About the test
HEXACO personality test
The HEXACO test describes your personality with six broad traits and 24 facets, including honesty-humility, which the Big Five lacks. It uses the public-domain IPIP-HEXACO by Ashton, Lee and Goldberg, not the official HEXACO-PI-R. Take it on its own, or alongside the Big Five test to see how the two models describe you.
Questionnaire / instrument: IPIP-HEXACO
The test at a glance
- Price
- Free, including your results
- Registration
- No account required
- Length
- 240 statements
- Time
- About 25 minutes
- Format
- Self-report · five response options
- Your report
- Six traits · 24 facets
The six traits and 24 facets
Each facet is measured with ten statements, and each trait combines its four facets. These are the names used in your report:
Honesty-humility
Not using others for your own gain. Facets: sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance and modesty. This is the trait the HEXACO model adds to the Big Five.
Emotionality
How strongly you react to danger and stress, and how attached you feel to others. Facets: fearfulness, anxiety, dependence and sentimentality. It overlaps with neuroticism but also includes empathy.
Extraversion
How you feel about yourself in social settings. Facets: expressiveness, social boldness, sociability and liveliness.
Agreeableness
How you react when others treat you badly. Facets: forgiveness, gentleness, flexibility and patience. It is narrower than agreeableness in the Big Five.
Conscientiousness
How you organise your time and work towards goals. Facets: organisation, diligence, perfectionism and prudence.
Openness to experience
How much you are drawn to beauty, knowledge, imagination and unusual ideas. Facets: aesthetic appreciation, inquisitiveness, creativity and unconventionality.
What your results show
Your result is calculated as soon as you have answered. You can preview an example result before taking the test.
- A score from 0 to 100 for each of the six traits, with a low, average or high label, a description of your level and an explanation of the trait.
- Scores for the four facets within each trait, each with a short explanation.
- The option to invite a friend, partner or colleague to take the HEXACO test and see your six traits side by side.
- A note on what the scores show and a suggestion to compare with the Big Five test.
What does it measure?
Six personality traits: honesty–humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness. Each trait includes four facets, making 24 in total.
Where does it come from?
This is the 240-item IPIP-HEXACO measure published by Michael Ashton, Kibeom Lee and Lewis Goldberg in 2007. It uses IPIP items to assess constructs in the HEXACO model.
How is the result calculated?
Each facet averages ten keyed responses, and each trait combines its four facets. The report shows broad traits and their more specific facets on a 0–100 scale. No public norms exist for IPIP-HEXACO, so scores show your position on the answer scale, with an average below 2.5 labelled low and above 3.5 high, as in our Big Five test.
What can the result tell you?
This public-domain instrument is distinct from the official HEXACO-PI-R. Emotionality and agreeableness also differ in content from their closest Big Five counterparts, so similarly named scores should not be treated as identical.
Languages and adaptations
English follows the IPIP key; Icelandic uses a published IPIP translation. In other languages, 80 of the 240 items reuse translations from our other IPIP banks. The rest, including in Norwegian, are our own AI-assisted translations that have not been independently validated.
Frequently asked questions
Is the HEXACO test free, including the results?
Yes. You can answer all 240 statements and read your full result without paying or creating an account.
How is HEXACO different from the Big Five?
HEXACO has six traits instead of five. It adds honesty-humility, and it divides emotional sensitivity and agreeableness differently: HEXACO emotionality includes sentimentality and dependence, but not anger, while HEXACO agreeableness covers forgiveness and patience, including keeping your temper. Extraversion, conscientiousness and openness are similar in both models. Results from the two tests cannot be compared directly.
Should I take this or the Big Five test?
Take the Big Five test if you want the most widely used model, 30 facets and percentiles compared with a large online sample. Take the HEXACO test if you are interested in honesty-humility or want a second view of your personality. The Big Five Aspects test is another Big Five option, with two aspects per trait instead of facets.
How is it different from the quick personality test?
The quick test also measures honesty-humility, but with only four statements per trait, and its other five traits follow the Big Five. This test uses 40 statements per trait, follows the HEXACO definitions of all six traits and shows 24 facets.
Who am I compared with?
No one. There are no public norms for the IPIP-HEXACO scales, so a score of 70 means that your answers lie 70 percent of the way up the response scale, not that you score higher than 70 percent of people. You can, however, invite someone you know and compare your two profiles.
How reliable is the test?
The IPIP scoring key reports internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) between .69 and .88 for the 24 facet scales, and each broad trait is based on 40 statements. Translations into other languages have not been validated for this test, so scores in another language may not match the English version exactly.
How should I answer?
Choose how well each statement describes how you usually are now, not how you would like to be. There are no right or wrong answers. The test is long, so you can take a break: your answers are saved in this browser along the way.
License and reuse
Public domainIPIP places its items and scales in the public domain. They may be used, copied, adapted and translated for commercial and non-commercial purposes without a fee or separate permission.
The terms below apply to the test materials. Articles, translations, software and our result descriptions may have separate terms.
Sources and further reading
Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., & Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The IPIP-HEXACO scales: An alternative, public-domain measure of the personality constructs in the HEXACO model. Personality and Individual Differences, 42(8), 1515-1526.