What is the Burnout Assessment Tool?

The Burnout Assessment Tool, or BAT, is a burnout questionnaire developed at KU Leuven in Belgium by Wilmar Schaufeli, Hans De Witte and Steffie Desart. It asks about exhaustion, mental distance from work, and problems with concentration and with controlling emotions. This test uses its 12-question short version, the BAT-12, with the questions exactly as the authors wrote them.

Is burnout the same as depression?

They overlap a great deal, and researchers still disagree about how clearly they can be told apart. Burnout is often described as tied to one draining context, while depression tends to be broader and follow you across situations. If low mood rather than exhaustion is the main feature, a depression screen is the more useful starting point.

Yes, and you don't need an account. Your answers are saved so the result can show how your score compares with others.

Can burnout be caused by something other than work?

Yes. The World Health Organization defines burnout as an occupational phenomenon, but the same pattern of exhaustion follows caring for a relative, studying, parenting, or a long stretch of illness. The questions in this test ask about your job, so they may fit less well if you are not working. The BAT's authors made a separate general version for that case.

What should I do with my score?

Use it as a starting point. A single score is a snapshot, so tracking it over time tells you far more than one result. If your score is high, look at the demands producing it rather than at your tolerance of them, and speak with a doctor if the exhaustion persists or comes with physical symptoms.

Free Burnout Test (Burnout Assessment Tool, BAT-12)

Burnout is physical and emotional exhaustion that has gone on for a long time, so you feel worn out most days. This test is the 12-question short version of the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT-12), which asks how you feel at work. It measures burnout symptoms and cannot diagnose burnout. If you score high, talk to a doctor.

This free burnout test uses the BAT-12, the short version of the Burnout Assessment Tool developed by Wilmar Schaufeli, Hans De Witte and Steffie Desart at KU Leuven in Belgium. Its authors made it free to use without asking permission, as long as the questions are not changed, so they appear here exactly as written. It takes about two minutes, asks nothing personal, and gives you a score with a plain-language explanation of what it means. You never have to sign up or hand over an email. Below the test you will find what burnout actually is, how to read your result, and what sensible next steps look like.

1)What is burnout?

Burnout is what happens when demands outrun recovery for long enough that rest stops working. It is not the ordinary tiredness of a hard week, which a weekend usually fixes. It is a state of depletion that follows you into Monday, and then into the Monday after that. The World Health Organization classifies it as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, describing it as chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

That framing is useful but narrow, because exhaustion of this kind is not confined to paid work. Caring for a relative, studying, parenting, or carrying a long stretch of illness produce the same pattern. The questions in this test come from the work version of the BAT, so each one asks about your job. The authors also made a general version for people who are not currently working.

2)Signs of burnout

Burnout is rarely only in your head. It shows up across energy, mood, and body at once, which is part of why people so often put it down to something else.

Physical: persistent tiredness that sleep does not fix, frequent illness, headaches, muscle tension, and changed appetite.
Emotional: feeling drained or numb, irritability, cynicism about work you used to care about, and a sense of not being able to take much more.
Cognitive: trouble concentrating, forgetfulness, and decisions that used to be easy suddenly feeling heavy.
Behavioural: withdrawing from people, putting off tasks, and relying more on caffeine, alcohol, or late nights to get through.

Everyone hits some of these in a hard month. What the test is really probing is how often this is true of you, because frequency is what separates a rough stretch from genuine depletion.

3)How the scoring works

Each of the 12 questions scores from 1 (never) to 5 (always), so your total runs from 12 to 60. A higher total points to more burnout symptoms. The questions come in four groups of three: exhaustion, mental distance from your work, trouble concentrating, and trouble controlling your emotions. The BAT manual works with an average rather than a total; to get it, divide your score by 12. The bands below are the manual's BAT-12 cut-offs, turned into totals:

Burnout test score bands
Score	Level	Average (score ÷ 12)
12 to 30	No sign of burnout risk	1.00 to 2.53
31 to 35	At risk of burnout	2.54 to 2.95
36 to 60	Very high risk of burnout	2.96 to 5.00

The authors set these cut-offs using Belgian (Flemish) workers, so use them as a guide. The BAT manual also says the BAT should not be used to diagnose burnout, because a diagnosis needs a fuller assessment by a trained professional. A higher band is a reason to look at what is generating the load.

4)What your score means, and what it doesn't

A single score is a snapshot of how work feels right now. It is not a label or a diagnosis. Exhaustion rises and falls with workload, sleep, illness, and life events, so the direction it moves matters far more than any one number. Two people can both score 33 and be in opposite situations: one heading into a hard quarter, the other climbing out of one.

It is also worth knowing what burnout is not. It is not laziness, and it is not a lack of resilience; it is a predictable response to a sustained mismatch between demands and recovery. It overlaps with depression, and researchers still disagree about how separate the two are. Burnout is often described as tied to one draining context, while depression tends to spread across more of life, but the symptoms overlap a great deal. Persistent exhaustion also has physical causes worth ruling out, including thyroid problems, anaemia, and sleep disorders. This test measures the exhaustion pattern, not the cause.

5)What to do next

No sign of risk: protect the basics, since steady sleep, real breaks that are not spent on a screen, and movement do more here than any productivity system.
At risk: look at the load itself rather than your tolerance of it. Which specific demands are non-negotiable, which are assumed, and which could be handed over or dropped? Burnout rarely improves while the input stays constant.
Very high risk: speak with a doctor. That covers both support for the exhaustion and ruling out physical causes that look identical from the inside.
In every case, retake the test in a few weeks. The trend tells you whether what you changed is working.

Burnout and chronic stress feed each other, so a high score here often pairs well with the free stress test, which looks at how stress is showing up in your days. If low mood is the bigger part of the picture, the free depression test (PHQ-9) is a better place to look.

If you are struggling to cope, or you are having thoughts of harming yourself or feel in immediate danger, please contact local emergency services or a crisis line you trust right now. You do not have to manage this alone, and reaching out is a sign of strength, not weakness.

6)Why tracking exhaustion over time helps

Burnout is hard to see from the inside precisely because it arrives slowly. The week you are in always feels like the normal amount of tired, and the comparison you would need in order to notice the slide is a version of yourself from three months ago that you cannot accurately remember. That is the specific problem a record solves. Tracking your energy and mood alongside everyday factors like sleep, workload, and time off tends to surface patterns that are invisible day to day, that the flat stretches follow the weeks with no real break, say, or that a bad Monday is reliably a short Sunday night. Those patterns are where change becomes possible, because they turn a vague sense of being drained into specific, addressable causes. Andy is built around exactly this loop: a quick daily check-in, and a clear view of how your mood and energy move over the weeks.

7)About this test

This test uses the BAT-12, the 12-item short version of the work-related Burnout Assessment Tool. The BAT is free to use without asking permission, on the condition that it is not changed and that this publication is cited: Schaufeli WB, Desart S, De Witte H (2020), Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT): Development, validity, and reliability, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(24), 9495. The score bands follow the cut-offs for Flemish employees in the BAT user manual (version 2.0). This test is for self-check and education only. It is not a substitute for professional care or diagnosis. Burnout and depression: Bianchi R, Schonfeld IS, Laurent E (2015), Burnout-depression overlap: a review, Clinical Psychology Review. Last reviewed September 2026.