What percentile is a 1,200 chess rating?
Here is where 1,200 sits in every pool this site measures. There is no FIDE row: FIDE has issued no rating below 1,400 since 2022, so 1,200 is an online rating and not a FIDE one of any kind.
| Pool | Top | Out of |
|---|---|---|
| Chess.com Bullet derived | Top 50% of that pool | 336,344 |
| Chess.com Blitz derived | Top 50% of that pool | 657,474 |
| Chess.com Rapid derived | Top 45% of that pool | 466,867 |
| Chess.com Classical derived | Top 65% of that pool | 38,941 |
| Lichess Bullet | Top 77.7% of that pool | 336,344 |
| Lichess Blitz | Top 74.8% of that pool | 657,474 |
| Lichess Rapid | Top 67.2% of that pool | 466,867 |
| Lichess Classical | Top 82.4% of that pool | 38,941 |
The Chess.com rows are derived rather than counted: Chess.com publishes no rating distribution, so its curve is the Lichess population mapped through the measured conversion between the two. Percentiles from it are rounded to the nearest 5 and stop at "top 5% or better". The Lichess and FIDE rows are counted from published data.
What 1,200 actually means
1,200 gets quoted as "average" more than any other rating, usually by somebody who has not checked. It is near the middle in some pools and comfortably above it in others, and the table above is the actual answer. The gap between what 1,200 means on Chess.com and what it means on Lichess is wider than most people expect.
| To reach | Ratings from | Gain |
|---|---|---|
| Top 25% | from 1,550 | +350 |
| Top 10% | from 1,800 | +600 |
| Top 5% | from 1,950 | +750 |
Band edges, not thresholds: the distributions are counted in bands, so each figure is where that band begins rather than a number you have to hit exactly.
Nearby ratings
Any other rating
This page exists for round hundreds. For anything else — 1,437, 2,051, whatever you actually hold — the lookup takes the number directly and answers from the same distributions.