Copenhagen Burnout Inventory

The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) is a free, 19-item questionnaire that measures personal, work-related, and client-related burnout as three separate scores from 0 to 100. Tage S. Kristensen and colleagues developed it at Denmark’s National Research Centre for the Working Environment (NFA).

That makes it a free, evidence-based alternative to paid burnout instruments, and a practical choice for staff wellbeing screening in a busy practice. Each subscale score is the average of its answers, from 0 (no exhaustion) to 100 (constant exhaustion).

Read the three scores separately, because each one points to a different fix. This guide covers how to give the questionnaire, score it, and act on the results, and the free PDF is below.

Key takeaways

The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory measures personal, work-related, and client-related burnout as three separate scores, so you can see where exhaustion comes from.

Each answer converts to a score (0-100 per item), and each subscale score is the average of its items. Researchers often use 50 as a cut-point, but the CBI has no official threshold.

The CBI is free and open-access, needing only attribution to Kristensen et al. and the NFA, so practices can use it without licensing fees.

In Pabau’s practice management software, the calendar and team management tools let you act on CBI findings by rebalancing schedules across your team.

What is the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory?

The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory is a 19-item self-report questionnaire that measures occupational burnout across personal, work-related, and client-related domains. Kristensen and colleagues first published it in 2005 in the journal Work & Stress. They built it in response to limits in existing measures, particularly the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI).

The MBI has three subscales covering exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced accomplishment. The CBI centers on fatigue and exhaustion instead, and its framework suits any human-services profession, from nursing and therapy to occupational health and coaching.

The NFA maintains the CBI and makes it freely available for clinical, research, and occupational health use. It requires only proper attribution. That makes it a practical fit for small and mid-sized practices that want evidence-based staff wellbeing assessment without licensing costs.

How to use the questionnaire in your practice

Rolling the CBI out to your team takes five steps, each grounded in occupational health practice.

1. Get the questionnaire. Download the 19-item PDF above, or read the NFA’s English scale sheet. Print copies or send it through your practice’s digital forms platform.
2. Administer it anonymously. Give the questionnaire to your whole team, including nurses, therapists, practitioners, and administrative staff. Make clear that answers are confidential and won’t affect employment or scheduling. Most people finish it in about five minutes.
3. Collect and score responses. Use the scoring panel in the PDF to calculate individual and team-level subscale scores. A score of 50 or more is a commonly used research cut-point, not an official threshold. Treat it as a prompt for a follow-up conversation.
4. Look for workload patterns. Review scores alongside your appointment schedule and staff allocation. The CBI often points to specific roles or seasons driving burnout, such as practitioners booked back-to-back in peak season. Automated scheduling workflows can help ease that pressure.
5. Plan and communicate support. Schedule confidential check-ins with staff who score high. Discuss workload, autonomy, recognition, and professional development. Document outcomes and repeat the CBI each year to track progress.

Who should use the CBI?

The CBI suits any practice, hospital, or human-services organization that wants to measure and prevent occupational burnout. Typical users include the following groups.

• Healthcare practices, from primary care and specialty practices to mental health services and physical therapy, managing clinician and staff wellbeing
• Med spas and medi aesthetics clinics tracking burnout among estheticians, nurses, and practitioners
• Occupational health departments conducting staff wellbeing surveillance
• HR teams and practice managers implementing preventive mental health programs
• Researchers and academics studying occupational health across professions
• Students and training programs (using the adapted CBI-Student variant) assessing educational burnout

Benefits of measuring burnout with the CBI

Running the CBI in your practice brings three practical benefits.

• A shared language for wellbeing. Conversations move from anecdotes to measurement. A manager can say “your work-related burnout score is 62” instead of guessing at exhaustion from behavior.
• Earlier warning. It flags high-scoring individuals and teams early, so you can step in before burnout becomes severe or drives resignations.
• Clear operational fixes. Set the scores beside scheduling and workload data from your practice management system, and patterns emerge. When certain roles, seasons, or practitioners keep scoring high, the fix is often reallocation, extra staffing, or automation.

For practice managers, the CBI also documents a proactive occupational health program. On a UK team, it can support your documented approach to staff wellbeing under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. Staff health data also needs a GDPR lawful basis, so settle how you’ll store results before you collect them.

The three subscales and what they measure

The CBI measures burnout in three domains, each with its own set of items. Knowing what each one captures helps you read results and target support accurately.

The bands are illustrative. The CBI has no official validated cut-offs, so use them to compare people and teams over time rather than to diagnose anyone.

How to score and interpret results

Scoring takes four steps, using the scoring panel in the PDF download.

1. Convert each answer to points. Frequency questions score Always = 100, Often = 75, Sometimes = 50, Seldom = 25, and Never or almost never = 0. Degree questions run from “to a very high degree” (100) down to “to a very low degree” (0) in the same 25-point steps.
2. Reverse the one reversed item. Only item 10, “Do you have enough energy for family and friends during leisure time?”, is reverse-scored. Always scores 0 and Never or almost never scores 100. In other words, if answered 0, score as 100, and if 100, score as 0.
3. Calculate subscale scores. Average the items in each subscale. Personal burnout covers items 1–6, work-related burnout items 7–13, and client-related burnout items 14–19. Each subscale lands between 0 and 100.
4. Interpret with care. Compare each score with the illustrative bands in the table above. A score of 50 or more is a commonly used research cut-point, not an official threshold. Use it to decide who gets a conversation about workload and support.

The chart below shows how each answer turns into points and which items feed each subscale.

Read each subscale on its own. Kristensen designed them to be interpreted separately, and a clinician can score low on personal burnout but high on work-related burnout. That pattern points to workload rather than general exhaustion.

The PDF also has an optional overall score, the average of the three subscales, but it can hide which domain is driving the problem. If personal burnout is the high score, a broader stress assessment questionnaire can help pinpoint pressures outside work.

How Pabau helps you act on burnout scores

A CBI score tells you who is running on empty. The fix usually sits in the calendar, in who is booked back-to-back and who keeps covering the late appointments.

Pabau’s calendar shows appointments across your whole team in one view. You can see where a high-scoring practitioner’s week is overloaded and move bookings to colleagues with capacity. Its team management tools keep staff schedules in one place, so changes after a CBI round don’t live in a separate spreadsheet.

If your team runs a therapy or counseling service, the same platform gives you simpler therapy practice management. Intake forms, treatment notes, and invoicing sit in one system, which takes admin off the clinicians most at risk of burnout.

Connect burnout scores to scheduling decisions

Use Pabau’s calendar and team management tools to rebalance appointments when CBI scores flag an overloaded practitioner.

Book a demo

Conclusion

Staff burnout is a practical problem with operational fixes. The CBI gives you the measurement, and the subscale that scores highest tells you where to look first.

Start with one anonymous round across the whole team, then repeat it in the same month next year. A high work-related score next to a normal personal score is the clearest case for changing schedules rather than adding generic wellbeing perks. The CBI has no official cut-offs, so the trend over time matters more than any single number.

Book a demo to see how Pabau’s calendar and team management tools help you turn burnout scores into fairer schedules.

Continue your research

Comparing burnout measures? Maslach Burnout Inventory gives you the MBI template with scoring for exhaustion, depersonalization, and accomplishment.

Running a mental health practice? Our mental health EMR keeps secure patient records, captures intake history before the first session, and supports virtual care.

Screening for stress outside work? The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale scores recent life events that add to a person’s overall stress load.

Following up on mood symptoms? The PHQ-9 and GAD-7 template helps clinicians screen patients for depression and anxiety symptoms.

Frequently asked questions