Psychological test licensing: what you can actually use

Three different things hide behind the word “free”: that an instrument downloads without payment, that its use needs no permission, and that it is public domain. The PHQ-9 is all three. The AUDIT may be reproduced freely but not commercially. The WHO-5 downloads free and its licence still forbids specific things. The BDI-2 is none of them. This guide sorts the instruments clinicians actually use into three licensing tiers, quoting each rights holder’s own words, so you can tell which is which.

How to check any instrument in a minute

Go to the rights holder’s page — not a reseller’s, not a blog’s — and look for the words “permission”, “copyright” or “licence”; the operative clause is usually in the PDF footer or the terms of use. Then check the two boundaries where terms change abruptly, edition and language, and whether the scoring is free too. Save the PDF with its date: what you can defend is what the site said that day.

Tier 1: public domain

PHQ-9, GAD-7 and the whole PHQ family. The official site attaches no conditions: “no permission is required to reproduce, translate, display or distribute them”, and the manual uses the technical term for the whole family: “all of the measures included in Table 1 are in the public domain”. Correcting the folklore: Pfizer’s copyright exemption is not specific to the PHQ-15. The terms of use cover the whole site — “content found at the PHQ Screeners site is expressly exempted from Pfizer’s general copyright restrictions”.

PCL-5. The VA’s National Center for PTSD says two things at once: the measure “is in the public domain and not copyrighted” and, even so, “is intended for use by qualified health professionals and researchers”. That restriction never came from copyright: public domain settles the rights question, not the competence question.

DASS and GDS. Lovibond, at the University of New South Wales, answers directly: “the DASS questionnaire is public domain, and so permission is not needed to use it”. You may charge for the service without selling the scale — “it is quite acceptable to charge patients for assessment that includes the DASS” — but administering it on a website or app open to the public, a practice site included, is expressly ruled out, and the severity bands are withheld from the free download and live in the manual, which costs AUS$55.00 including postage. Stanford, on the GDS, publishes the reason for its status and with it the scope: “the original scale is in the public domain due to it being partly the result of Federal support” — the original scale, not every derivative.

Tier 2: free, with strings attached

Vanderbilt: the edition decides. NICHQ offers the first edition of its ADHD scales free, and only that one; two editions later, the 3rd (2019) is sold by the American Academy of Pediatrics. As of August 2026 the AAP store lists the clinician toolkit in online format at $155.00 ($125.00 for members) and the parent-informant form 50-pack at $24.95, with a note that matters to anyone running an EHR: the single-user licence “does not support EHR integration”; an institutional licence is what covers that. And the free PDF is not public domain — its footer reads “Copyright ©2002 American Academy of Pediatrics and National Initiative for Children’s Healthcare Quality”.

AUDIT: free, but not commercial. The World Health Organization allows the document to be “freely reviewed, abstracted, reproduced, and translated, in part or in whole but not for sale or for use in conjunction with commercial purposes”. Whether a clinician administering the AUDIT inside a paid consultation is engaged in “commercial purposes” is something WHO does not gloss, and we will not resolve it for you here.

C-SSRS: free, with a defined scope. Columbia narrows the offer in the same sentence that makes it: the scale and its training are free “for use in community and healthcare settings, as well as in federally funded or nonprofit research”. One warning that sits above any licence: a risk disclosure of any kind — a positive PHQ-9 item 9, a mention of ideation — calls for an immediate clinical risk assessment under your own protocol and training. This article will not give you that protocol; be wary of any blog that does: it comes from professional guidelines and supervised training. Give clients the crisis line serving their location, in writing, before you need it.

WHO-5: NonCommercial and ShareAlike. Since 2024 the rights holder is WHO: the Psychiatric Centre North Zealand, in Copenhagen, assigned it the copyright that year, so pages that still credit that centre are out of date. Its licence is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO. Two consequences follow. We are not reproducing the five WHO-5 items here, because a company blog is a commercial context and because ShareAlike would pull the whole page under the same licence. And an open question we will not close: whether administering it inside a paid consultation counts as commercial use. WHO does not say, and routes licensing queries through its copyright page. There is no official Spanish version — WHO hosts 26 other language versions, none of them Spanish — worth knowing if you use it as an outcome measure, as the guide on measuring progress in therapy discusses.

