2 min · free · no account
Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) Test
Diener's five-item Satisfaction with Life Scale, one of the most cited measures in wellbeing research, asks for your own overall judgment of your life.
- Published items
- Items
- 5
- Time
- 2 min
- Scales
- 1
- Scale
- 7-pt
Free, no account needed. Your answers are not shared.
You'll find out: Your overall life satisfaction judgment, using the five published SWLS items from Ed Diener.
Want to understand what you’re about to do? The sections below explain what this assessment measures, where the questions came from, and what you’ll see at the end. Already decided? The start button is up top.
What this is really asking
The SWLS deliberately avoids asking about your health, income, relationships or work. It asks five broad questions — whether your life is close to your ideal, whether the conditions are excellent, whether you are satisfied, whether you have got the important things you want, and whether you would change little given the chance — and lets you decide which parts of your life to weigh and how heavily.
That design is the point. Wellbeing researchers distinguish life satisfaction, a considered cognitive judgment, from momentary happiness, which fluctuates hour to hour. The SWLS targets the judgment. Someone can be having a difficult week and still conclude that their life is broadly going well, and the scale is built to capture that conclusion rather than the mood surrounding it.
Five items on a seven-point scale is enough to place you meaningfully because the questions are so global. The trade-off is that a single number tells you nothing about why, which is why this scale is most useful alongside a measure of what is actually happening — stress, mood, or a personality profile.
The scale
- Life Satisfaction — Global judgment of how your life is going
What lands on your screen at the end
You get a total in the standard 5–35 range with the descriptive band it falls in, from extremely dissatisfied through neutral to extremely satisfied, and an explanation of what that band means against typical population scores.
Unlike the screeners on this site, a low score here is not framed as a symptom. It is a statement about the gap between your life and what you want from it, which is information rather than a problem to be graded.
Where these questions came from
SWLS (Satisfaction With Life Scale)
Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The Satisfaction with Life Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49(1), 71–75.
This version: The five published items with the original seven-point agreement scale, unmodified, so the published score ranges apply.
For self-reflection and education. No account is required and your answers are not shared.
Common questions
What is a good score on the Satisfaction With Life Scale?
Totals run 5 to 35, with 20 as the neutral point. Scores of 21–25 are described as slightly satisfied, 26–30 as satisfied and 31–35 as extremely satisfied; 15–19 is slightly dissatisfied and below 15 indicates substantial dissatisfaction. Most adults in Western samples score in the 23–28 range, so a result near 25 is unremarkable rather than mediocre.
How is life satisfaction different from happiness?
Happiness usually refers to how you feel in the moment, which changes constantly. Life satisfaction is a judgment you make when you step back and evaluate your life as a whole. They correlate but they are not the same, and the SWLS is designed to measure the second one — which is why its items ask you to assess conditions rather than report a mood.
Why are there only five questions?
Because each one is deliberately global, and the scale asks you rather than the researcher to decide what counts. Adding items would mean naming specific life domains, which would impose a definition of a good life on everyone taking it. Five broad questions is what has kept the scale usable across cultures for four decades.
Can my score change?
Yes. Life satisfaction is more stable than mood but it does move with circumstances, and it typically returns toward a personal baseline after major events. Retaking the scale after a significant change is a reasonable way to see where your baseline has settled.