What is a good chess rating?

Short answer: almost certainly better than you think. "Good" only means anything next to the people you are being measured against, so here is the whole population, counted.

Rating numbers feel absolute and are not. A 1200 on one site is not a 1200 on another, and neither is a 1200 over the board. What travels between them is your POSITION — the share of rated players you are ahead of. That is the number below, taken from every rated player in this pool.

Where each rating sits — blitz
Rating band	Percentile	Share of players
600–800	0.6%	2.6%
800–1000	3.4%	7.8%
1000–1200	11.6%	13.4%
1200–1400	25.2%	16.8%
1400–1600	42.1%	18.4%
1600–1800	60.6%	17.3%
1800–2000	77.7%	12.9%
2000–2200	90.2%	7%
2200+	96.8%	3.4%

all rated Lichess players with an established rating in this perf

The most common mistake is comparing yourself to titled players, who are a rounding error in the population. Half of all rated blitz players sit below the midpoint of this table. If you are anywhere in the upper half, you are better at chess than most people who take chess seriously enough to be rated at all.

Common questions

Is 1200 a good chess rating?

On Lichess blitz it puts you ahead of roughly a quarter of rated players; on Chess.com the same standing sits at a lower number, because the scales differ. The table above gives the exact share for each.

What rating is average?

The median is the rating where half the population is below you. It moves by time control and by platform, so read it off the table for the one you actually play rather than trusting a number you heard.

How fast should my rating go up?

Faster at the start and slower later, because the pool above you thins out. Moving from the 40th to the 60th percentile is a smaller rating change than the same jump near the top.

Data updated 2026-08-01

Chess.com publishes no rating distribution. Those figures are derived from the Lichess distribution mapped through the conversion anchors, and are rounded accordingly.