Mental health assessment
Free Burnout Test (Copenhagen Burnout Inventory)
Take the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, a public-domain instrument that measures three kinds of burnout separately rather than collapsing them into one number. It takes about four minutes and your answers never leave your device.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory?
The CBI is a 19-item burnout instrument developed by Tage Kristensen and colleagues and published in Work & Stress in 2005. It was created explicitly as a free, public-domain alternative to the commercially licensed Maslach Burnout Inventory, and it measures personal, work-related, and client-related burnout as three separate scales.
How is the CBI scored?
Each answer is worth 0, 25, 50, 75, or 100 points. Each subscale score is the average of its items, not the total, so every subscale lands on the same 0 to 100 scale despite having different numbers of items. Scores of 50 to 74 indicate moderate burnout, 75 to 99 high, and 100 severe.
Why are there three separate scores?
Because where exhaustion is attributed changes what helps. Someone exhausted by caring for a relative and someone exhausted by their workload can score identically on general exhaustion while needing entirely different things. Collapsing them into one number hides exactly the information that matters.
What if I do not work with clients?
The client-related subscale applies only to people whose work involves direct contact with clients, patients, students, or service users. If that is not your work, that subscale is not meaningful for you and the personal and work-related scores are the ones to read.
About this screening tool
The CBI was developed by Tage S. Kristensen, Marianne Borritz, Ebbe Villadsen, and Karl B. Christensen as part of the Danish PUMA study, and published in 2005. It is in the public domain and free to use, which was a deliberate decision by its authors. Burnout is an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical diagnosis, and this instrument measures it as one. It is provided for information and does not replace clinical assessment.
References
Your burnout result in context
The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, and specifically as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. That framing matters: it locates the cause in conditions rather than in the person experiencing them.
Reading the three subscales against each other is where this instrument earns its structure. Personal high with work low points away from the job. Work high with personal lower suggests the problem is bounded and that recovery outside work is still functioning. Client high in a caring or teaching role is a well-documented occupational risk and is usually the first to rise.
Burnout and depression overlap substantially and are not the same thing. Burnout is tied to a context and typically eases when the context changes; depression is pervasive and persists across contexts. Where a score is high, that distinction is worth making with a clinician rather than alone, because the treatments diverge.
Other screens you might also take
Burnout overlaps with depression, anxiety, and sleep problems, and separating them changes what helps.