AIS (Athens Insomnia Scale): Take It, Score It, Understand Your Results
The Athens Insomnia Scale (AIS) is a brief 8-item self-report questionnaire that measures how much your sleep has been disturbed over the past month. Developed by Soldatos and colleagues in Athens and validated against ICD-10 criteria for nonorganic insomnia, the AIS takes about 3 minutes to complete and produces a 0-24 score. A score of 6 or higher is the validated positive screen for insomnia (sensitivity 93%, specificity 85% against an ICD-10 nonorganic insomnia diagnosis). The AIS is a screening tool, not a diagnosis of any specific sleep disorder: results should be reviewed with a healthcare professional.
What is the AIS?
The Athens Insomnia Scale was developed by Constantin Soldatos, Dimitris Dikeos, and Thomas Paparrigopoulos at the Athens University Medical School Sleep Study Unit, and first published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 2000. The instrument was deliberately mapped onto the ICD-10 criteria for nonorganic insomnia: the 8 items mirror the diagnostic features that the World Health Organization uses to define the condition. A diagnostic-validity study three years later, also by Soldatos and colleagues, established the positive-screen cutoff at a total score of 6, with strong agreement against clinician diagnosis. The AIS has since been translated into more than 20 languages and is routinely used in sleep medicine clinics, primary care, and clinical research worldwide.
What the AIS measures
The AIS measures self-reported insomnia severity across two clusters of symptoms: five nocturnal items (sleep induction, awakenings during the night, final awakening earlier than desired, total sleep duration, and overall quality of sleep) and three daytime consequences (sense of well-being, physical and mental functioning, and sleepiness during the day). Each item is preceded by a frequency gate — you only mark an item as a problem if it has occurred at least three times per week during the last month. That frequency threshold is the literal ICD-10 Criterion B for nonorganic insomnia, and it is what keeps the AIS specific to clinically meaningful sleep disturbance rather than picking up occasional rough nights.
How the AIS is administered
The AIS is a self-report questionnaire that takes about 3 minutes to complete. Each of the 8 items is rated on a 0-3 scale, with 0 meaning no problem and 3 meaning a very severe problem (the exact anchor words vary slightly by item — for example, item 1 anchors run from "no problem" to "very delayed or did not sleep at all," while item 5 anchors run from "satisfactory" to "very unsatisfactory or did not sleep at all"). The recall window is the past month, and only sleep problems that occurred at least three times per week during that month are scored. The total is the simple sum of the eight items, with a possible range from 0 to 24. No special preparation is required.
Who uses the AIS
The AIS is used routinely by sleep medicine clinics, primary care practices, psychiatry services, and clinical researchers as both an initial screening instrument and an outcome measure during treatment. Because it is short, ICD-10-aligned, and freely available, the AIS is a common choice in occupational health screening, hospital sleep studies, and primary-care insomnia care pathways. It has been validated for use in adolescents and older adults as well as the general adult population. Outside formal care, the AIS is widely used in public health surveys, occupational research, and university clinical-handout repositories such as the University of Pennsylvania CBT-i program.
AIS is a screening tool, not a diagnosis
The AIS gives a brief snapshot of perceived insomnia severity over the past month, but it does not by itself diagnose insomnia disorder or rule out other sleep conditions such as obstructive sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, periodic limb movement disorder, or a circadian rhythm disorder. A score of 6 or higher is the validated signal that a clinician conversation about sleep is warranted — not a clinical verdict. A score below 6 does not rule out a sleep disorder, particularly if a bed partner has noticed loud snoring, breathing pauses, or excessive movement during sleep, or if you have severe daytime sleepiness despite a low AIS score. If sleep problems are affecting your day-to-day life, a primary care clinician or sleep specialist can decide whether further evaluation, such as a sleep study, is appropriate.