# Rating bands

> The five standardized rating bands — excellent, good, moderate, at risk, critical — used across every inspect.software health metric and category.


Every value in an inspect.software report — components rolled into metrics,
metrics rolled into categories, and the overall health index — lives on one
standardized 1–100 scale, higher is better. To make those numbers readable at
a glance, each value maps to one of **five standardized bands**, used
consistently across health, security, and quality measurements.

<div class="md-figure">
<div class="md-bands" role="img" aria-label="Band scale from critical (1–29) through excellent (85–100)">
<i style="width:29%;background:#c15361"></i>
<i style="width:20%;background:#d57953"></i>
<i style="width:20%;background:#c79c43"></i>
<i style="width:15%;background:#38a6a1"></i>
<i style="width:16%;background:#21aa81"></i>
</div>
<div class="md-bands-legend">
<span style="--dot:#c15361">Critical 1–29</span>
<span style="--dot:#d57953">At risk 30–49</span>
<span style="--dot:#c79c43">Moderate 50–69</span>
<span style="--dot:#38a6a1">Good 70–84</span>
<span style="--dot:#21aa81">Excellent 85–100</span>
</div>
<figcaption>The five bands of the standardized scale. Thresholds are part of the versioned methodology.</figcaption>
</div>

## What each band means

| Band | Range | Meaning |
| ---- | ----- | ------- |
| **Excellent** | 85–100 | Exemplary; meets essentially all checked criteria |
| **Good** | 70–84 | Healthy; minor gaps |
| **Moderate** | 50–69 | Acceptable with notable gaps; review recommended |
| **At risk** | 30–49 | Significant weaknesses; adoption warrants caution |
| **Critical** | 1–29 | Severe problems — e.g. abandoned, single-maintainer, no hygiene |

## How bands should be read

- **Bands are coarse on purpose.** The difference between 71 and 74 is noise;
  the difference between *good* and *at risk* is information. Procurement and
  review decisions should key on bands and on the category profile, not on
  single-point differences. The [comparison view](/compare) is built around
  this: it states the spread between the records on screen in index points,
  so a three-point gap can be recognized as one and set aside.
- **Bands apply at every level.** A repository can sit in the *good* band
  overall while one category sits in *critical* — the per-category bands exist
  precisely so that strength in one area cannot silently mask risk in another.
- **Thresholds are versioned.** Band boundaries are part of the methodology
  and only change with a version bump recorded in every report — see
  [methodology versions](/wiki/methodology-versions).

## Where the bands appear

The bands drive the color coding across the whole record: catalogue cards,
the report gauge, category headers, individual metric cards, and the
[GitHub badge](/badges). A repository with no completed inspection yet shows a
neutral *pending* state rather than a band.

Related: [the health index](/wiki/health-index) explains how the underlying
1–100 values are computed; [signals, not warranties](/wiki/signals-not-warranties)
explains what they do and do not claim.