Character · House
Dr. House's IQ — what the methodology actually says.
"Dr. House's IQ" is a popular search. TV Intelligentsia doesn't invent IQ numbers for fictional characters. Here's the honest answer — the show's IQ Score, and what it tells you about how seriously the work treats his mind.
The honest answer
TVI scores shows and films, not characters. Assigning an IQ to a fictional character would be fabrication — we don't have a methodology for that. What we do have: a 0–200 rating of the work's structural intellectual quality, and that score tells you something real about how seriously House treats Dr. House's mind.
Who Dr. House is, and what kind of intelligence the show actually depicts
Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) is diagnostic-medicine specialist whose method ("everybody lies") is explicitly framed as the show's intellectual engine. The character's intellectual signature in the show is differential-diagnosis reasoning, social-distrust-as-method, the rare medical-procedural intelligence rendered with reasonable medical literacy.
This is the part of the question "what is Dr. House's IQ" that the search engine flattens. The real question — the one viewers are circling — is whether the show treats his mind seriously. That's the question TVI can actually answer.
What the IQ Score reveals about the portrayal
House scores 157/200 (Stimulating) because the procedural-medical reasoning is genuine — the differential-diagnosis structure is closer to how doctors actually think than almost any other medical drama — but the formula limits how far the show can compound that intelligence. The IQ Score captures both: real cognitive engagement per episode, structural constraints on what 22 episodes per season can accumulate.
For the full score breakdown — Cognitive Stimulation, Educational Value, Craft & Quality, and the rationale — see House on TV Intelligentsia. Or read what an IQ Score is and how it's calculated.
Read the full methodology
How TV Intelligentsia scores intellectual quality — the rubric, the dimensions, the published framework.
Methodology →