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Score your own urinary symptoms

The seven questions urologists use, scored the same way they score them. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is saved, and no email is asked for.

This is the International Prostate Symptom Score — the IPSS, also called the AUA Symptom Index. It does not diagnose anything. What it does is turn "it's been worse lately" into a number you can compare against the same number three months from now, which is the part most people never have.

1 Incomplete emptying

Over the past month, how often have you had a sensation of not emptying your bladder completely after you finished urinating?

2 Frequency

Over the past month, how often have you had to urinate again less than two hours after you finished urinating?

3 Intermittency

Over the past month, how often have you found you stopped and started again several times when you urinated?

4 Urgency

Over the past month, how often have you found it difficult to postpone urination?

5 Weak stream

Over the past month, how often have you had a weak urinary stream?

6 Straining

Over the past month, how often have you had to push or strain to begin urination?

7 Night-time trips

Over the past month, how many times did you most typically get up to urinate from the time you went to bed until the time you got up in the morning?

QoLQuality of life

If you were to spend the rest of your life with your urinary condition just the way it is now, how would you feel about that?

Answer all seven questions to see your score.

What this number is actually for

Two things, and neither is diagnosis.

It makes the conversation concrete. "I get up a couple of times" and "IPSS of 21, quality of life 5" carry very different amounts of information into a ten-minute appointment.

It gives you a before. If you're going to test a supplement or start a medication, score yourself first, then again at twelve weeks. A change of about three points is the threshold researchers treat as meaningful — smaller than that is within the noise of how these symptoms swing on their own.

How to run that twelve-week test without fooling yourself →

Pair it with volumes

The IPSS captures how much things bother you. It does not capture how much you actually pass, and that second number is what separates a prostate problem from your body simply producing too much urine overnight. Two nights with a measuring jug settles it.

Print the bladder diary →

The International Prostate Symptom Score is a validated, publicly available instrument developed by the American Urological Association and adopted by the World Health Organization. We reproduce the standard wording because changing it would make the score incomparable to the one your doctor uses. This page is consumer education, not medical advice, and our editorial team are not clinicians.