What Does a Wonderlic Score of 40 Mean?

A raw score of 40 sits at the 99th percentile — the top 1% of all Wonderlic test-takers. Any score of 36 or higher saturates the published percentile rank at 99th.

Where 40 falls on the distribution

40 is the top of the published Wonderlic scoring scale for percentile reporting. Any raw score from 36 to 50 reports as the 99th percentile, because so few candidates score that high that the test stops differentiating in percentile terms. Wonderlic does continue to differentiate in raw-score terms — a 40 is genuinely harder to achieve than a 36 — but on the percentile rank both look identical to employers reviewing the score report.

Roles where a 40 is competitive

Role fit: In range for specialized and leadership roles: management consulting, attorney, executive, physician.

For context: Wonderlic's published occupational data lists the average score for systems analysts at 32. Your 40 is 8 points above that role's average.

Any 36+ score signals top-1% cognitive ability on the WPT-R. It clears every published occupational threshold Wonderlic reports, including specialised, technical, and leadership categories. The only reason to push from 36 toward 40+ is if your specific employer reports raw scores rather than percentiles and prizes the absolute number.

How rare is a 36+ score?

The roughly 118,000-person WPT-R normative sample puts the 99th percentile at raw 36. That means out of every 100 test-takers, fewer than 1 score this high. The famous historical perfect score of 50 belongs to former NFL punter Pat McInally; only a handful of others have ever been documented at that level. For practical purposes, anything above 36 is indistinguishable to employers reading a percentile-only score report.

Source: percentiles on this page are interpolated from the anchors in the official Wonderlic Personnel Test sample report (©Wonderlic Inc. 2018), which prints "Score 31 / Percentile in Total Population 94 / IQ Equivalent 121". Remaining anchors follow the commonly cited Wonderlic population norms (mean ≈ 20–21, SD ≈ 7) on the 1992 normative sample of N=118,549. Occupational averages cited above are from Wonderlic's own published occupational data.