A free 19-item measure of burnout across three separately scored subscales - personal, work-related and client-related - each reported on a 0–100 scale.
Usage conditions apply.The CBI was developed with Danish public funds and its authors distribute it free of charge; the full items are published in Kristensen et al. (2005) and hosted by the National Research Centre for the Working Environment (NFA). No formal licence text exists, so written confirmation from NFA is recommended for commercial hosting.
Answer each question about how you have been feeling recently. Where a question mentions clients, read it as the people you work with - patients, service users, students or similar.
01
How often do you feel tired?
Item score-
02
How often are you physically exhausted?
Item score-
03
How often are you emotionally exhausted?
Item score-
04
How often do you think
"I can't take it anymore"?
Item score-
05
How often do you feel worn out?
Item score-
06
How often do you feel weak and susceptible to illness?
Item score-
07
Is your work emotionally exhausting?
Item score-
08
Do you feel burnt out because of your work?
Item score-
09
Does your work frustrate you?
Item score-
10
Do you feel worn out at the end of the working day?
Item score-
11
Are you exhausted in the morning at the thought of another day at work?
Item score-
12
Do you feel that every working hour is tiring for you?
Item score-
13
Do you have enough energy for family and friends during leisure time?
Item score-
14
Do you find it hard to work with clients?
Item score-
15
Do you find it frustrating to work with clients?
Item score-
16
Does it drain your energy to work with clients?
Item score-
17
Do you feel that you give more than you get back when you work with clients?
Item score-
18
Are you tired of working with clients?
Item score-
19
Do you sometimes wonder how long you will be able to continue working with clients?
Item score-
Scored locally in your browser - nothing is sent until you choose to.
0 of 19 answered
CBI0 / 19
Answer each question about how you have been feeling recently. Where a question mentions clients, read it as the people you work with - patients, service users, students or similar.
01
How often do you feel tired?
Item score-
02
How often are you physically exhausted?
Item score-
03
How often are you emotionally exhausted?
Item score-
04
How often do you think
"I can't take it anymore"?
Item score-
05
How often do you feel worn out?
Item score-
06
How often do you feel weak and susceptible to illness?
Item score-
07
Is your work emotionally exhausting?
Item score-
08
Do you feel burnt out because of your work?
Item score-
09
Does your work frustrate you?
Item score-
10
Do you feel worn out at the end of the working day?
Item score-
11
Are you exhausted in the morning at the thought of another day at work?
Item score-
12
Do you feel that every working hour is tiring for you?
Item score-
13
Do you have enough energy for family and friends during leisure time?
Item score-
14
Do you find it hard to work with clients?
Item score-
15
Do you find it frustrating to work with clients?
Item score-
16
Does it drain your energy to work with clients?
Item score-
17
Do you feel that you give more than you get back when you work with clients?
Item score-
18
Are you tired of working with clients?
Item score-
19
Do you sometimes wonder how long you will be able to continue working with clients?
Item score-
0 of 19 answered
Scoring & cutoffs
How scoring works.
Each item is scored 0, 25, 50, 75 or 100. Items are averaged within each subscale, giving three 0–100 scores: personal burnout (items 1–6), work-related burnout (items 7–13, item 13 reversed) and client-related burnout (items 14–19). There is no total score.
Personal burnout
6 items · 0–100
Items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Below threshold0–49
Moderate50–74
High75–99
Severe100–100
Work-related burnout
7 items · 0–100
Items 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13r
r = reverse-scored before summing
Below threshold0–49
Moderate50–74
High75–99
Severe100–100
Client-related burnout
6 items · 0–100
Items 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19
Below threshold0–49
Moderate50–74
High75–99
Severe100–100
The original 2005 paper published no clinical cutoffs. The 50-point threshold for a high degree of burnout comes from Borritz and Kristensen's NFA normative report (2004); the moderate / high / severe labels follow the four-band convention used by Creedy et al. (2017). Danish population mean on the personal scale is about 33 (SD 16).
The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) measures burnout as physical and psychological fatigue and exhaustion, and asks where the person attributes that exhaustion. Its 19 items are split into three separately scored subscales: personal burnout (six items on general exhaustion that anyone can answer, regardless of employment), work-related burnout (seven items on exhaustion the person attributes to their work) and client-related burnout (six items on exhaustion attributed to working with clients, patients, students or similar). Each subscale is reported on a 0-100 scale, with higher scores meaning more exhaustion.
The CBI deliberately does not measure the "cynicism" or "reduced personal accomplishment" dimensions found in the Maslach model. Its authors argued that exhaustion is the core of burnout and that attribution to work or to clients is what distinguishes burnout from ordinary tiredness. This makes the CBI a narrower instrument than the MBI, but also one that can be used in populations without clients, or outside employment altogether, by dropping the subscales that do not apply.
Where it comes from.
The CBI was developed by Tage S. Kristensen, Marianne Borritz, Ebbe Villadsen and Karl B. Christensen at the National Institute of Occupational Health in Copenhagen (now the National Research Centre for the Working Environment, NFA) and published in Work & Stress in 2005. It grew out of PUMA (Project on Burnout, Motivation and Job Satisfaction), a five-year prospective study of around 1,900 Danish human-service workers in social welfare, hospitals, institutions for people with disabilities, a prison and home care, which began in 1999.
