CEFR Levels Explained: What A1 to C2 Actually Mean

CEFR stands for the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. It is a scale published by the Council of Europe in 2001 and extended by a Companion Volume, issued provisionally in 2018 and in full in 2020. It now sits underneath most European language courses, a lot of textbooks, and the way exam boards report what a score means.

Everything below is sourced. Where a figure comes from an awarding body it is linked to that body's own page; where it comes from research it is linked to the paper, and the full list is repeated under Sources at the end.

The scale has six levels in three bands:

That much is easy to memorise. What is much less obvious is what any of it means in practice, so here is each level described the way you would actually experience it.

The six levels in practice

A1 — you have phrases, not language. You can introduce yourself, ask where something is, order food, and understand someone speaking slowly and clearly directly to you. You cannot follow a conversation between two other people. Written text is largely opaque except for signs, menus and forms.

A2 — you can survive predictable situations. Shopping, timetables, appointments, describing your family and your job in simple terms. The key limit is predictability: as long as the conversation stays on the script you expected, you are fine. When it wanders, you lose it. Reading is limited to short, concrete texts.

B1 — you become independent. This is the level where you can handle a situation you did not prepare for. You can travel alone in the language, explain a problem, follow the main points of a clear standard discussion, and read straightforward factual text on subjects you care about. You still avoid abstraction and you still simplify heavily when you speak. B1 is where a lot of learners plateau, because it is enough to function.

B2 — you can take part rather than get by. You can follow extended argument, disagree with someone in real time, read an article on an unfamiliar subject and get the gist without a dictionary, and produce clear, detailed text. This is the level most universities and employers actually mean when they say "good English". The jump from B1 to B2 is the largest one on the scale.

C1 — you can operate professionally. Long and demanding texts, implicit meaning, register control, structured writing on complex subjects. You still make mistakes, but they no longer get in the way. You can be fluent without obvious searching for words.

C2 — you have precision. Not perfection, and not native-speaker status. C2 describes someone who reads almost anything with ease, summarises from multiple sources coherently, and expresses fine shades of meaning accurately even in complicated situations.

Three things people get wrong

The levels are not evenly spaced

The names suggest six equal steps. They are not. Cambridge English publishes guided-learning-hours guidelines that make the shape obvious. The hours are cumulative from complete beginner, not level-to-level:

Read the gaps rather than the totals. Getting from nothing to B1 is roughly 350-400 hours. Getting from B1 to B2 is another 150-200 on top. Getting from B2 to C1 is another 200. The upper half of the scale is where the hours pile up, which is why progress feels like it stops around B1 even when it has not.

Treat those numbers as rough — Cambridge itself calls them "a guideline only" and names four things that move them: your language-learning background, the intensity of your study, your age, and how much exposure you get outside lessons. They also assume guided study, and how far your first language is from the one you are learning matters more than any table can express.

The descriptors are can-do statements, not grammar syllabuses

This is the most useful thing to understand about CEFR and the most commonly missed. The framework does not say "B1 means you know the present perfect". It says things like: can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure.

That has a practical consequence. You cannot become B2 by finishing a B2 grammar book, because B2 is not a set of structures — it is a set of things you can do. Two learners at B2 can have quite different grammatical gaps. The framework describes the outcome and leaves the route open.

The Companion Volume pushed this further. It added scales for mediation, online interaction and plurilingual/pluricultural competence, introduced a pre-A1 level below A1, enriched the description at A1 and at the C levels, and replaced the phonological competence scale with one that avoids native-speaker norms — it focuses on intelligibility and accepts that many speakers at C2 keep a noticeable accent.

CEFR is per skill, and a single number hides that

Official CEFR profiles are usually reported per skill: reading, listening, spoken interaction, spoken production, writing. Almost everybody is uneven, because recognition develops ahead of production. If you have read a lot and spoken little, B2 reading with A2 speaking is a completely ordinary profile.

When a course or a test gives you one global level, it is averaging away the thing you most needed to know: which skill is holding you back. If you want a reading-specific estimate, a free English level test that works from reading comprehension will tell you more about your reading than a general placement test will.

How CEFR maps to IELTS and TOEFL

Exam boards publish their own alignments, and they are worth reading from the source rather than from a forum post.

