FSI Hours vs CEFR Levels: What Level Does FSI Actually Reach?
The FSI hours everyone quotes (690 for Spanish, 2,200 for Japanese) are hours to a specific level, and that level isn't on the CEFR scale most learners use. FSI measures with the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale. So before you can say "FSI hours get you to B2" or "to C1", you need to know where ILR 3 sits on the CEFR. The short answer: no official conversion exists, and the published mappings disagree by up to a level.
On this page
What FSI's hours aim at
The State Department's language training page says its timelines are "the time usually expected for a student to reach an integrated score of 3 (Speaking + Listening) on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale". ILR 3 is called "General Professional Proficiency"; the ILR's speaking description begins: "able to speak the language with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations" (ILR speaking descriptions). For the full scale, see our ILR scale explainer.
Why there's no official ILR-to-CEFR table
The two scales were built separately, by different institutions, for different purposes. The ILR scale grew out of U.S. government testing in the 1950s and describes what someone can do in a job. The CEFR comes from the Council of Europe and was designed for teaching and certification across European languages. Neither body publishes a conversion to the other.
The most careful work comes via ACTFL, the U.S. scale used in education, whose guidelines were derived from the ILR descriptions. After a series of alignment conferences with European partners, ACTFL published official correspondences for its own tests and concluded that "frameworks cannot be aligned based solely on their constructs", only test by test. Its correspondences are also explicitly one-directional: an ACTFL test result can be given a CEFR rating, but not the reverse.
What the published mappings say about ILR 3
| Source | ILR 3 ≈ |
|---|---|
| ACTFL, speaking | C2 |
| ACTFL, listening | C1.2 |
| Comparison tables | C1 |
| CIoL table | B2 |
Some notes on each:
- ACTFL. ACTFL's correspondences link its Superior rating to C2 for speaking and writing, and to C1.2 (upper C1) for reading and listening (Advanced High is C1 for speaking, C1.1 for reading and listening). ACTFL Superior is usually treated as the counterpart of ILR 3, but that link is itself an approximation, not part of ACTFL's CEFR study.
- Comparison tables. Several tables collected in Wikipedia's ILR article, including one from a 2012 study, put ILR 3 at C1.
- Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL). The same article reproduces a table from this UK professional body that aligns each ILR level one step lower: ILR 3 and 3+ with B2, ILR 4 with C1, ILR 5 with C2.
That's a spread from B2 to C2 for the same ILR level. The middle of the spread, and the reading most people use, is upper B2 to C1. That's what we use on this blog, with the caveat that it's a convention, not a conversion.
FSI hours by category, read as CEFR
With that caveat in place, here's how FSI's figures line up with CEFR goals. The B1 column is this blog's rule of thumb, roughly half the FSI hours, not anything FSI publishes.
| Category | ILR 3 | B1 (half) |
|---|---|---|
| I | 552–690 | ~275–345 |
| II | 828 | ~415 |
| III | 1,012 | ~505 |
| IV | 2,200 | ~1,100 |
A sanity check from the CEFR side: Cambridge English's guided learning hours for English put B2 at about 500–600 hours and C1 at 700–800 from beginner. The French DELF/DALF figures listed by Campus France put B2 at 550–650 hours and C1 at 800–950. FSI's 690 class hours for French or Spanish sits right in that B2-to-C1 band, which supports the usual reading. (FSI students also do about 17 hours of self-study a week on top of class, which these other figures don't count either way.)
Estimate your own date
The calculator below starts on the B1 rule of thumb. Switch the goal to see FSI's full figure, which you can read as roughly B2/C1, or this blog's estimates for A1, A2, B2 and C1, which take a fixed share of it. Our how long to learn a language page explains those shares and lists them for every category.
Which number should you plan with?
- If your goal is a CEFR certificate (DELE, DELF, Goethe, Cambridge), plan with the exam body's own level descriptions and, where they exist, hour guides for that language. Use FSI for the relative difficulty of the language.
- If your goal is "work in the language", FSI's figure is the right size: that's what ILR 3 describes.
- Either way, the conversion is fuzzy enough that your own data will beat it within a few months. Log your hours in LangTrack, take a level test every few hundred hours, and you'll have your own hours-per-level number.
Level-by-level hour guides: B1, B2 and C1.
FAQ
What CEFR level is ILR 3?
There's no official conversion. Published mappings range from B2 (a Chartered Institute of Linguists table) through C1 (several comparison tables) to C2 for speaking under ACTFL's correspondence for its Superior level, which is usually treated as ILR 3's counterpart. Upper B2 to C1 is the most common reading.
Do FSI hours get you to B2 or C1?
FSI's hours are to ILR 3 in speaking and listening, usually read as upper B2 to C1. Cross-checks support that: Cambridge puts B2 at about 500–600 and C1 at about 700–800 guided hours for English, and FSI's figure for Spanish or French is 690 class hours.
How many hours to B1 using FSI numbers?
FSI doesn't publish B1 figures. A common rule of thumb is about half the FSI hours: roughly 275–345 for Category I languages like Spanish, about 415 for German, about 505 for Russian and about 1,100 for Japanese, Korean, Chinese or Arabic.
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