Life Events Checklist (LEC-5): Count Your Exposure to Potentially Traumatic Events

What the LEC-5 is for, and how this page counts it

The Life Events Checklist was developed at the US National Center for PTSD alongside the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale, and the DSM-5 version (LEC-5) was released by Weathers and colleagues in 2013. Its job is narrow and useful: to establish whether a person has been exposed to the kinds of events that can lead to post-traumatic stress, before any questions about symptoms are asked. Clinicians use it as the first step of a PTSD assessment, researchers use it to describe trauma history in a study sample, and the extended version goes on to ask which single event was worst. The standard version reproduced here lists 17 event categories and, for each one, asks you to mark every way it applies: it happened to you personally, you witnessed it happen to someone else, you learned about it happening to a close family member or friend, you were exposed to it as part of your job, you are not sure if it fits, or it doesn't apply.

The published LEC-5 does not produce a total score, and the National Center for PTSD says so plainly. Clinicians read the pattern of checks, not a number. Because a web page needs to show you something at the end, we count the events you marked as happened to me or witnessed it and report that count, from 0 to 17. Events you marked as learned about it or part of my job are not added to the count, not because they do not matter (the DSM-5 recognizes both as possible qualifying exposures in some circumstances) but because the count is meant to be a conservative, simple exposure tally. The four result ranges, zero, one to two, three to five, and six or more events, describe exposure counts only. They are not severity levels, they are not published cutoffs, and they say nothing about whether any event affected you.

The National Center for PTSD publishes three versions. The standard self-report version, reproduced here, is the 17-item checklist on its own. The extended self-report version adds a second part that asks you to identify the single worst event, when it happened, whether it involved actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence, and how you were involved, which is how clinicians establish whether a specific event meets the DSM-5 definition. The interview version is administered by a clinician and includes ratings of abuse. If you take this checklist and then go on to a PTSD assessment, you will almost certainly be asked those extended questions, so it can help to have thought about which event you would name.

Criterion A in plain words

The DSM-5 diagnosis of PTSD begins with what is called Criterion A: exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. The manual recognizes four ways that exposure can happen. You experienced the event directly. You witnessed it in person as it happened to someone else. You learned that it happened to a close family member or close friend, where, for a death, it was violent or accidental. Or you were exposed repeatedly to the details of such events as part of your work, as paramedics, police officers, and people who handle abuse reports often are. The six response options on the LEC-5 line up with these routes, which is why the checklist exists in its current form.

Two things follow from this. First, not every painful experience is a Criterion A event. A divorce, a job loss, or a long illness in the family can be devastating and can leave real marks, without meeting the definition, and a person can have significant stress-related difficulties without PTSD. Second, meeting Criterion A is only the entry point. Most people who experience a qualifying event do not develop PTSD; the diagnosis also requires specific patterns of intrusion, avoidance, changes in mood and thinking, and changes in arousal, lasting more than a month and causing real impairment. That is what the PCL-5, our PTSD Test (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), screens for, and it is the test to take after this one if any of the events you marked still feels close.

Why many people have several events

If your count surprised you, you are in good company. In a large US national survey using DSM-5 criteria, Kilpatrick and colleagues (2013) found that nearly 90 percent of adults reported at least one Criterion A exposure in their lifetime, and most of those reported more than one, with sudden deaths of loved ones, accidents, and disasters among the most common. The LEC-5 casts a wide net on purpose: it includes transportation accidents, serious illness, and sudden accidental deaths, which touch most lives eventually. A count of three, four, or five is ordinary, and it is not a verdict on how hard your life has been or how you have coped.

What the count cannot tell you is which events mattered. One event marked happened to me can shape a life; five marked learned about it can leave very little trace. Clinicians know this, which is why the extended LEC-5 goes on to ask about the single worst event, and why the number is never read alone. If you are using this page to prepare for a therapy intake, the most useful thing you can bring is not the count but a note of which one or two events still come to mind unbidden. The companion tests for childhood adversity, the ACE Test and the Childhood Trauma Test, look at a different window, the years before 18, with a different kind of item.

What to do next

If any of the events you marked still intrudes, through memories, nightmares, avoidance, being on edge, or a sense that you have not been the same since, take the PCL-5 at PTSD Test (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) next. It is the symptom measure the LEC-5 was designed to sit in front of, and it is also reproduced faithfully. If the difficulty is more about a long period of repeated harm, often in a relationship or in childhood, and shows up as problems with emotion regulation, self-worth, and closeness, Complex PTSD Test (C-PTSD) covers complex PTSD. If you notice that you check out, lose time, or feel unreal when reminded of an event, Dissociative Disorder Test looks at that. And Trauma Response Test (Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn) describes the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn patterns many people recognize in themselves.

