WHO-5 Wellbeing Index Scoring and Interpretation, Explained for HR Teams

If you've been asked to evaluate a wellbeing measurement tool, there's a good chance the WHO-5 Wellbeing Index has come up. It's short, it's free to use, and it's one of the most widely referenced screening instruments in the world. This FAQ walks through what it is, how it's scored, how to interpret the results, and where it fits (and where it doesn't) in a workforce wellbeing strategy.

The WHO-5 Wellbeing Index is a five-item questionnaire developed by the World Health Organization's Regional Office for Europe. It's designed to measure subjective psychological wellbeing over a short recall period, rather than diagnose a specific condition. It has been in use since 1998 and is one of the most widely applied brief wellbeing scales globally, appearing in national health surveys, primary care settings, and clinical research.

Its appeal is simplicity. Five questions, a couple of minutes, no clinical training required to administer it.

Respondents rate five statements about how they've felt over the preceding two weeks, covering things like feeling cheerful, calm, active, waking up rested, and finding daily life interesting. Each item is rated on a 6-point scale from 0 (at no time) to 5 (all of the time).

Scoring is straightforward:

• Each of the five items is scored 0 to 5, so the raw score ranges from 0 to 25.
• The raw score is then multiplied by 4 to convert it to a percentage scale of 0 to 100.
• A score of 100 represents the best possible wellbeing over the recall period; a score of 0 represents the worst.

That conversion is what makes WHO-5 easy to communicate. A raw score means little on its own, but a 0-100 percentage is intuitive for anyone reading a report, HR leaders included.

Typically a minute or two. That brevity is a large part of why it's used so widely: in repeated-measures research, clinical intake, and population health surveys, a shorter instrument gets completed more consistently than a long one.

Yes. WHO-5 has been translated and validated in dozens of languages and used across a wide range of countries and cultural contexts, which is part of why it's become a common reference point in international wellbeing research.

Higher scores indicate better subjective wellbeing over the two-week period; lower scores indicate worse wellbeing. The most widely used interpretive threshold treats a percentage score below 50 as an indicator of poor wellbeing that warrants further assessment, rather than something to act on in isolation.

It's worth being precise about what that threshold does and doesn't tell you. A sub-50 score is a flag to look closer, rather than a diagnosis. WHO-5 was built as a screening tool, and screening tools are designed to identify who might benefit from a follow-up conversation or a more detailed clinical assessment, rather than to conclude that assessment on their own.

WHO-5 is also used as a first-step screener for depressive symptoms, and a validated lower cutoff exists in the literature for flagging scores likely to warrant depression follow-up, distinct from the general 50% wellbeing threshold. Because that specific number carries clinical weight and is easy to misapply outside a clinical setting, we're not going to state it here. If your organization is considering WHO-5 for anything touching depression screening, that's a conversation to have with an occupational health or clinical professional who can apply the validated cutoff correctly and put appropriate follow-up in place.

No. WHO-5 doesn't diagnose depression, anxiety, or any other condition. It measures self-reported wellbeing over a short window and flags when a score falls low enough to warrant a closer look. Treating a low score as a diagnosis, or treating a single administration as a complete picture of someone's mental health, misuses the instrument. That's true whether it's used one-to-one in a clinical setting or rolled out across a workforce.

Because it's short, free, validated, and produces a number that's easy to trend over time. Those are genuinely useful properties. But WHO-5 was built as an individual screening instrument, rather than as an organizational measurement system. It tells you something about how one person has felt over two weeks. It wasn't designed to isolate which workplace factors, psychological safety, managerial support, workload, organizational change, are driving that number, or to benchmark a workforce against external standards at scale.

That gap is exactly where HR teams tend to get stuck. A wellbeing score is useful. Knowing what's driving it, and what to do about it, is a different problem.

Individual screening instruments like WHO-5 and organizational diagnostic tools serve different purposes and usually work best together rather than as substitutes for one another. Insights & Assessments, from Unmind, is built for the organizational side of that equation: it aggregates wellbeing data into real-time dashboards, runs a diagnostic assessment that measures key drivers of workforce psychosocial risk (including psychological safety, social wellbeing, managerial support, and organizational support), and benchmarks results against external standards so leaders can see how their organization compares.

Where WHO-5 gives you a wellbeing score for an individual over two weeks, this kind of organizational layer is designed to show HR and People leaders where risk is concentrated across teams and regions, and to connect that picture to what's driving it, so interventions can be targeted rather than generic.

You can administer WHO-5 at scale, and some organizations do use it as one input into broader wellbeing surveying. But a few things are worth thinking through first. WHO-5 wasn't designed with organizational benchmarking, team-level segmentation, or workplace risk-factor analysis in mind, so aggregating individual scores doesn't automatically tell you which parts of the organization need attention or why. There's also the practical question of what happens after a low score is flagged: a screening instrument only has value if there's a clear, resourced pathway from "this person scored low" to appropriate support.

If the goal is a workforce-wide view that connects wellbeing signals to organizational drivers like workload, change fatigue, or managerial support, that's a different kind of tool than a five-item individual screener, and it's worth being clear about which problem you're solving before you pick one. For a broader look at how organizational risk factors compound across a workforce, see this analysis of workforce burnout risk for enterprise leaders.

WHO-5 is a well-validated, quick, and genuinely useful individual wellbeing screener, and understanding how it's scored (0-25 raw, multiplied by 4 to a 0-100 scale) and interpreted (with a sub-50 score flagging a need for closer follow-up) is a reasonable starting point for any HR leader evaluating wellbeing measurement. But it answers a narrower question than most enterprise wellbeing strategies actually need answered. Pairing an individual screening signal with organizational-level diagnostics and benchmarking is what turns a single number into something a People team can actually act on.