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Three questions, a number from 0 to 12, and a great deal of care needed in how you read it.
Last updated: July 2026
The AUDIT-C is a short alcohol screening questionnaire. It is made up of the three consumption questions from the AUDIT (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test), the ten-item instrument developed for the World Health Organization and published by Saunders and colleagues in 1993. Bush and colleagues validated the three-question subset as a standalone screener in 1998.
Its purpose is narrow and worth stating plainly: it is designed to flag drinking patterns that deserve a closer look. It is not designed to diagnose anything.
Each answer scores from 0 to 4, so the total runs 0–12.
| # | Question | Scored on |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | How often do you have a drink containing alcohol? | Frequency, from "never" (0) to "4+ times a week" (4) |
| 2 | How many standard drinks do you have on a typical day when you are drinking? | Typical quantity, from "1–2" (0) to "10+" (4) |
| 3 | How often do you have six or more drinks on one occasion? | Heavy-episode frequency, from "never" (0) to "daily or almost daily" (4) |
Notice what the three together are reaching for: not just how much, but how often and how concentrated. Fourteen drinks spread evenly across a week and fourteen drinks in one Saturday score very differently — deliberately, because they carry different risks.
The most widely used positive-screen thresholds are 4 or more for men and 3 or more for women. Above that, the likelihood of hazardous drinking rises with the score.
| Band | Broad meaning |
|---|---|
| Low risk | Consumption below the screening threshold. Not a guarantee of no harm — just no flag from this instrument. |
| Hazardous | A pattern that raises the risk of future harm, even if nothing has gone wrong yet. |
| Harmful | A pattern where damage — physical, mental or social — is more likely to be occurring already. |
| Possible dependence | A high score warranting a proper conversation with a clinician. Not a diagnosis of dependence. |
The single most important thing to hold onto: a screening score is a prompt, not a verdict. It is designed to be sensitive — to catch people worth asking more questions about — which necessarily means it flags some people who turn out to be fine. Only a qualified professional can diagnose an alcohol use disorder.
Normally you'd answer the AUDIT-C from memory — and memory tends to round drinking down. Because SipWiser already holds a record of what you actually logged, it derives the three answers from your own history instead of asking you to recall them.
Two honest caveats. It needs roughly a month of tracking before it reads reliably, since all three questions are about typical patterns rather than one night. And it can only see what you logged — nights you skipped are invisible to it, which biases the score downward.
If the number worries you. That reaction is worth taking seriously, and it's also worth not facing alone. A GP is a completely ordinary place to start — this is a routine conversation for them, not a dramatic one. In Belgium, De DrugLijn and Aide-Alcool offer free, anonymous advice. Elsewhere, your national health service will list local services. Wanting to drink less is a good instinct, whatever the score says.
Scores run 0–12. Commonly used positive-screen thresholds are 4+ for men and 3+ for women. Higher scores mean a higher likelihood of hazardous drinking — but the number is a prompt for a conversation, not a conclusion.
No. It's a screening tool designed to flag patterns worth examining. Only a qualified clinician can diagnose an alcohol use disorder.
Yes. It reflects recent consumption patterns, so as those change the score follows. That's precisely what makes it useful to watch over time rather than once.
SipWiser scores the AUDIT-C from the nights you've already logged — no questionnaire, no recall bias. Free, offline-first, and built to help you drink less, never more.
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