Tier 3: commercially licensed

Here you describe the instrument and never reproduce it, and buying it is not just paying. Pearson publishes three qualification levels, and the wording is broader than the folklore. Level A: “there are no special qualifications to purchase these products.” Level B is satisfied by any one of five routes — a master’s degree in psychology, education, speech language pathology, occupational therapy, social work, counseling or a field closely related to the intended use, plus formal training in the ethical administration, scoring and interpretation of clinical assessments; or certification by, or full active membership in, a professional organization; or a degree or licence to practise in a healthcare or allied healthcare field; or formal supervised training specific to assessing children or in infant and child development; or working for an accredited institution. Level C requires a doctorate with that same formal training, or licensure or certification to practise in your state in a related field, or full active membership in a body such as APA, NASP, NAN or INS.

The same policy names who carries the responsibility: the “Qualified User” is “the individual who assumes responsibility for all aspects of appropriate test use, including administration, scoring, interpretation, and application of results”, and some tests may be administered or scored by less-trained staff only under that supervision. The qualification is not a purchasing formality — it is an assignment of accountability.

Prices from Pearson’s US store as of August 2026: the BDI-2 and BAI complete print kits, $195.70 each; digital starter kits, $122.90; Spanish BDI-2 response sheets, $85.00 for 25; the Vineland-3 complete digital kit, $395.00. The MMPI-3’s Spanish materials are Level C as well. Multi-Health Systems labels the Conners 4 “Qualification Level B”, but we could not find where MHS defines its B: do not assume it matches Pearson’s. And if you practise outside the United States, check the routing before the price: Pearson’s international contacts page sends Mexico and nineteen other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to Giunti Psychometrics for Spanish-language assessments.

“Spanish version” is not one thing

APA Standard 9.02 is the reason this matters clinically rather than commercially: use instruments “whose validity and reliability have been established for use with members of the population tested”, and where they have not, describe the strengths and limitations of the results. Now read the last column of the table. The Spanish PCL-5 is available only by emailing the National Center for PTSD, which warns the translation “has not been validated in published research”. The official Spanish AUDIT is WHO’s own; its cover credits the “Conselleria de Benestar Social” in Spain. The DASS and GDS sites both disclaim responsibility for the quality of the translations they host. The PHQ-9 and GAD-7 do publish an official Spanish-for-Mexico form — covered in the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 guides — and Columbia lists the C-SSRS in Mexico/Spanish; even so, the PHQ manual notes that few translations have been psychometrically validated against an independent structured psychiatric interview.

The legal layer, and where it stops

Clinicians get copyright wrong in a predictable direction: they assume the rule is about money. It is about reproduction. Mexico’s federal copyright act, to take one jurisdiction, reserves to the rights holder the exclusive right to exploit the work and to prohibit its reproduction by any medium (arts. 24 and 27-I), and its fair-use analogue is narrow — art. 148 allows quotation only where “the amount taken cannot be considered a simulated and substantial reproduction of the content of the work”. Copying 21 inventory items into your template or your software is exactly what that excludes. Recording a score in a progress note is ordinary documentation: what is licensed is the instrument, not the number you write down — a distinction that also shows up when comparing DAP and SOAP notes.

What we did not find is a statute assigning specific instruments to specific credentials. We searched Mexican law and found none; wherever you practise, verify your own rules. In practice the gate is contractual — the publisher’s terms — and ethical.

Why we are not reproducing any items

Not the WHO-5’s, not the AUDIT’s, not Vanderbilt’s, none of Pearson’s. Not the PHQ-9’s or the DASS’s either, which we could: we would rather link the official source. The underlying reason is not copyright. It is APA Standard 9.11, which asks psychologists to “make reasonable efforts to maintain the integrity and security of test materials” — manuals, protocols, questions and stimuli. Standard 9.07 closes the other flank: psychologists “do not promote the use of psychological assessment techniques by unqualified persons”, except for supervised training. And there is a clinical argument above both: an item that circulates freely stops measuring what it measured. Standard 9.08 adds the same logic across time — do not base decisions on obsolete tests — another way of saying the edition matters.

In practice: do not paste licensed items into note templates, one more entry on the list of clinical documentation mistakes; make sure assessment is covered by your informed consent; and before loading any instrument into a digital tool, read its terms and ask your vendor the questions in the guide on using AI with client data.

If a defensible core kit is built from public-domain instruments in a version validated for the population you see, what follows is using them consistently. gesell.ai includes validated scales with automatic scoring — the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 among them — and tracks the scores across sessions so you see the trajectory, not just today’s number. A score supports your decision, it never replaces it: the clinical reading stays yours.

References

• PHQ Screeners — Terms of Use (Pfizer, site rights holder)
• US National Center for PTSD — PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5)
• University of New South Wales — DASS Frequently Asked Questions (Lovibond)
• World Health Organization — WHO-5 Well-Being Index (2024)
• Pearson Assessments — Qualifications Policy (Levels A, B and C)
• American Psychological Association — Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (2017)