The highest GRE score is 340, which is a 170 on verbal reasoning plus a 170 on quantitative reasoning. There is a second ceiling that the 340 leaves out: analytical writing tops out at 6.0, and it is reported beside your total rather than inside it.
The more useful question is how rare each ceiling is. The two halves of a 340 are nothing like equally hard to reach.
- The highest GRE score is 340. A perfect report is 340 plus a 6.0 in analytical writing, two numbers that are never added together.
- A 170 in verbal is the 99th percentile. A 170 in quant is the 89th, so roughly 1 test taker in 9 reaches the top of the quant scale.
- That makes verbal the binding half of a 340. The verbal ceiling is about ten times rarer than the quant ceiling.
- Among applicants to mathematics and statistics programs, 26.9 percent score a perfect 170 in quant. Among life sciences applicants, 1.1 percent do.
- Moving from 165 to 170 in verbal is worth 4 percentile points. The same five points in quant are worth 22.
- No broad graduate field averages anywhere near the ceiling. The highest field means add up to 314.
Our recommended GRE prep course:
Target Test Prep GRE
Deep quant and verbal coverage with 4,000+ practice questions. Try full access for 5 days.
No code neededPros
- 4,000+ practice questions with 2,000+ video explanations
- Strong analytics, error tracking, and custom test builder
- 320+ GRE score guarantee framework
Cons
- Verbal depth can feel secondary to quant
The highest GRE score is 340, and the second ceiling is a 6.0
ETS sets the scales in Interpreting Your GRE Scores: 2026-27. Verbal reasoning runs 130 to 170 in one-point steps. Quantitative reasoning runs 130 to 170 in one-point steps. Analytical writing runs 0 to 6 in half-point steps.
The 340 everyone quotes is the sum of two of those three numbers. The writing score sits next to it, which is why a genuinely perfect GRE report reads 170, 170 and 6.0, not 340.
The two ceilings are also different kinds of achievement. Verbal and quant scaled scores come from the number of questions you answered correctly, adjusted by equating for the difficulty of the sections you were given, as ETS explains on its scoring page. The writing score is a judgment: essays are rated on a 6-point holistic scale by a trained reader together with the e-rater scoring engine. One ceiling means you missed nothing. The other means two assessors agreed your essay was at the top of a six-level rubric.
One more ceiling worth naming, because the phrase "highest GRE score" collects it too. The same ETS document puts the GRE Subject Tests on a different scale entirely: 200 to 990 in 10-point increments. A 990 in mathematics or physics is the top of that test, and it has nothing to do with the 340. If you want the full picture of both ends of the General Test scale, our GRE score range guide covers the floor, the middle and what each section point is worth.
How rare a 340 actually is
A percentile rank is the percentage of test takers who scored lower than you. The current ranks come from everyone who tested between July 1, 2022 and June 30, 2025, published in the GRE General Test Interpretive Data tables.
A 170 in verbal is the 99th percentile, so about 1 test taker in 100 reaches it. A 170 in quant is the 89th percentile, so about 1 in 9 reaches it. A 6.0 in analytical writing is the 99th percentile, so about 1 in 100 again.
Reaching the top of each GRE scale. Source: ETS General Test Interpretive Data, tables 1B and 1C, July 2022 to June 2025 test takers.
A 340 needs both of the hard ones at once, and ETS does not publish how many people manage it. The arithmetic you can do from the published tables goes like this. If verbal and quant results were unrelated, 1 percent of 11 percent would give 0.11 percent, about 1 in 900. They are not unrelated: the same ETS document reports a correlation of .44 between verbal and quant scores. Treating the two distributions as normal with that correlation pushes the joint rate to roughly 0.5 percent, about 1 in 210.
Both of those are estimates, and they bracket the real figure rather than pin it. The bound that needs no model at all: a 340 can never be more common than its rarer half, so no more than about 1 in 100.
For scale, 790,864 people sat the quant section across that three-year window, which is about 263,600 a year. Somewhere between a few hundred and roughly 1,250 of them finish with a 340. That range is an estimate from the percentile tables, not a count ETS reports.
A perfect quant score is more common than the top results say
Search for the highest GRE score today and the AI Overview tells you that a 170 puts you in the top 1 percent for verbal and the top 3 percent for quant, attributed to historical data. The second-ranked page prints the quant 170 as the 96th percentile. One of the pages the AI Overview cites says that two standard deviations above the mean puts you near the top 5 percent, with a 170 in quant.
The current ETS table says 89th percentile. That is the top 11 percent, not the top 3.
Percentile ranks are not fixed properties of a score. ETS is explicit that a given scaled score represents about the same level of ability whenever it was earned, but its percentile rank varies depending on the group it is compared against. Whatever those older figures were accurate against, the number printed on a score report today comes from the July 2022 to June 2025 reference group, and for a 170 in quant that number is 89.
You can check any pair of section scores against the same tables with our GRE score percentile calculator, and the full lookup table sits in our GRE score percentiles guide.
Sponsored
Target Test Prep GRE
Deep quant and verbal coverage with 4,000+ practice questions. Try full access for 5 days.