IELTS. Cambridge English mapped the 9-band scale to the CEFR and IELTS publishes the resulting chart. Overall bands of roughly 4.0-5.0 sit at B1, 5.5-6.5 at B2, 7.0-8.0 at C1 and 8.5-9.0 at C2. IELTS is unusually candid about the limits: because IELTS predates the CEFR, "IELTS band scores have never aligned exactly with the CEFR transition points", the chart refers to the overall band and not the four skill scores, and the CEFR "was not designed to provide the basis for precise equating".

TOEFL. This one has changed, so check the date on anything you read. Since 21 January 2026 ETS reports TOEFL iBT on a 1-6 scale in half-point increments, explicitly to align more directly with the CEFR, with four section scores and an overall score that is the average of the four rounded to the nearest half band. For a two-year transition period a comparable total on the old 0-120 scale is also reported. Any CEFR-to-TOEFL table quoting 0-120 totals is describing the pre-2026 report format.

Two cautions apply to both. First, each exam reports a score built from four skills, while CEFR describes each skill separately, so the mapping is a compression. Second, the boundaries are approximate by the exam boards' own account — a 6.5 and a 7.0 are not two different people.

The mapping is still worth knowing, because it converts a vague goal into a concrete one. "I want to be B2" is hard to act on. "I want to read a 900-word academic passage and answer thirteen questions in twenty minutes" is a thing you can practise. If that is your target, IELTS reading time management covers the timing side specifically.

How vocabulary size tracks the levels

Vocabulary size correlates with CEFR level but is not the same thing, and the framework itself attaches no word count to any level. The tables you will find circulating online mostly have no traceable source.

One set of figures that does: Meara and Milton tested learners taking and passing Cambridge exams at every CEFR level and estimated their vocabulary with the X_Lex test, and James Milton reproduced the resulting bands in a 2010 review of the evidence.

Read the small print before you use these numbers. They are lemmas, not word families, and they are drawn from a test that scores out of the most frequent 5,000 words only — so C2 is capped by the instrument rather than by the learners. They are not comparable with the 8,000-9,000 word-family figure for unassisted reading in how many English words you actually need, which counts a different unit for a different purpose.

Do not treat any of these as targets to hit in order. Vocabulary size is a symptom of level, not a cause of it — someone who knows 5,000 words but has never read a long text is not B2. If you want a measured estimate rather than a guess, the vocabulary size test gives you one, and how many English words you actually need explains what the number is and is not good for.

Using your level for something

The point of knowing your CEFR level is not the label. It is that it tells you what to read.

Hu and Nation's research on lexical coverage suggests you need to know roughly 98% of the running words in a text to read it comfortably without help. That means the useful text for building fluency sits at or just below your level, and the useful text for stretching sits one step above. Both have a job — extensive vs intensive reading covers how to split your time between them.

To find out which band a specific text falls into, paste it into the readability checker, which returns standard readability scores alongside an estimated CEFR band. And if the difficulty of finding level-appropriate material is the thing that keeps stalling you, that is exactly what LingoRead generates: passages written to the CEFR level you pick, with questions and vocabulary built from the passage itself.

Sources

• Council of Europe. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. The framework itself, 2001.
• Council of Europe (2020). CEFR Companion Volume. Full edition; the provisional 2018 edition is also still online. Source for pre-A1, mediation, online interaction, plurilingual/pluricultural competence and the revised phonology scale.
• Cambridge English. Guided learning hours. Source for the cumulative hours table and the "approximately 200 hours per level" rule of thumb.
• Cambridge English. International language standards and the CEFR diagram (PDF). Where the Cambridge exams sit on the scale.
• IELTS. IELTS and the CEFR. Source for the band-to-level chart and for the caveats quoted above.
• ETS. Understanding TOEFL iBT scores. Source for the 1-6 scale introduced on 21 January 2026 and the transition arrangements.
• Hu, M. and Nation, P. (2000). Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1), 403-430. Source for the 98% coverage threshold.
• Milton, J. (2010). The development of vocabulary breadth across the CEFR levels. EUROSLA Monographs 1, 211-232. Source for the vocabulary-per-level table, which Milton gives as Table 5, adapted from Meara and Milton (2003), and for the X_Lex 5,000-word ceiling.