The unsatisfying-but-true answer: anything from about 90 up is "good" for almost every purpose life presents, 115+ is meaningfully above average, and 130+ is rare air. The satisfying part is what those numbers actually cash out to — and where the folk beliefs about them fall apart.
Good for what? For daily life, the honest threshold is low — most of modern life is built for the middle of the curve. For elite academic tracks, studies of demanding professions put typical members in the 115–130 window — with plenty of spread and plenty of exceptions in both directions. For "bragging rights", the internet's inflation has done real damage: unnormed online tests routinely hand out 130s, which is precisely why a trustworthy score has to come with a margin of error attached.
And within the broad middle, small differences mean nothing at the individual level. IQ 98 versus IQ 104 — a gap online tests treat as identity-defining — is smaller than the same person's swing between a good and a bad testing day.
Across a century of research, the traits that most reliably turn ability into outcomes are conscientiousness, curiosity, and staying power — none of which any IQ test measures. A "good IQ" is a tailwind. It has never been the boat.
Yes, unambiguously — 120 sits at the 91th percentile, higher than about nine in ten people, in the range test manuals label "superior". It is comfortably typical of people in intellectually demanding professions. It is also 10 points below the usual high-IQ-society cutoff, which matters to almost nothing in real life.
110 is the 75th percentile — "high average", better than roughly three-quarters of people. It is a genuinely above-average result that online tests love to inflate past 120; if several honest measurements put you around 110, that is a solid score, full stop.
The top 2% of the population on an accepted supervised test — about 130 on the standard mean-100/SD-15 scale (about 132 on the Stanford–Binet SD-16 scale). Note "supervised": Mensa does not accept online tests, ours included; their own admission test or a proctored clinical score is the route in.
It is the definition of typical — matching or beating half of everyone. People with IQ 100 succeed in nearly every field; past the basic demands of a role, conscientiousness and accumulated skill dominate outcomes. Anyone selling you anxiety about being average has misread what the number does.
"Genius" is not a psychometric category — no test manual defines it. Convention loosely attaches it to 140+ (top ~0.4%), but psychology dropped the label a century ago for good reason: the historical record is full of transformative work by people who would test in the 120s, and of untransformative lives at 150+. Genius describes output, not a score.
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