means a section was not attempted — any attempted section scores 1–9.
The official rounding rules
From ielts.org's scoring page, verbatim:
"The overall band score is the average of the four section band scores rounded to the nearest half band."
And the part that decides borderline applications:
"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."
So at exactly .25 and .75 — the two points sitting halfway between bands — the tie always breaks upwards. Everywhere else, ordinary nearest-half-band rounding applies, which means it can just as easily go down.
The official worked examples, walked through
These three test takers appear on ielts.org's own scoring page. Here is the arithmetic behind each row.
| Test taker | Listening | Reading | Writing | Speaking | Average | Overall band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 6.5 | 6.5 | 5.0 | 7.0 | 6.25 | 6.5 |
| B | 4.0 | 3.5 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 3.875 | 4.0 |
| C | 6.5 | 6.5 | 5.5 | 6.0 | 6.125 | 6.0 |
Test taker A — 6.5 + 6.5 + 5.0 + 7.0 = 25.0, divided by four is 6.25. That ends in .25, so the .25 rule fires and the overall band rounds up to 6.5 — despite a Writing score of only 5.0. A strong Speaking performance dragged a weak Writing paper over the line.
Test taker B — 4.0 + 3.5 + 4.0 + 4.0 = 15.5, divided by four is 3.875. Neither special rule applies, so it is ordinary rounding to the nearest half band: 4.0.
Test taker C — 6.5 + 6.5 + 5.5 + 6.0 = 24.5, divided by four is 6.125. Again no special rule — and the nearest half band is 6.0. C rounds down. Compare C with A: identical Listening and Reading, a better Writing score than A, yet half a band lower overall, because A's Speaking 7.0 pushed the average onto the magic .25.
The practical lesson sits in that comparison. The gap between an average of 6.125 and 6.25 is 0.125 — exactly what one half band in one skill contributes to the average. Raising any single skill by half a band moves your average by 0.125, which near a boundary is the whole game.
What the overall band does not tell you
Two honest caveats, because the overall band is not the only number that matters.
First, institutions and governments read the four skill scores separately. Your Test Report Form shows all four, and receiving bodies set per-skill requirements of their own. Canadian citizenship, for example, looks only at two skills — canada.ca requires Listening 4.5 or higher and Speaking 4.0 or higher on the General Training test, and the other two skills do not enter into it. A rounded-up overall band will not rescue an application whose per-skill minimums you missed, so check the requirements page of your specific institution or programme before you celebrate — or resit.
Second, the four skill bands themselves are not all produced the same way. Listening and Reading come from raw marks out of 40, and ielts.org publishes only partial "average marks" tables for those — with the caveat that the marks needed "will vary slightly from test version to test version". Writing and Speaking are examiner-marked against four criteria each, and no official raw-score conversion exists for them at all — any chart claiming otherwise is a prep-site invention. The full story is on our raw-score page linked below. Worth knowing here: Task 2 "contributes twice as much as Task 1 to the Writing score", so within Writing the essay is where a half band is most realistically won.
What actually costs you
- Not knowing where your average sits. 6.125 and 6.25 feel the same; they round to different overall bands. Do the arithmetic before deciding whether — and what — to retake.
- Chasing the overall band while missing a per-skill minimum. Rounding cannot fix a skill score that is itself below a requirement.
- Retaking everything when one half band in one skill would do. The average moves 0.125 per half band per skill — target the skill where that half band is cheapest for you.
- Trusting a prep-site "score calculator" over the official rule. The two sentences quoted above are the entire mechanism. Anything more elaborate is decoration.
Try one
The only way to know where your four skills — and their average — actually sit is to test them under real conditions.
[Try a full mock test →] — one full task, marked, no card required.