The Fagerström Test for Nicotine Dependence: six questions, published in 1991, scored 0 to 10. Time to your first cigarette and how many you smoke a day carry three points each; the other four questions carry one. Your total lands in one of four bands, and the band is what shapes which quit strategy actually fits you.
Question 1 of 6
The six questions and the scoring are not ours. They are the Fagerström Test for Nicotine Dependence, published by Heatherton, Kozlowski, Frecker and Fagerström in the British Journal of Addiction in 1991 as a revision of the 1978 Fagerström Tolerance Questionnaire. That paper dropped two items from the original because they correlated with nothing biochemical, and rescored two more. This page runs it as written.
The arithmetic is a plain sum. Time to the first cigarette of the day scores 3 for within five minutes, 2 for six to thirty, 1 for thirty-one to sixty, 0 beyond an hour. Cigarettes a day scores 0 for ten or fewer, 1 for eleven to twenty, 2 for twenty-one to thirty, 3 for thirty-one or more. The four remaining questions are yes or no and score 1 or 0. The total runs 0 to 10 and that is your score.
What IS ours is the interpretation. The four bands break at 0-2, 3-4, 5-7 and 8-10, which are the conventional cut points, but the labels this page puts on them are one step stronger than most published readings of the same boundaries — where we say low, moderate, high and very high, other sources reading the identical cut points say very low, low, moderate and high. If you want the gentler reading of your own number, it is one band down. The strategy paragraph under each band is ours as well.
Two things this is not. It is not a diagnosis: the FTND measures physical dependence and nothing else, and it says nothing about the behavioural half, which is what most people actually struggle with. And it is not a prescription. Where a band mentions medication it is because the honest advice at that score is to talk to a doctor, not because a web page can recommend one.
Nothing on this page is medically reviewed and nothing above measures anything about you — it explains a calculation. Where a number here is our own judgement rather than a published figure, the note says so and cites nothing; where the health bodies disagree, it carries the disagreement. Method last checked 21 August 2026.
The FTND was developed by Karl-Olov Fagerström in 1978 and revised in 1991. It is used by clinicians worldwide to determine nicotine dependence severity before prescribing cessation pharmacotherapy. A higher score predicts more severe withdrawal symptoms and a greater response to pharmacological support (NRT, varenicline, or bupropion).
The test has been validated across dozens of cultures and languages and remains the most predictive six-item instrument for physical nicotine dependence available.
Physical nicotine dependence — measured by the FTND — is distinct from the psychological habit of smoking. People with low FTND scores may still smoke heavily due to psychological triggers (stress, routine, social cues). High-score smokers experience significant physical withdrawal that makes quitting harder without pharmaceutical support. Both dimensions require different intervention strategies.
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Free nicotine withdrawal timeline. Enter your last cigarette to see which symptoms belong to each phase, when withdrawal peaks, and when it starts easing.
Free nicotine clearance calculator. Enter your last cigarette and watch live countdowns to carbon monoxide clearing (WHO's 12h mark) and nicotine (72h).
Free craving countdown timer. Nicotine cravings peak and pass in 3–5 minutes; start the timer, follow the 4-7-8 breathing guide, and outlast this one.
The science copy and the pacing follow your score, because a 9 and a 2 need different weeks.
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