Average chess rating and a good chess rating

What is the average chess rating on Lichess?

Half of the 345,715 active blitz players were rated below about 1530 on 1 September 2026, so that is the average this page uses: the median, the rating with half of the players below it. In rapid it was about 1445 and in bullet about 1640. The mean sits a little away from the median because the distribution is not symmetric.

These are active Lichess players, not every chess player, and Lichess ratings are a separate scale from FIDE, US Chess and chess.com ratings. There is no single average rating for all chess players.

What is a good chess rating?

A good chess rating depends on the comparison you want. In blitz on Lichess, a rating above about 1530 is above the average player, about 1795 is the top quarter, about 2010 the top 10 percent and about 2375 the top 1 percent.

Lichess starts every new account at 1500, so a 1500 blitz rating is higher than 46.8% of active players rather than an achievement of its own. The table below gives the same thresholds for rapid and bullet.

What rating is the top 1, 5 and 10 percent on Lichess?

In blitz, about 2010 reaches the top 10 percent, about 2135 the top 5 percent and about 2375 the top 1 percent. Rapid and bullet have different pools of players, so the thresholds differ, as the table shows.

What share of Lichess players is below each rating?

The ladder gives the share of active players a rating is higher than, in the three largest time controls. In rapid, 1500 is higher than 55.3% of players, in blitz 46.8% and in bullet 38.1%.

Where do I look up my own rating?

Each page below answers the question "is this rating good" for one rating from 600 to 2400, with the share of players above and below it in every time control. The four time control pages show the whole distribution for one time control.

How were these percentiles measured?

The figures come from the Lichess open database. They count every account that played at least one rated standard game on 1 September 2026 (UTC), once per time control, at its rating after its last game of that day. Bot accounts are left out and no account name is kept. The file for that day holds 2,978,648 rated games.

The numbers describe players who were active that day, not every account that ever registered, and they include newcomers whose rating is still provisional because the games file does not mark them. Lichess starts every new account at 1500, so newcomers add to the numbers near that rating. Lichess also says its ratings cannot be compared with the ratings of other sites or organizations, so this site shows no conversion to FIDE, US Chess or chess.com.