IELTS vs TOEFL Speaking: Which Is Easier in 2026?
Until January 2026, the honest answer to this question was “they are close, pick whichever your university names.” That answer is out of date. On 21 January 2026, ETS replaced the TOEFL Speaking section with something structurally different, and in doing so it broke the comparison that every older guide is still repeating.
TOEFL Speaking is now about eight minutes long, has no preparation time at all, and spends seven of its eleven questions asking you to repeat a sentence you have just heard. IELTS Speaking is unchanged: an 11 to 14 minute conversation with a certified examiner, three parts, every word generated by you. These are no longer two versions of the same task. They measure different things, and “easier” now depends almost entirely on which of those things you are good at.
Short version — TOEFL Speaking (2026): ~8 min, 11 questions, zero prep, 7 × Listen and Repeat + 4 × interview questions at 45 seconds each, scored 1–6. Rewards ear, pronunciation and speed. IELTS Speaking: 11–14 min, live examiner, 3 parts, one minute of prep for the long turn, scored 0–9 on four equally weighted criteria. Rewards sustained, self-generated argument. For Canadian immigration the choice is made for you: IRCC accepts IELTS General Training, not TOEFL.
What each test actually asks you to do now
IELTS Speaking is a conversation. An examiner asks you questions across three parts: four to five minutes of Part 1 questions on everyday subjects, a Part 2 cue card with one minute to prepare and one to two minutes to speak, then four to five minutes of Part 3 discussion that pushes the Part 2 theme into abstract territory. Your performance is scored live against four criteria worth 25% each: Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, Pronunciation.
TOEFL Speaking is now two mechanical tasks, described in full in our guide to the redesigned TOEFL Speaking section.
Listen and Repeat is seven questions. You hear one short sentence, audio only, never displayed on screen. You have roughly 8 to 12 seconds to record yourself repeating it as closely as you can. There is no ready screen and no pause. You are not producing language; you are reproducing it, and what gets measured is how accurately you heard and rendered stress, rhythm and individual sounds.
Take an Interview is four questions on a single topic, 45 seconds each, with nothing between seeing the question and answering it.
The four-task format that ETS ran for two decades — one independent opinion task and three integrated tasks combining reading, listening and speaking, each with 15 to 30 seconds of planning — is gone entirely.
Format comparison
| IELTS Speaking | TOEFL Speaking (since Jan 2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Duration | 11–14 minutes | ~8 minutes |
| Interlocutor | Live certified examiner | Recorded; no human present |
| Structure | 3 parts | 2 task types, 11 questions |
| Preparation time | 1 minute, Part 2 only | None |
| Longest single turn | 1–2 minutes | 45 seconds |
| Language you produce | Entirely your own | 7 of 11 questions are repetition |
| Scale | Band 0–9, half bands | 1–6, half points |
| Scored on | Fluency, lexis, grammar, pronunciation (25% each) | Pronunciation accuracy and natural delivery (Task 1); fluency and relevance (Task 2) |
| Follow-up questions | Yes — examiner probes your answers | No |
| Results | Typically 3–13 days | Typically within days |
The redesign inverted the old advice
The standard recommendation used to be that TOEFL suited candidates who disliked being watched, and that its predictable task types rewarded preparation. Both halves of that have weakened.
The absence of a human is still real, and for candidates whose problem is nerves rather than English, it remains the single strongest argument for TOEFL. What is no longer true is that TOEFL rewards preparation in the old sense. With planning time removed, memorised frames have nowhere to live — you see a question and speak. Our separate guide on why TOEFL Speaking templates stopped working covers what changed in more detail, but the headline is that a strategy which reliably lifted scores before 2026 now actively costs points on a rubric weighted toward natural delivery.
The IELTS equivalent of that trap never went away. Examiners are trained to notice rehearsed rhythm and generic phrasing, and prepared answers tend to collapse in Part 3, where the questions are unpredictable and the examiner follows up on whatever you just said. Both tests now punish memorisation; they simply punish it in different places.
The genuinely new asymmetry is Listen and Repeat. Nothing in IELTS resembles it. Seven of TOEFL’s eleven questions are a test of auditory working memory and pronunciation accuracy — hearing a sentence once and rendering it back with the right stress and sounds. A candidate can have excellent conversational English and still perform poorly at it, and a candidate with a strong ear and a modest vocabulary can perform well.
