Sleep calculator
Chronotype calculator — the five-question rMEQ
Answer five questions and get your reduced Morningness-Eveningness score, the band it falls in, and where it sits on the 4-to-25 scale. Free, instant, no sign-up.
The five questions
Answer for how you would live if nothing forced the schedule — not for the alarm you currently set.
Your clock is neither strongly early nor strongly late, which is where most people sit. This is the widest band on the scale, so the position marker is worth more than the label here — a 12 and a 17 are both intermediate and are not the same person.
Knowing your clock is only useful if the week is built around it. That part is a conversation.
What a chronotype is
A chronotype is not a preference or a habit. It is largely genetic, it tracks the timing of your circadian clock, and in adults it is stable over years. That is what separates it from "I stay up late": an evening type forced onto an early schedule is not being lazy, they are running a body clock that has not shifted.
The reduced MEQ
The questions are the reduced Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (rMEQ), Adan and Almirall, 1991, in Personality and Individual Differences — five items drawn from Horne and Östberg's original nineteen. The reduced form is used here because it correlates with the full MEQ at around r = 0.90 while asking a quarter as many questions, and a nineteen-item form on a web page gets abandoned rather than completed. The option weights are not uniform across items: item 2 runs 1 to 4 and item 5 runs 0 to 6. That asymmetry is the instrument's, not a mistake.
The three bands
Adan and Almirall's cut-offs are evening 4 to 11, intermediate 12 to 17, and morning 18 to 25. The original MEQ splits five ways, separating "definitely" from "moderately" at each end; the reduced form's validation supports three, so three is what this page publishes. The position marker on the scale is shown alongside the band because the bands are wide and the ends of one behave differently from each other.
Chronotype moves with age
It drifts in a predictable direction: later through adolescence, and earlier again from the mid-twenties. That drift is the evidence behind later school start times — teenagers being asked to sit exams at 08:30 are not a lazy cohort, they are a cohort whose clocks have shifted late and will shift back on their own.
What the score does not license
It is not a training prescription. Studies do find peak performance later in the day for evening types, but the effect is small next to sleep quality, training history, and how much notice your body has had of the schedule. Knowing your chronotype is more useful for choosing when to sleep than for choosing when to lift.