Free burnout tests: nine self-checks compared, plus the paid MBI

A free burnout test is a short questionnaire about work-related exhaustion, cynicism, and sense of accomplishment, scored by the person taking it. Nine solid free burnout tests exist, each fit for a particular situation. The most-cited research instrument, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, is paid; the free alternatives are serviceable screeners, and most people only need a screener.

A free burnout test is a self-rating form you score yourself, which rules the Maslach out

The practical shape of the free burnout self test is simple. A block of questions about the last two to four weeks of work. Likert ratings from never to every day. A total score, usually split into subscales for exhaustion, cynicism or disengagement, and personal accomplishment. The reader scores themselves. No clinician looks at it.

The Maslach Burnout Inventory, developed by Christina Maslach and Susan Jackson in 1981, remains the standard research measure of occupational burnout. It is licensed through Mind Garden and sold by the use. A free Maslach Burnout Inventory test does not exist in any legitimate form; the questions are copyrighted. Mind Garden publishes several forms of the inventory for different populations, from human services to medical personnel to educators to a general-workforce version. What is available at no cost are screeners informed by the same three-axis model, plus other validated scales that measure overlapping constructs. Our main piece on burnout recovery covers the three-axis framework in detail.

Four things worth checking before you pick one

Four quick checks save a lot of trouble.

What it actually measures. A free burnout assessment tool is not one thing. The Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) breaks burnout into four components: exhaustion, mental distance, emotional impairment, and cognitive impairment. The Oldenburg Burnout Inventory splits exhaustion from disengagement. The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory separates personal, work-related, and client-related burnout. The subscales are the point. A single global number buries whichever one is actually driving the state.

Who it was built for. Scales were validated on specific populations. ProQOL was built for people in helping professions. The Professional Fulfillment Index was built for physicians. The Oldenburg and the BAT were validated on broad workforce samples. Taking a scale outside its validation population still produces a number, but the number is a looser indication than it looks.

How long it takes. A free burnout quiz typically runs fifteen to twenty questions and a few minutes. A research-grade scale like the BAT is longer: twenty-three questions in its full form. Shorter scales miss nuance; longer scales get abandoned mid-way. The practical trade is between the two.

What "free" actually covers. Most of the free burnout test online options cost nothing to take; some charge for a longer PDF report, and some require licensing for commercial or clinical use. A signs of burnout checklist posted on a therapy-directory site, for instance, is free to take and read, but using it inside a workplace program may need the publisher's permission. Features and free tiers change, so check the vendor's page before building a habit around any single one of these.

Nine free burnout tests, plus the paid Maslach

Links open directly on the vendor or publisher's own page.

1. Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT): Best for a research-grade measure with four components. Developed at KU Leuven. Non-proprietary and free to use without asking permission, as long as the questions aren't modified and the authors' 2020 paper is cited. Scoring manual downloadable.

2. Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI): Best for separating exhaustion from disengagement. Sixteen items across two eight-item subscales. The research scale itself is widely published; the NovoPsych version adds automated scoring. Useful when the suspicion is withdrawal from the work rather than fatigue from it.

3. Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) (paid, for completeness): Best for the most widely cited research measure in the occupational-burnout literature. Licensed through Mind Garden; several versions exist (human services, medical personnel, educators, general, and a students version). Required reading for formal organizational interventions. Probably overkill for an individual trying to decide whether a bad quarter has turned structural.

4. Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI): Best for separating personal, work-related, and client-related burnout. Published by Denmark's national work-environment research centre (NFA) and free to use for both non-commercial and commercial purposes with citation. Nineteen items across three subscales. Useful when exhaustion seems to attach to a specific group at work (patients, students, clients) rather than the job as a whole.

5. ProQOL (Professional Quality of Life): Best for people in helping roles. Covers compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress. Free to use. Translations in dozens of languages. The vendor site includes a scoring guide and the research citations behind the measure.

6. Professional Fulfillment Index (Stanford WellMD): Best for physicians and clinicians. Developed by Stanford's WellMD program and built for organizational well-being measurement rather than solo self-use. The toolkit is published for use by healthcare systems. Check the toolkit's terms of use before adopting it inside a hospital or clinic.

7. Burnout Self-Assessment (Jennifer Moss): Best for seeing which workplace factors are driving the strain. Twenty-one questions about the past two weeks, scored across seven research-backed drivers of burnout, starting with workload. Free.

8. Burnout Test (psychology.com): Best for a quick online screener run entirely in the browser. Fifteen questions, about seven minutes, three-dimension output modeled on the Maslach framework. Answers stay in the browser; an optional report is available.

9. Burnout at Work Test (Psychology Today): Best for a quick quiz with an instant score. Twenty questions, roughly three minutes. Treat the result as a snapshot rather than a full report.

10. Burnout Self-Test (Mind Tools): Best for a short, score-yourself check with no account required. Useful as a first-pass look rather than a research measure.

Which one to open first, depending on where you're sitting

A short rule of thumb for choosing fast:

• Short on time, want a yes-or-no feeling. Mind Tools or Psychology Today. Three to five minutes.
• Suspect a specific axis. OLBI or BAT, because each returns subscales rather than one lumped number.
• The problem feels tied to the people the job serves. CBI, for its separate client-related subscale. Or ProQOL for anyone in a caring role.
• The question is which organizational conditions are driving the strain. Jennifer Moss's seven-factor self-assessment, which reads the strain against workplace architecture.
• The score is going into a real workplace intervention. The paid MBI, properly licensed.

A score becomes an argument with your job

A burnout score does not diagnose anything. It is a number on a form, produced by a tired person, that captures what tiredness looks like on a particular Thursday afternoon. Taking the same test again two weeks later will produce a different number. If the exhaustion has lasted for weeks and rest isn't touching it, that's worth raising with a doctor, whichever screener you used.

What a score is actually good for is simpler and more concrete. The subscale pattern turns a vague feeling into a specific claim. "The exhaustion score is at the ninety-fifth percentile and the cynicism score is in the normal range" is a different sentence than "work has been hard lately." The first version can be brought into a conversation with a manager. The second cannot.

That is where a free burnout quiz earns its keep: as the opening sentence of a conversation, with the person taking the quiz and with the job that produced the result.