The scoring scales do not line up
ETS published a comparison between the new 1–6 scale and IELTS bands. These are the Speaking reference points it gives:
| IELTS Speaking | TOEFL Speaking | CEFR (per ETS) |
|---|---|---|
| 9 | 6 | C2 |
| 8 | 6 | C2 |
| 7 | 4.5 | B2 |
| 6 | 3.5 | B1 |
Two things in that table are worth more attention than they usually get.
The TOEFL Speaking scale is coarse at the top. IELTS bands 8 and 9 both land on a TOEFL Speaking 6. IELTS reports Speaking in nineteen possible half-band steps from 0 to 9; TOEFL now has eleven possible values from 1 to 6 across the entire range. Above roughly IELTS 7, the TOEFL scale stops separating candidates. For a university admissions threshold that hardly matters. For anything where a half-band carries points — a competitive scholarship, a ranked immigration system — the granularity is a real difference, and it runs in IELTS’s favour.
The two providers disagree about band 7. ETS’s alignment places TOEFL Speaking 4.5 at CEFR B2, and its comparison puts IELTS Speaking 7 at that same 4.5. IELTS’s own CEFR alignment places bands 7 and 8 at C1. So the exact band most candidates are chasing sits at C1 on one provider’s map and B2 on the other’s.
That is less scandalous than it sounds — a score concordance and a CEFR standard-setting study are different exercises, and IELTS is explicit that its bands have no one-to-one correspondence with CEFR levels, with the C1 threshold falling somewhere between 6.5 and 7. But it has a practical consequence. If an employer or registration body has asked you for “C1 speaking” rather than a test score, the test you choose changes whether you appear to have met it. Our CEFR speaking levels comparison works through how each major exam maps onto the framework, and why those maps should never be used to predict a score you have not sat.
One more scale detail: alongside the 1–6 figures, TOEFL score reports show a CEFR level and, until January 2028, a comparable 0–120 score, so institutions still working from old thresholds can read them. After that the old numbers disappear.
Which one is actually easier for you
Difficulty is not a property of these tests any more. It is a property of the match between the test and your profile.
TOEFL Speaking suits you if you have a strong ear and accurate pronunciation; you are comfortable with rapid-fire tasks and short answers; a human examiner makes you seize up; you want the shortest possible speaking section; or you are applying to US institutions that have historically preferred TOEFL.
IELTS Speaking suits you if you think and speak better when you can develop an idea over a minute or two; you can build an argument and defend it under follow-up; repeating sentences from memory is not a strength; you need the finer scale that half bands give you; or your destination is an immigration route that accepts IELTS.
The clearest single diagnostic costs you ten minutes. Record yourself doing both: have someone read you seven unfamiliar sentences to repeat back immediately, then answer one Part 2 cue card and three Part 3 follow-ups. Most candidates find one of the two obviously harder, and it is not always the one they expected.
Where each test is accepted
For university admission, both are accepted almost everywhere in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and across the EU. Some departments still state a preference, so read the requirement rather than assuming interchangeability, and note that a requirement written against the old TOEFL 0–120 scale may not yet have been updated for the 1–6 scores.
For immigration, the choice is frequently made for you. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada accepts IELTS General Training, CELPIP-General and PTE Core for English; TOEFL iBT is not among them. ETS announced TOEFL Essentials in 2025 as a future addition, but it had not been activated for Express Entry as of 2026, so anyone planning a Canadian application should treat TOEFL as unavailable and verify on IRCC’s language testing guidance before booking. If that is your route, our guide to IELTS Speaking and CLB conversion covers what the score has to reach and why there is no compensation between skills. UK visa routes similarly require an approved Secure English Language Test, which constrains the choice further.
For professional registration, requirements vary by body and country, and several accept only one of the two. Confirm before you pay for anything.
Preparing for both is usually a mistake
General English improves for both tests at once. Targeted preparation does not transfer in either direction, and the redesign widened that gap rather than narrowing it.
