How IELTS is scored.
No grade, no pass mark, a band from 0 to 9, and an examiner deciding which one you've shown.
The short version. Each of the four skills, Listening, Reading, Writing, Speaking, gets its own band from 0 to 9. Your overall band is the average of the four, rounded to the nearest half. There's no pass mark: the band you need is set by the university, employer, or visa you're applying for.
Nought to nine, in half steps.
Every score on every skill sits somewhere on the same nine-band ladder.
A band describes a level of English, not a percentage. Bands run in half-band steps, so 6.5 and 7.0 are adjacent, and that small gap is often the whole difference between meeting a requirement and missing it.
Listening and Reading are marked out of 40 questions and converted to a band. Writing and Speaking are judged by an examiner against four criteria, each scored 0–9 and then averaged, which is where most of the technique lives.
How the overall band is worked out
Listening 7.0 · Reading 6.5 · Writing 6.0 · Speaking 7.0
average = 26.5 ÷ 4 = 6.625 → Overall 6.5
A .25 average rounds up to the next half band; a .75 rounds up to the next whole band.
What each band actually looks like.
Speaking is marked on these four criteria, each from 0 to 9; your Speaking band is their average. Pick your target and see what it means across all four at once.
Descriptions are a plain-English summary for orientation, not the official wording. Writing is marked on four parallel criteria.
Fluency & Coherence
How smoothly you speak
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary and word choice
Grammatical Range
Sentence variety and accuracy
Pronunciation
Clarity, stress and rhythm
The hard part isn't the scale. It's seeing your own band honestly.
Most people sit half a band below where they think they are, and can't tell why.
The first lesson is a full assessment: I'll assess your current level against these criteria and tell you, plainly, what's holding the band down and what to do about it. Lessons are £20 for fifty minutes, one to one, in proper British English. Or start free, sit a Reading test or drill your articles.