Short answer: there is no single official conversion between English tests. Two of the four mappings on this page are authoritative — the CEFR alignment that IELTS publishes itself, and the CLB table the Canadian government uses, which is binding for immigration.
The TOEFL and PTE rows come from those test makers concording their own scale to IELTS, and universities are free to ignore all of it and set their own numbers. Use the tables to orient yourself; use the requirement on your institution's page to decide.
1. IELTS to CEFR — published by IELTS
The Common European Framework of Reference is the six-level scale (A1 to C2) used across European education and by many employers and immigration systems. IELTS publishes its own alignment to it, which makes this the mapping to trust.
| IELTS band | CEFR level | What it describes |
|---|---|---|
| 8.5 – 9.0 | C2 | Proficient. Handles complex and abstract material with ease. |
| 7.0 – 8.0 | C1 | Effective operational command. The usual line for demanding academic study. |
| 5.5 – 6.5 | B2 | Independent user. The most common undergraduate and skilled-visa requirement. |
| 4.0 – 5.0 | B1 | Threshold. Enough for familiar, routine matters. |
| Below 4.0 | A2 and below | Basic user. IELTS is not designed to discriminate finely at this level. |
Treat the boundaries as bands rather than points: a 6.5 sits at the top of B2 and a 7.0 at the bottom of C1, and an institution asking for "C1" will normally name the IELTS band it wants rather than leave you to convert.
2. IELTS to CLB — set by the Canadian government, and exact
The Canadian Language Benchmarks table is the one mapping here with legal force: Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada publishes the IELTS-to-CLB conversion used for Express Entry and provincial programmes, and it works per skill, not on your overall band.
| CLB | Listening | Reading | Writing | Speaking |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CLB 9 | 8.0 | 7.0 | 7.0 | 7.0 |
| CLB 7 | 6.0 | 6.0 | 6.0 | 6.0 |
Two things about this table catch people out. First, your overall band is irrelevant — CLB is assessed skill by skill, so a candidate at 8.0 overall with a 6.5 in Reading is CLB 8 for Reading, whatever the average says.
Second, the Listening requirement for CLB 9 is a full band higher than the others, which is why Listening is disproportionately often the skill that blocks a Canadian application.
The full level-by-level table and a calculator for it live at our CLB converter, and the Express Entry context is in CELPIP versus IELTS for Canada PR.
3. IELTS to TOEFL iBT — ETS's comparison, not ours
ETS, which owns TOEFL, publishes a comparison of TOEFL iBT total scores against IELTS bands. It is a statistical concordance built by the other test maker, and IELTS does not endorse it — so it is a reasonable orientation and a poor basis for an application decision.
| IELTS | TOEFL iBT (approx.) | Typically used for |
|---|---|---|
| 9.0 | 118 – 120 | Above almost every requirement |
| 8.5 | 115 – 117 | Competitive postgraduate |
| 8.0 | 110 – 114 | Competitive postgraduate |
| 7.5 | 102 – 109 | Selective universities |
| 7.0 | 94 – 101 | Common postgraduate requirement |
| 6.5 | 79 – 93 | The most common undergraduate requirement |
| 6.0 | 60 – 78 | Foundation, pathway, many visa routes |
| 5.5 | 46 – 59 | Pre-sessional English |
| 5.0 | 35 – 45 | Below most academic requirements |
Notice how wide the band at IELTS 6.5 is — roughly fifteen TOEFL points map onto one IELTS half-band there. That width is the honest signal: the two tests measure overlapping but different things, and a precise-looking conversion hides real disagreement.
4. IELTS to PTE Academic — Pearson's concordance
Pearson publishes a concordance between PTE Academic's 10–90 scale and IELTS bands. Same caveat as TOEFL: it is the other test maker's work.
| IELTS | PTE Academic (approx.) |
|---|---|
| 9.0 | 89 |
| 8.5 | 84 |
| 8.0 | 79 |
| 7.5 | 73 |
| 7.0 | 65 |
| 6.5 | 58 |
| 6.0 | 50 |
| 5.5 | 42 |
| 5.0 | 36 |
If you are choosing between sitting IELTS and sitting PTE rather than converting an existing score, the format differences matter far more than the concordance does — that comparison is in IELTS versus PTE Academic, and the three-way version in IELTS versus TOEFL versus PTE.
What these tables cannot do
| Assumption | Reality |
|---|---|
| "I can submit my IELTS score where TOEFL is required." | No. Scores do not transfer. If an institution accepts only TOEFL, you sit TOEFL. |
| "My university will accept this conversion." | Only if their own page says so. Institutions set their own equivalences and many publish a table that disagrees with the test makers'. |
| "Overall band is what counts." | Often not. Canadian immigration works per skill, and most universities set a per-skill minimum alongside the overall. |
| "A conversion is exact." | Only CEFR and CLB are defined mappings. The TOEFL and PTE rows are statistical estimates with genuine spread. |
Working out the band you actually need
- Read the requirement on the source that will judge you — the admissions page, the visa route, the professional regulator. Not a conversion table, including this one.
- Find the per-skill minimum. "6.5 overall with no band below 6.0" is a different target from "6.5 overall", and the second half is where applications fail.
- Check which IELTS version is accepted — Academic, General Training, or IELTS for UKVI. They are not interchangeable across routes.
- Do the rounding arithmetic. Overall band is the average of four skills rounded to the nearest half, so a 6.75 average becomes 7.0 but a 6.6 becomes 6.5. Run your real numbers through the Band Score Calculator, and see how band scores work for the rule behind it.
- Then work backwards to a raw score for Listening and Reading, which is the only part of the test where you can count what you need in advance.
Requirements by country, visa route and institution type are collected at IELTS band score requirements, and if your score is already in and you are deciding whether it can be improved, the Enquiry on Results guide covers the six-week window and when a re-mark is the wrong choice.