Licensed 22-item burnout inventory (Mind Garden) with three subscales. Scoring, profiles, evidence and free alternatives explained; the questionnaire itself cannot be hosted here.
The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) measures occupational burnout as three related but separate experiences: emotional exhaustion, a sense of being drained by one's work; depersonalisation, a detached, cynical or callous response to the people one serves; and reduced personal accomplishment, a loss of felt competence and achievement at work. Respondents rate how often they experience each feeling on a seven-point frequency scale from never to every day, and each subscale is scored on its own. There is deliberately no total score, because the authors regard burnout as a pattern across the three dimensions rather than a single quantity.
The original 22-item Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS), with nine exhaustion, five depersonalisation and eight accomplishment items, remains the most used form and has a variant worded for medical personnel (MBI-HSS (MP)). An Educators Survey (MBI-ES) exists for teachers, and a 16-item General Survey (MBI-GS) reframes the dimensions as exhaustion, cynicism and professional efficacy for occupations without direct service recipients, with a student version (MBI-GS (S)). All forms take around 10 to 15 minutes. The MBI describes an occupational state in working adults; it is not a clinical diagnostic tool.
02 - Origin & purpose
Where it comes from.
Christina Maslach and Susan Jackson published the inventory in 1981 in the Journal of Occupational Behaviour, after interviewing and surveying human-services workers about the emotional toll of caring work. Factor analysis of a large pool of candidate statements produced the three-factor structure that has defined the construct ever since, and the instrument was published commercially by Consulting Psychologists Press before moving to Mind Garden. The manual is now in its fourth edition (Maslach, Jackson and Leiter, 2016-2018).
The MBI was designed as a research measure of a continuum of work-related experience, not as a clinical screen. That intention has mattered a great deal in practice: as burnout became a headline concern in healthcare, the MBI was widely pressed into service as a prevalence tool with cutoffs its authors never validated for that purpose, and the 2018 JAMA systematic review of physician burnout found at least 142 different definitions in use across 182 studies. The fourth edition responded by withdrawing the cutoffs and replacing them with profile-based interpretation.
03 - Scoring & cutoffs
How scoring works.
Each item is rated 0 (never) to 6 (every day) and the items in each subscale are summed: emotional exhaustion ranges from 0 to 54, depersonalisation from 0 to 30 and personal accomplishment from 0 to 48. Higher exhaustion and depersonalisation and lower accomplishment indicate greater burnout. The subscales are reported separately and Mind Garden explicitly states that they cannot be combined into a single burnout score.
Editions of the manual up to the third (1996) offered high, moderate and low bands for each subscale, derived by splitting a large normative sample into thirds. The widely quoted values were exhaustion 27 or more (high), 17 to 26 (moderate) and 16 or less (low); depersonalisation 13 or more, 7 to 12, and 6 or less; and accomplishment 31 or less (high burnout), 32 to 38, and 39 or more. Because a tercile split has no diagnostic meaning, these bands were removed from the fourth edition, whose authors have described their earlier publication as a mistake. The fourth edition instead classifies respondents into five latent profiles - Engaged, Ineffective, Overextended, Disengaged and Burnout - using thresholds set relative to normative means and standard deviations, and Mind Garden publishes mean-item thresholds for each subscale (for the HSS, exhaustion above 3.00, depersonalisation above 2.73 and accomplishment 4.66 or below). Studies that still report "burnout" on the MBI using exhaustion of 27 or more or depersonalisation of 10 or more should be read with that history in mind.
04 - Validation evidence
How well it performs.
Reliability of the exhaustion subscale is consistently strong; depersonalisation and personal accomplishment are weaker. The original manual reported Cronbach's alphas of 0.90, 0.79 and 0.71 and two-to-four-week test-retest coefficients of 0.82, 0.60 and 0.80 for the three subscales respectively. Reliability generalisation meta-analyses (Wheeler et al. 2011; Aguayo et al. 2011) confirm mean alphas around 0.88 for exhaustion, 0.71 for depersonalisation and 0.78 for accomplishment, with wide heterogeneity by language and sample. A meta-analysis of 45 factor-analytic studies supports the three-factor structure, although newer work on the General Survey reports problems with measurement invariance across groups. Validity evidence is largely convergent and structural: there is no external gold standard for burnout against which the MBI's sensitivity and specificity could be estimated, which is why prevalence estimates using it have ranged from 0% to 80.5% in physicians alone.