The authors set out to build a free, public alternative to the licensed Maslach Burnout Inventory, one that was not tied to human-service work and that separated exhaustion from its attributed cause. Because it was developed with public funds, the CBI has always been distributed without charge, and the full items, scoring rules and Danish norms are hosted by NFA. It has since been translated and validated in many languages, including Chinese, Persian, Italian, Greek, Portuguese and Serbian.
How well it performs.
In the PUMA baseline sample (n ≈ 1,900) all three subscales showed high internal consistency (Cronbach's α 0.85-0.87) and item-scale correlations of 0.52-0.76. Over three years of follow-up, higher baseline scores predicted sickness absence, sleep problems, use of painkillers and intention to leave the job, and were associated with lower job satisfaction, supporting predictive validity. Work-unit-level burnout predicted long-term sickness absence over the following 18 months. Danish general-population norms exist for the personal subscale (mean 32.7, SD 15.7, n = 1,498, ages 20-59). Translations have reproduced the three-factor structure and reliability in Iranian nurses (α 0.82-0.90, ICC 0.85-0.95), Italian academics (α 0.84-0.89), Hong Kong human-service workers and Greek doctors, though the Greek study found a 16-item model fitted better than the full 19 items. A 2021 systematic review of burnout measures rated the CBI's content validity as moderate and judged it among the more suitable freely available instruments, while noting that the evidence base for all burnout measures remains limited.
α 0.85-0.87
Internal consistency
Personal 0.87, work-related 0.87, client-related 0.85 in the PUMA cohort - Kristensen et al. 2005; Borritz & Kristensen 2004
ICC 0.85-0.95
Test-retest reliability
Persian version in Iranian nurses - Mahmoudi et al. 2017 (not reported in the original Danish study)
3-year follow-up
Predictive validity
Baseline scores predicted sickness absence, sleep problems, painkiller use and intention to quit - Kristensen et al. 2005
32.7 (SD 15.7)
Population norm
Personal burnout, Danish general population aged 20-59, n = 1,498 - Borritz & Kristensen 2004
How it compares to the alternatives.
Instrument
Items
Time
When to reach for it
CBI
19
~5 min
Free three-domain exhaustion measure; usable outside human-service work and in non-employed groups by dropping subscales.
The reference instrument with exhaustion, depersonalisation and personal accomplishment; licensed by Mind Garden with a per-administration fee - available in the Aisel scale library.
OLBI
16
~5 min
Free two-factor measure (exhaustion and disengagement) with positively and negatively worded items.
BAT
23 (12 short)
5-8 min
Free, newer four-dimension model (exhaustion, mental distance, cognitive and emotional impairment) with published cutoffs.
Mini-Z
10
2-3 min
Very brief clinician worklife survey with a single-item burnout question; free for research and evaluation.
ProQOL-5
30
~10 min
Free; separates burnout from secondary traumatic stress and compassion satisfaction in helping professions.
Right tool, wrong tool.
Reach for it when
-Screening or surveying burnout in staff groups, particularly health and social care, where a free instrument with Danish norms is wanted.
-Separating exhaustion attributed to clients from exhaustion attributed to the job as a whole.
-Repeated measurement in occupational-health or workplace intervention studies.
-Populations without clients or without paid work, using the personal subscale alone.
Reach for something else when
-Diagnosing a clinical condition - burnout is not a disorder in DSM-5 or ICD-11 and high CBI scores overlap with depression; use the PHQ-9 or MDI to assess depressive symptoms.
-Measuring cynicism, depersonalisation or reduced efficacy, which the CBI does not cover - use the MBI or BAT.
-Producing a single total burnout score - the CBI has none.
-Individual decisions about fitness for work based on a cutoff alone.
Reading the score with care.
No standard error of measurement or minimal clinically important difference has been published for the CBI, so there is no agreed threshold for a meaningful individual change. With subscale alphas around 0.85-0.87 and standard deviations of roughly 16-18 points in the PUMA sample, a rough SEM estimate is 6-7 points, meaning individual changes smaller than about 10 points should not be over-interpreted. Group means are considerably more stable and are the intended unit of analysis in workplace surveys. Scores of exactly 50 sit on the authors' threshold and should be read as borderline rather than categorical.
What it cannot tell you.
The CBI measures exhaustion only and its attribution, and critics argue this reduces burnout to fatigue. The 50-point threshold and the moderate/high/severe bands are conventions, not clinically validated cutoffs, and no MCID exists. The client subscale does not apply to workers without clients, and several translations have dropped or reworded items, so factor structure is not identical across languages. Norms come from Danish human-service workers, 83% of whom were women, and may not transfer to other countries or occupations. As with all self-report burnout measures, scores are influenced by mood and correlate strongly with depressive symptoms.
How licensing works.
The CBI was developed with Danish public funds and its authors distribute it free of charge; the full items are published in Kristensen et al. (2005) and hosted by the National Research Centre for the Working Environment (NFA). No formal licence text exists, so written confirmation from NFA is recommended for commercial hosting.
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