OCD Severity Test (Y-BOCS-Style): Score Your Obsessions and Compulsions From 0 to 40

The test has ten items. The first five ask about your obsessions: how much time they take each day, how much they interfere with work, study, relationships or daily tasks, how much distress they cause, how hard you try to resist them, and how much control you have over them. The second five ask the same questions about your compulsions, which include visible rituals such as washing, checking, ordering and counting, and mental rituals such as reviewing, praying, neutralizing or reassurance-seeking. Each item scores 0 to 4, so obsessions and compulsions each total 0 to 20 and the combined score runs from 0 to 40.

Two of the ten items run in a direction that surprises people. Resistance is scored so that trying hard to resist earns a low score and giving in completely earns a high one, because effort to resist is a sign of lower severity even when it fails. Control is scored by the outcome, not the effort: if you try hard but cannot stop the thought or the ritual, control scores high. This is how the published scale separates the two ideas, and it is why someone who fights their symptoms every day can still land in a high band.

The bands here follow the shape of the conventional Y-BOCS ranges: 0 to 7 subclinical, 8 to 15 mild, 16 to 23 moderate, 24 to 31 severe and 32 to 40 extreme. On this page they are educational reference points, not clinical cutoffs, because the items are original self-ratings rather than the clinician-administered scale those ranges were built around. Read them as a map of where your self-rating falls, and bring the number and your two half-scores to a clinician rather than treating any band as a verdict.

The Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale was published by Wayne Goodman and colleagues in 1989 as a clinician-administered, semi-structured interview. A trained rater first works through a symptom checklist with the person, agrees on their main obsessions and compulsions, then rates ten severity items from the interview. It became the standard outcome measure in OCD treatment trials because it rates severity independently of which symptoms a person has, so improvement can be tracked across very different presentations. A second edition (Y-BOCS-II) followed in 2010, and a self-report version has been studied since the mid-1990s and found to agree well with the interview.

The Y-BOCS is a copyrighted instrument. This page does not reproduce its items, its anchors or its symptom checklist. What it borrows is the architecture: five severity dimensions, rated for obsessions and for compulsions, scored 0 to 4 and summed to 40. Every question here was written for Psychology.com in plain language you can answer about yourself without a rater. That makes it an educational self-rating in the Y-BOCS shape, which is the honest description, and it is why we do not call the result a Y-BOCS score.

A self-rating also cannot do what the interview does best: help you decide what counts. A clinician will spend time establishing whether a repetitive thought is an obsession or ordinary worry, whether a habit is a compulsion or a preference, and whether the thing you are rating is OCD at all rather than, for example, generalized anxiety, a tic, or hoarding. The unscored theme checklist on the start screen is there to help you rate the right symptoms, but it is a prompt, not an assessment.

Severity and theme are separate questions, and both matter. If you are not yet sure whether what you experience is OCD, the broader screening on OCD Test (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) covers the full range of symptom types and is a better place to begin. If your obsessions are mostly internal and your compulsions are mental, Pure O OCD Test describes that pattern; if the intrusive content is about harming yourself or someone else, Harm OCD Test explains why those thoughts are common in OCD and are not intentions; and if the doubting centers on your relationship or partner, Relationship OCD (ROCD) Test covers relationship OCD. All of those are about theme. This page is about how hard the whole thing is hitting you right now.

Two related constructs are worth knowing. Hoarding disorder was separated from OCD in current diagnostic manuals and has its own screening on Hoarding Disorder Test (HRS-SR); difficulty discarding does not score as a compulsion here unless it is driven by an obsession. Intolerance of uncertainty is a trait that runs underneath many obsessional patterns, the sense that not knowing for sure is unbearable, and Intolerance of Uncertainty Test measures it directly. People with high severity on this page often find that trait is a large part of what keeps checking and reassurance-seeking going.

Severity also fluctuates. Stress, sleep loss, illness, a new life stage or a recent trigger can push a score up for weeks and then let it settle. That is a reason to rate the past week, as this page asks, rather than your worst stretch ever, and a reason to retake it rather than treat one number as fixed.

If your total sits in the subclinical or mild range and your symptoms are not costing you much, a note of the date and score is enough; retake the test if things change. If you landed in the moderate range or higher, the most useful next step is to book an assessment with a clinician who treats OCD specifically, and to bring three things: your total, your obsessions and compulsions half-scores, and a short list of the themes you ticked on the start screen. That gives a clinician the beginnings of a real Y-BOCS interview in a few minutes.

The first-line treatment for OCD at every severity level is exposure and response prevention (ERP), a form of cognitive behavioral therapy in which you gradually face the triggers of your obsessions while holding off the compulsion, until the anxiety loses its grip. Medication, usually an SSRI at doses higher than those used for depression, is the other evidence-based option and is often combined with ERP in the severe and extreme ranges. Both are tracked in research and in clinics using the Y-BOCS, which is why the same severity structure you just used will probably come up again in treatment.

If you are not ready for treatment, you can still start. Write down the main obsession and the ritual that follows it, time how long the ritual takes, and notice what happens to the urge if you delay the ritual by five minutes. That small delay is the seed of ERP, and it tells you a lot about how much room there is to move.