The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory is the assessment behind this tool. Understanding what it measures, why it uses three dimensions, and what your scores represent will make your results significantly more useful than a number on a screen.
The CBI was developed by Tage S. Kristensen, Marianne Borritz, Ebbe Villadsen, and Karl Bang Christensen as part of the PUMA study — a Danish longitudinal research project tracking burnout in human service workers published in 2005. It was designed specifically to address limitations in the dominant burnout instrument at the time, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), which requires a paid licence and was built primarily around depersonalisation as a core burnout component.
Kristensen et al. argued that burnout is better understood as sustained fatigue and exhaustion rather than a syndrome that necessarily includes depersonalisation. They also argued, importantly, that burnout is not exclusively a work phenomenon — it can manifest in personal life and in the specific relational demands of client-facing work independently of occupational context.
The result was a 19-item instrument divided into three subscales, released into the public domain so researchers and practitioners could use it freely. It has since been validated in studies across more than 40 countries and translated into dozens of languages.
This is the most important thing to understand about the CBI. Your scores are not one number — they are three numbers, each measuring a distinct source of exhaustion. The distinctions matter because they point toward different causes and different interventions.
General physical and emotional exhaustion that is not tied to work or relational demands. This subscale asks about tiredness, physical and emotional exhaustion, and the felt sense of being worn out as general states of daily life. A high personal burnout score without a corresponding high work score is one of the most diagnostically important patterns in the CBI — it points toward sources of depletion outside the workplace, which is where most tools fail to look.
Exhaustion attributed specifically to one’s job. Questions ask about whether work is emotionally exhausting, whether the person feels burnt out because of their work, and whether they experience fatigue that persists through standard rest periods. Crucially, one item is reverse-scored: “Do you have enough energy for family and friends during leisure time?” A yes answer reduces the burnout score — reflecting the insight that capacity outside work is protective.
Exhaustion arising specifically from working with people — clients, customers, patients, students, or any group requiring direct interpersonal engagement. This subscale captures what the occupational health literature calls compassion fatigue or empathy depletion: the cumulative cost of sustained emotional labour in relational work. It can be elevated independently of both personal and work burnout, reflecting someone whose job structure is manageable but whose relational demands exceed their capacity to replenish.
Each of the 19 items uses a five-point frequency scale: Always (100), Often (75), Sometimes (50), Seldom (25), Never / almost never (0). The score for each subscale is the average of its items, giving a 0–100 scale per dimension. The reverse-scored item is recalculated before averaging.
| Score | Band | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| 0–49 | Low | No significant burnout. Energy and recovery are in reasonable balance. |
| 50–74 | Moderate | Meaningful exhaustion present. Risk of worsening without changes. |
| 75–100 | High | Significant burnout. Structural change and likely professional support needed. |
Most free burnout quizzes online are built around the MBI framework — three dimensions of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced personal accomplishment. The CBI rejects depersonalisation as a defining feature of burnout, arguing it is a consequence rather than a component. This is not a minor academic distinction: it changes who the instrument identifies as burnt out and what recovery looks like.
The second major difference is the public domain status. Because the CBI is freely available, any researcher, clinician, or developer can use it without licensing fees — which means the tools built on it can be genuinely free rather than freemium. The tool on this site uses the full 19-item CBI at no cost to you.
The CBI measures self-reported exhaustion at a point in time. It does not measure burnout causes, does not distinguish between clinical burnout and transient fatigue in all cases, and does not replace a clinical evaluation by a qualified professional. Scores can be affected by temporary circumstances — a particularly bad week, acute illness, or an unusual life event. For this reason, tracking scores over time (which this tool’s history feature enables) is more informative than any single assessment.
The client-related subscale also assumes the person works with clients, customers, or people in a service capacity. If your role has no client-facing component, that subscale is less relevant to your situation.
The original PUMA study followed 1,914 Danish human service workers over time and validated the CBI against outcomes including sickness absence, sleep problems, and turnover intention. Subsequent research has validated the instrument in healthcare, education, social work, and knowledge-work contexts in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa. A 2022 multi-centre study in Singapore compared five burnout screening tools against the MBI as reference standard and found the CBI’s accuracy comparable to or better than the alternatives.
The instrument is cited in hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. For the original validation study: Kristensen, T.S., Borritz, M., Villadsen, E., & Christensen, K.B. (2005). The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory: A new tool for the assessment of burnout. Work & Stress, 19(3), 192–207.
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