If the events you marked are not bothering you, that is a legitimate result and a common one. People recover from most exposures without treatment, especially with support around them. You do not need to go looking for symptoms that are not there. If filling in the checklist stirred something up, let that settle before deciding anything: take a walk, talk to someone you trust, or come back to this page another day. A trauma-informed therapist can help you make sense of any of it, at your pace, and the find-a-therapist link below searches for one. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please reach out now; in the US you can call or text 988 at any time.

This page is written for adults reflecting on their own lives. If you are using it to think about someone else, a partner, a parent, or a friend, remember that only they can say which events happened to them and how those events landed; a checklist cannot be filled in on another person's behalf. If you are worried about a child who has been through something on this list, a children's version of the checklist exists for clinicians, but the right first step is a pediatrician, a school counselor, or, where safety is in question, your local child protective services, not an adult self-assessment. And if you are a first responder, clinician, or journalist whose work exposes you to these events repeatedly, the part of my job column exists for you, and the cumulative weight of that exposure is recognized in the DSM-5 for good reason.

Methodology & sources

This page reproduces all 17 event items of the Life Events Checklist for DSM-5, standard self-report version (Weathers, Blake, Schnurr, Kaloupek, Marx, and Keane, 2013; version dated 12 April 2018), word for word, together with the checklist's instruction to consider your entire life and its six response options: happened to me, witnessed it, learned about it, part of my job, not sure, and doesn't apply. The LEC-5 was created by staff at the US Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD and, as the Center states on its website, is in the public domain and not copyrighted. The original is distributed at ptsd.va.gov. One difference from the paper form: the LEC-5 lets you check more than one box per event, while this page asks you to choose the single option that fits best, so if an event both happened to you and was witnessed by you, choose happened to me.

The published LEC-5 does not yield a total or composite score. The exposure count on this page is our own addition: events marked happened to me or witnessed it count one point each, all other options count zero, for a tally from 0 to 17. The four result ranges and the breakdown into disasters and accidents, violence and captivity, illness and death, and harm caused or other events are our own educational groupings for reading the pattern, not validated subscales or cutoffs. Gray and colleagues (2004) found the original LEC had adequate test-retest stability and good convergence with an established trauma-history interview; those findings concern the checklist as an exposure measure and do not validate our count or our ranges.

The LEC-5 measures exposure, not symptoms and not distress. It cannot tell you whether you have PTSD, complex PTSD, or any other condition; that requires a symptom measure such as the PCL-5 and, for a diagnosis, a clinical assessment. The test is offered for education and self-reflection, and because the event list can be activating, crisis information appears before you start and with your result.

The official LEC-5 allows more than one exposure response for each event category. This page allows one selection, which can omit overlapping routes of exposure. For the unchanged form, use the National Center for PTSD version at https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/assessment/documents/LEC5_Standard_Self-report.PDF. Our tally counts categories under this page's rules, not separate incidents, symptom severity, or PTSD.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the verbatim LEC-5 items and response options against the National Center for PTSD form, the exposure-count explanation, and the routing to the PCL-5 and crisis support. Last reviewed October 5, 2026.

References

1. Weathers FW, Blake DD, Schnurr PP, Kaloupek DG, Marx BP, Keane TM. The Life Events Checklist for DSM-5 (LEC-5), Standard. Measurement instrument. 2013. National Center for PTSD. ptsd.va.gov/professional/assessment/te-measures/life_events_checklist.asp
2. Gray MJ, Litz BT, Hsu JL, Lombardo TW. Psychometric properties of the Life Events Checklist. Assessment. 2004;11(4):330-341. doi.org/10.1177/1073191104269954.
3. Kilpatrick DG, Resnick HS, Milanak ME, Miller MW, Keyes KM, Friedman MJ. National estimates of exposure to traumatic events and PTSD prevalence using DSM-IV and DSM-5 criteria. Journal of Traumatic Stress. 2013;26(5):537-547. doi.org/10.1002/jts.21848.
4. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed., Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing; 2022.

Life Events Checklist (LEC-5): Trauma Exposure Screen FAQ