α 0.90 / 0.79 / 0.71
Internal consistency (original)
Emotional exhaustion / depersonalisation / personal accomplishment - Maslach & Jackson manual
0.82 / 0.60 / 0.80
Test-retest reliability
Same three subscales at 2-4 weeks - original manual samples
α 0.88 / 0.71 / 0.78
Meta-analytic reliability
Mean alphas across 45 studies, high heterogeneity - Aguayo et al. 2011
0-80.5%
Physician burnout prevalence
Range across 182 studies using at least 142 definitions, mostly MBI-based - Rotenstein et al. 2018
05 - How it compares
How it compares to the alternatives.
Instrument
Items
Time
When to reach for it
MBI
22 (HSS) or 16 (GS), 3 subscales
10-15 min
Licensed (Mind Garden, per administration). Reach for it when comparability with the international burnout literature or the five-profile model matters and a licence is in place.
Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI)
19, 3 subscales
5-10 min
Public domain. Reach for it when you need a free, well-validated measure that separates personal from work-related and client-related burnout, or for non-client-facing roles.
Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI)
16, 2 subscales
~5 min
Free. Reach for it when you want engagement as the positive pole, balanced positive and negative wording, and use across any occupation.
Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT)
23 core (12-item short form)
5-10 min
Free for non-commercial use. Reach for it when you want a single total burnout score with published cutoffs and an ICD-11-aligned four-dimension model.
ProQOL-5
30
5-10 min
Free with attribution. Reach for it in helping professions exposed to trauma, where compassion satisfaction and secondary traumatic stress matter alongside burnout.
Mini-Z
10 (single burnout item)
2-3 min
Free. Reach for it for rapid organisational pulse surveys in healthcare; the single burnout item is validated against MBI exhaustion.
Free with conditions. Reach for it when the question is general wellbeing or possible depression rather than work-specific burnout.
06 - When to use it
Right tool, wrong tool.
Reach for it when
-Occupational-health or organisational surveys where results must be comparable with the international burnout literature, most of which uses the MBI.
-Research using the fourth-edition profile model, which is defined on MBI subscales.
-Settings that already hold a Mind Garden licence for the number of administrations planned.
-Working adults in human-services, educational or general occupational roles, using the form matched to the occupation.
Reach for something else when
-Clinical diagnosis or case-finding for an individual patient - burnout is an ICD-11 occupational phenomenon, not a disorder, and the MBI is a research measure.
-Deriving a single burnout score or a burned-out / not-burned-out dichotomy - the authors reject both.
-Distinguishing burnout from depression - the overlap is substantial and the MBI does not resolve it; use a depression measure alongside.
-Abbreviated one- or two-item versions, which Mind Garden discourages and which inflate false positives.
-Any service without a licence - use the CBI, OLBI or BAT, which are free.
07 - Confidence & precision
Reading the score with care.
No standard error of measurement or minimal clinically important difference has been established for any MBI subscale, and intervention trials report mean changes and effect sizes without an agreed threshold for meaningful individual change. With test-retest coefficients of 0.82 for exhaustion but only 0.60 for depersonalisation over a few weeks, small movements on the depersonalisation subscale in particular are within measurement noise. Because the old bands were terciles rather than validated cutoffs, a respondent classified as "high" on one occasion and "moderate" on the next has not necessarily changed clinically. Interpretation should rest on the pattern across subscales, the direction of change over repeated administrations, and the respondent's own account, rather than on crossing a threshold.
08 - Limitations
What it cannot tell you.
The MBI's dominance has produced an incoherent evidence base: definitions of burnout using it vary so much that prevalence in the same profession ranges from near zero to over 80%, and its associations with outcomes cannot be reliably pooled. Reliability of the depersonalisation subscale is often below conventional standards, and the personal accomplishment dimension correlates weakly with the other two, leading some to argue it is a distinct construct rather than part of burnout. The overlap between exhaustion and depressive symptoms is large and conceptually unresolved. The instrument was developed inductively from a factor analysis of statements rather than from a theory of burnout, and its subscales do not map exactly onto the ICD-11 description. It measures working adults only, and its licence terms prohibit displaying items online, giving individual feedback under the standard research licence, or including the form in publications.
09 - Licensing, explained
How licensing works.
The MBI is copyrighted and licensed per administration by Mind Garden, Inc. (from about US$2.75 per respondent, with a minimum order). Its items may not be reproduced online or in publications, so this page explains how the MBI works without showing it. Free burnout measures include the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory and the Burnout Assessment Tool; for general wellbeing you can score the WHO-5 here.
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