Clinical Frailty Scale Classification Tool (Full version)

About this tool

The Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) summarizes a person’s overall level of fitness or frailty on a 9-point scale, from 1 (very fit) to 9 (terminally ill). It was developed by Kenneth Rockwood and colleagues at Dalhousie University and is used in hospitals and clinics around the world.

This classification tool helps clinicians score the CFS consistently. It asks about your patient’s usual state (about two weeks ago, if they are currently unwell) and follows a fixed decision tree:

Is your patient terminally ill?
Can they do basic activities of daily living without help (dressing, eating, walking, getting in and out of bed, bathing)?
Can they do instrumental activities without help (telephone, shopping, meals, housework, medicines, money)?
Which chronic health conditions have they been told they have?
How do they rate their health, how often does everything feel like an effort, and how often are they physically active?

Only the questions needed for your patient’s path are shown. If an earlier answer changes, later answers that no longer apply are cleared.

Interpreting the result

The result is a CFS level from 1 to 9, shown with its pictogram and description. The tool supports, but does not replace, clinical judgement.

Privacy

Answers stay in this browser tab until you close it or choose New assessment. Nothing is sent to a server.

More about the Clinical Frailty Scale (Geriatric Medicine Research website)

References

This reference list is under review.

Rockwood K, Song X, MacKnight C, Bergman H, Hogan DB, McDowell I, Mitnitski A. A global clinical measure of fitness and frailty in elderly people. CMAJ. 2005;173(5):489–495. doi:10.1503/cmaj.050051

Theou O, Pérez-Zepeda MU, van der Valk AM, Searle SD, Howlett SE, Rockwood K. A classification tree to assist with routine scoring of the Clinical Frailty Scale. Age Ageing. 2021;50(4):1406–1411. doi:10.1093/ageing/afab006

How to cite

Please cite the papers behind this tool:

Rockwood K, Song X, MacKnight C, Bergman H, Hogan DB, McDowell I, Mitnitski A. A global clinical measure of fitness and frailty in elderly people. CMAJ. 2005;173(5):489–495. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.050051

and the tool:

GMR Toolkit. Clinical Frailty Scale Classification Tool (Full version), scoring version 2.0. Geriatric Medicine Research, Dalhousie University. https://gmrtoolkit.ca/tools/cfs-classification/. Accessed [date accessed].

Or, for a reference manager, in BibTeX:

@misc{gmrtoolkit-cfs-classification, author = {{Geriatric Medicine Research}}, title = {{Clinical Frailty Scale Classification Tool (Full version)}}, year = {2026}, howpublished = {\url{https://gmrtoolkit.ca/tools/cfs-classification/}}, note = {GMR Toolkit, scoring version 2.0. Accessed [date accessed]} }

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