No code neededPros
- 4,000+ practice questions with 2,000+ video explanations
- Strong analytics, error tracking, and custom test builder
- 320+ GRE score guarantee framework
Cons
- Verbal depth can feel secondary to quant
Who actually reaches 170, and in which fields
ETS publishes something better than an overall rate, and almost nobody writing about perfect scores uses it. Table 3A of the interpretive data breaks the score distribution down by the field each test taker said they intended to study, including a column for the share scoring exactly 170.
Percent of each intended graduate field scoring a perfect 170 in quant. Source: ETS General Test Interpretive Data table 3A, seniors and nonenrolled college graduates, July 2022 to June 2025.
| Intended field | Scored 170 verbal | Scored 170 quant |
|---|---|---|
| Mathematics and statistics | 1.1% | 26.9% |
| Business | 0.7% | 15.4% |
| Physical sciences | 0.5% | 14.1% |
| Humanities and arts | 0.7% | 12.3% |
| Engineering | 0.3% | 10.5% |
| Social and behavioral sciences | 1.0% | 8.7% |
| Education | 0.5% | 5.6% |
| Law | 1.1% | 4.8% |
| Life sciences | 0.1% | 1.1% |
Two things fall out of that table. The first is that a perfect quant score means something different depending on who you are applying alongside. More than a quarter of mathematics and statistics applicants have one. Among life sciences applicants, about 1 in 90 does. The second is that the verbal ceiling stays rare everywhere: no field in the table clears 1.1 percent, and most sit under 1 percent.
Two notes on reading it honestly. Mathematics and statistics is a field inside physical sciences, listed separately here because its numbers are so far from the rest. And since 2025 ETS counts undecided majors inside liberal arts, which sits in the humanities and arts row, so that row is a broader mix than its name suggests.
The last five points barely move your verbal percentile
The top of the verbal scale is crowded in percentile terms, which is why chasing it pays so little. These are the ranks ETS publishes for the last six scores on each scale, from the same interpretive data.
| Scaled score | Verbal percentile | Quant percentile |
|---|---|---|
| 165 | 95th | 67th |
| 166 | 96th | 72nd |
| 167 | 97th | 75th |
| 168 | 98th | 80th |
| 169 | 99th | 85th |
| 170 | 99th | 89th |
Climbing from 165 to 170 in verbal moves you 4 percentile points, and the final step from 169 to 170 moves you none at all. The same five points in quant move you 22. Widen it to the last ten points and the split holds: 160 to 170 is worth 17 percentile points in verbal and 39 in quant.
So the ceiling is worth chasing in exactly one section, and it is not the one most people assume. If you are at 166 in verbal, each additional point buys about 1 percentile point. If you are at 166 in quant, each point buys 4 or 5. A GRE prep course that pushes you from 166 to 170 in quant is buying real standing. The same four points in verbal are nearly invisible to an admissions committee.
No graduate field averages anywhere near the ceiling
Table 2 of the same ETS interpretive document gives mean scores by intended field. Business applicants average 154 verbal and 160 quant. Physical sciences applicants average 152 and 162. Both add up to 314, which is 26 points below the ceiling, and they are the highest totals in the table. Law applicants average 154 and 152. Life sciences applicants average 150 and 150.
The writing picture is the same shape. A 6.0 is the 99th percentile, and in the same table 3A the share of a broad field reaching even 5.5 or above runs from 7.0 percent in law down to 3.0 percent in business and 1.1 percent in engineering. A 4.5 is already the 85th percentile.
None of that makes a 340 worthless. It makes it a poor target, because the score that gets you admitted is set by your field and your programs rather than by the top of the scale. Our guide to what counts as a good GRE score works through setting two section targets instead of one total, and the rest of our GRE guides and tools cover the prep from there.
Highest GRE score FAQs
How rare is a 340 on the GRE?
ETS does not publish a count of 340s. From the published percentile ranks, a 170 verbal is reached by about 1 test taker in 100 and a 170 quant by about 1 in 9, and a 340 needs both in the same sitting. That puts the rate somewhere between about 1 in 900 and 1 in 210 depending on how strongly the two scores move together, and never better than about 1 in 100.
What is the highest GRE analytical writing score?
A 6.0, awarded in half-point steps from 0 to 6. It is the 99th percentile, so about 1 test taker in 100 earns one. It is reported separately from your 260 to 340 total and is never added into it, which is why a perfect GRE report is two numbers rather than one.
Is a 330 a good GRE score?
A 330 is a strong score in any field, but how it splits matters more than the total. Built as 165 and 165 it is the 95th percentile in verbal and the 67th in quant. Built as 170 verbal and 160 quant it is the 99th and the 50th. Two applicants can report the same 330 and look completely different to a quant-heavy program.
What is the highest GRE Subject Test score?
A 990. The Subject Tests use a 200 to 990 scale in 10-point increments, and the practical range on any single test is usually narrower than that. It is a separate exam from the General Test, so a 990 is unrelated to the 340 ceiling on verbal and quant.
We may earn commissions from some links on this page, but this does not affect our reviews or your experience.