GAD-7 — Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (7 items)
The GAD-7 is a 7-item anxiety screener developed by Spitzer, Kroenke, Williams & Löwe (2006). It asks how often, over the past two weeks, the respondent has been bothered by core anxiety symptoms. Scores are reported with published severity bands and an empirical population percentile with a confidence range.
Minimal (0–4)
Few or no anxiety symptoms reported.
Mild (5–9)
Mild symptom levels; monitoring or re-screening may be appropriate.
Moderate (10–14)
Clinically relevant symptom levels warranting professional evaluation.
Severe (15–21)
Severe symptom levels; professional assessment is strongly recommended.
At a glance
About the GAD-7
Spitzer and colleagues developed the GAD-7 as a brief self-report screen for generalized anxiety disorder in primary care. Its seven items cover nervousness, uncontrollable worry, worry about different things, trouble relaxing, restlessness, irritability, and a sense of dread, each rated on a 4-point frequency scale from "not at all" (0) to "nearly every day" (3).
The summed total (0–21) is interpreted against the published severity bands: 0–4 minimal, 5–9 mild, 10–14 moderate, and 15–21 severe. In the original validation, a cut point of 10 or above identified generalized anxiety disorder with good sensitivity and specificity, and the scale also performs reasonably as a broader screen for panic, social anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Like the PHQ-9, it is a screening instrument, not a diagnostic tool, is in the public domain, and is administered here verbatim with attribution.
Spitzer, R. L., Kroenke, K., Williams, J. B. W., & Löwe, B. (2006). A brief measure for assessing generalized anxiety disorder: The GAD-7. Archives of Internal Medicine, 166(10), 1092–1097.How the percentile is calculated
Alongside the severity band, GAD-7 results on this platform show an empirical population percentile. Screener scores are strongly skewed — most people in the general population score near zero — so a percentile derived from a mean and standard deviation under a normality assumption would be misleading. Instead, the percentile is read directly from a published cumulative distribution table: the percentage of a general-population reference sample scoring at or below each raw total.
The reference table comes from Kliem and colleagues (2025), who report cumulative percentages for every GAD-7 total score in a German general-population sample (N = 2,519; M = 2.18, SD = 3.28, Cronbach's α = 0.90). A percentile of 93, for example, means 93% of that reference sample scored at or below the same total. Because the source publishes the scale's reliability and standard deviation, the GAD-7 percentile is shown with a confidence range based on the standard error of measurement.
The reference sample is German. General-population symptom distributions differ between countries, so the percentile is labeled with its country of origin and should be read as standing relative to that specific reference population, not a universal norm. The severity bands above are independent of the percentile and follow the original validation study.
Kliem, S., et al. (2025). Norm values of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale-7 based on a representative German sample. Frontiers in Psychology, 16:1526181 (open access, CC BY).How it is administered here
The GAD-7 is a clinical screener on this platform: it is delivered to a respondent through a secure link generated by a clinician, who then reviews the scored result. It is not self-administered from the public catalog. Clinicians can administer it from the clinician portal; the full item text, psychometric summary, and citations are on the GAD-7 scale page.