Shadowing drills that build the auditory precision Listen and Repeat rewards will not teach you to sustain a two-minute argument or to handle an examiner asking why you think that. Practising unscripted Part 3 reasoning will not train you to hold a fourteen-word sentence in memory and reproduce its stress pattern. The pronunciation work is the one meaningful overlap, and it is weighted very differently: a flat 25% of your IELTS band, against the dominant criterion in seven of TOEFL’s eleven questions.
Pick the test your destination requires, confirm it in writing, then train for that format specifically. If that test is IELTS, the fastest diagnostic is a full three-part mock on prompts you have never seen, scored against the four criteria — most candidates stuck at 6.5 are weak in one or two of them, not all four, and finding which one is the whole job. Our breakdown of band 6 versus band 7 shows what separates them concretely.
Test your IELTS Speaking band before you commit
Run a full three-part mock under real exam timing and get a band scored criterion by criterion against the official IELTS descriptors — so you know where you stand before you pay a test fee.
Start a free simulationRelated reading
- TOEFL Speaking section 2026: the redesigned format — the full breakdown of both new tasks
- TOEFL Listen and Repeat: task guide
- TOEFL Take an Interview: questions and model answers
- Why TOEFL Speaking templates stopped working
- IELTS Speaking test structure and criteria
- IELTS vs PTE Speaking: which is easier — the third option most candidates forget
- CEFR speaking levels compared across exams
Frequently asked questions
Is TOEFL Speaking easier than IELTS Speaking?
They stopped being comparable in January 2026. TOEFL Speaking is now roughly 8 minutes, 11 questions, zero preparation time, and 7 of those 11 questions ask you to repeat a sentence you have just heard. IELTS Speaking is an 11-14 minute conversation with a live examiner where every word is your own. TOEFL is easier if your ear and pronunciation are strong but you freeze when generating ideas; IELTS is easier if you can hold a conversation but struggle with rapid-fire recall.
What TOEFL Speaking score equals IELTS 7?
On the comparison table ETS published with the new scale, IELTS Speaking 7 corresponds to TOEFL Speaking 4.5. IELTS Speaking 8 and 9 both correspond to TOEFL Speaking 6, and IELTS Speaking 6 corresponds to 3.5. These are statistical comparisons between two different tests, not conversions you can put on an application.
How is TOEFL scored now that the 0-120 scale is gone?
Since 21 January 2026 each section, including Speaking, is scored 1 to 6 in half-point steps, and the overall score is the average of the four sections rounded to the nearest half band. Score reports also show a CEFR level and, until January 2028, a comparable 0-120 figure so institutions can adjust.
Is TOEFL accepted for Canadian Express Entry?
No. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada accepts IELTS General Training, CELPIP-General and PTE Core for English. TOEFL iBT is not on that list. ETS announced TOEFL Essentials as a future addition in 2025, but it had not been activated for Express Entry as of 2026 — check canada.ca before planning around it.
Does TOEFL Speaking still have preparation time?
No. The pre-2026 format gave you 15 to 30 seconds to plan each response. The redesigned section removed that entirely. In Listen and Repeat you hear a sentence and record immediately; in Take an Interview you see the question and answer straight away, with 45 seconds per response.
Which test is better for university admission?
Whichever the university names. Both are accepted almost everywhere in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and the EU, and neither carries an advantage in admissions. The one practical difference is granularity: above IELTS 7, the TOEFL Speaking scale stops distinguishing between candidates, so a strong speaker shows more separation on IELTS.
Can I prepare for IELTS and TOEFL Speaking at the same time?
Your underlying English improves for both, but the drills do not transfer. TOEFL's Listen and Repeat trains auditory memory and pronunciation accuracy; IELTS Part 3 trains sustained argument under unscripted follow-up questions. Practising one does not prepare you for the other, and splitting effort usually means arriving underprepared for both. Pick the test your target institution requires, then train for that format.
Does an accent lower your score on either test?
Not by itself, on either. IELTS scores pronunciation on intelligibility and the range of features you control, not on sounding British or American. TOEFL's Listen and Repeat task is closer to a direct pronunciation measure, since you are reproducing a model sentence rather than generating your own, which makes accent-driven errors more visible there than in a free-speaking answer.