IELTS test-taker statistics 2024 to 2025: average bands by country, first language and skill

IELTS publishes two spreadsheets of test-taker data each year, and the 2024 to 2025 edition is the latest. This page digests them: the average band for each of the four skills and overall, by nationality and by first language, for Academic and for General Training, plus the share of candidates who reach Band 7.0 by the reason they took the test. Every number below is IELTS.org’s own; the only arithmetic added is a sum of its published distributions, marked where it appears.

Two limits of the source are worth knowing before you read. IELTS.org lists the top nationalities and first languages in alphabetical order, not by the size of the candidature, and it publishes no counts of test takers, so the tables say how groups scored, not how many sat the test. And a mean is a middle: inside every row there are candidates at Band 5 and at Band 8, which is why the distribution tables further down matter as much as the averages.

Where the numbers come from

IELTS.org’s test statistics page carries the data as two downloads, “Test taker performance 2024-2025” and “Demographic data 2024-2025”. The first gives mean band scores by nationality, by first language and by gender, separately for Academic and for General Training, with the split between the two test types. The second gives the distribution of overall bands, from below 4 to 9, by first language, by nationality and by reason for taking the test. IELTS.org adds that the page shows “the top nationalities and languages listed alphabetically, not in order of the size of the candidature”. The same page gives the reliability of the marking: 0.90 for Speaking and 0.92 for Writing between examiners.

Academic: mean band by nationality

The 40 nationalities IELTS.org lists for the Academic test, with the mean band in each skill and overall. The names are as IELTS.org writes them.

Academic: mean band by first language

The nine languages this site is written in

For readers of this site’s own languages, the Academic row again, with one figure that the means hide: the share of candidates with that first language whose overall band was 7.0 or above, summed from IELTS.org’s distribution table.

The spread is wide. Two in three English-speaking candidates reach 7.0; among Uzbek speakers it is about one in five, and among Arabic speakers one in four. For every language in the list, Writing is the lowest of the four means, which is the single most useful fact on this page for a candidate deciding what to practise.

General Training: mean band by nationality

General Training: mean band by first language

The skill pattern

Counting across IELTS.org’s rows gives a pattern that holds almost everywhere:

• Academic. Writing is the lowest mean for 31 of the 40 nationalities and 34 of the 40 first languages (two of them, Bengali and Swahili, in a tie with Listening); Reading is the highest for 28 nationalities and 33 first languages. Listening is the lowest mean for five nationalities (Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Kuwait and Oman), and Speaking is the lowest for four (China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam). Speaking is the highest mean for seven nationalities, all in Africa and the Gulf (Ghana, Kenya, Kuwait, Nigeria, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates).
• General Training. The picture changes because General Training Reading is marked on a different conversion and the candidates are different: Listening is the lowest mean for 19 nationalities and Writing for 19 (Mauritius counts in both, a tie); Reading is still the highest for 25, and Speaking the highest for 14, most of them African and South Asian nationalities where Speaking means run above 7.0.

Two readings follow. First, the Writing gap is not a Chinese or an Arabic problem; it is nearly universal, so a candidate whose Writing is the lowest skill is in the usual position, and the guide to moving Writing from band 6 to 7 is the place to start. Second, the four nationalities where Speaking is the weakest skill are all in East and South-East Asia (China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam), and the same four first languages show the same pattern, so a candidate from that group whose Speaking trails the other skills is, again, in the usual position.

Who reaches 7.0, by reason for taking the test

IELTS.org publishes the distribution of overall bands by the reason candidates gave for taking the test. Summing the columns from 7.0 upward gives the share of each group that reached Band 7.0 or above.

Candidates taking the test for medical registration score highest. That says more about who sits the test than about the test: the bodies that register doctors and dentists set their requirements high, so the candidates who book the test for that reason are mostly those already near the band. Candidates for short courses, personal reasons and employment sit closer to the overall mean.

Gender and the test split

IELTS.org reports that 53% of candidates were women and 47% men, and that women scored slightly higher in every skill: Academic overall 6.25 against 6.19, General Training 6.41 against 6.30. The largest gap is in Speaking (6.04 against 5.94 in Academic). Of all tests, 79% were Academic and 21% General Training.

How to use these numbers

A national or language mean is not your score, and it is not a ceiling. It tells you where candidates like you tend to land and which skill tends to drag the average, so you can check your own profile against it. If your four skills are close to your group’s means, the lowest one is where the next half band is; if one skill sits far below the others, that skill is the whole plan. The band score calculator turns four skill bands into the overall band with the official rounding rule, and the answer on what a good IELTS score is sets these means against what universities and immigration programmes ask for.

The figures will change when IELTS.org publishes the next edition; this page carries the edition and the date in its title and will be updated then.