The ACE questionnaire counts ten categories of childhood adversity. Take it in about three minutes and get your score broken down across abuse, neglect, and household challenges — with a straight answer about what the number does and does not mean.
Before you begin. These ten questions ask directly about abuse, neglect, and serious difficulty in your household before you turned 18. They can be hard to read, let alone answer. You can stop at any point, and every question has a "I would rather not answer this one" option. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.
If you are in crisis or these questions bring up more than you expected, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) at any time.
The ACE questionnaire comes from the CDC-Kaiser Adverse Childhood Experiences Study — one of the largest investigations ever conducted into how childhood adversity relates to health across a lifetime. It counts ten categories of experience, and your score is simply how many of them applied to you.
It is worth being clear about what this measures before you start. An ACE score counts what happened to you. It does not measure how you are doing now, it is not a diagnosis, and it does not predict your future. It is a starting point for a conversation, not a verdict.
The Ten Categories
A measure of exposure, not a diagnosis.
Adapted from the published CDC-Kaiser questionnaire.
The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study began in the mid-1990s, run jointly by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente and published by Vincent Felitti, Robert Anda and colleagues in 1998. More than 17,000 adults completed a standard health assessment and answered ten questions about their childhoods. It remains one of the largest investigations ever conducted into the relationship between early adversity and adult health.
Two findings made it famous. The first was how common adversity turned out to be — roughly two-thirds of participants reported at least one ACE, in a largely insured, employed, middle-class population. The second was the dose-response relationship: as the number of categories rose, so did the population rate of depression, substance use, and a long list of physical health conditions. The effect was graded, and it held after adjusting for the obvious confounders.
What gets lost in retellings is the nature of that finding. It is an association measured across a large population. It is not a mechanism that operates on individuals, and the original authors never claimed it was. Treating an ACE score as a personal forecast misreads the study — and does real harm to people who then believe their future is already written.
Every question asks about the period before your 18th birthday. Each category counts once, regardless of how often it happened — which is one of the instrument's acknowledged limitations.
| Group | Category | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Abuse | Emotional abuse | Frequent insults, humiliation, or being made to fear physical harm by an adult in the household. |
| Abuse | Physical abuse | Being pushed, grabbed, slapped, or hit hard enough to leave marks or cause injury. |
| Abuse | Sexual abuse | Sexual contact or attempted contact by an adult or anyone at least five years older. |
| Neglect | Emotional neglect | Not feeling loved, important, or supported; a family that was not close. |
| Neglect | Physical neglect | Not enough food, dirty clothes, no one to protect you, or caregivers too impaired to provide care. |
| Household | Parental separation | Parents separated or divorced. |
| Household | Domestic violence | A caregiver frequently subjected to violence in the household. |
| Household | Substance use | Living with a problem drinker, an alcoholic, or someone using street drugs. |
| Household | Mental illness | A household member with depression or mental illness, or who attempted suicide. |
| Household | Incarceration | A household member going to prison. |
The ten categories were chosen for a specific 1990s research study, not as a complete inventory of childhood adversity. A low score does not mean an easy childhood. None of the following are counted anywhere in the questionnaire:
It also counts each category only once. One instance and ten years of the same experience produce the same single point. And crucially, it measures exposure only — it asks what happened, never how you are affected today.
These answer two different questions, and people often arrive looking for one while searching for the other.
| ACE Test (this page) | Trauma Test | |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | What happened to me in childhood? | How is it affecting me now? |
| What it measures | Exposure — a count of categories | Symptoms — current distress and functioning |
| Time frame | Before your 18th birthday | Recent weeks and months |
| Based on | CDC-Kaiser ACE questionnaire | ITQ, with exposure categories from the LEC-5 |
| Best used for | Understanding your history and its context | Deciding whether to seek treatment now |
If what you actually want to know is whether to seek help, the trauma test will tell you more than this one will. Many people find it useful to take both: the ACE score for context, the trauma test for what to do about it.
Trauma-Informed Outpatient Care · Port Charlotte & Arcadia, FL
Whatever your score, what happens next is not fixed. Our team works with adults carrying childhood trauma — building grounding skills first, then doing the deeper work, without an inpatient stay.
If you are in crisis, call or text 988 immediately.