Which Latin American Countries Speak the Best English?

The short answer: Argentina. It has the highest score in Latin America in the best-known ranking of English, the EF EPI index, and it has been first in the region in every edition since 2011. Honduras and Uruguay come next. Mexico is last of 20 countries.

But that ranking comes from a free online test that anyone can choose to take. It does not test a sample of each country. And the score changes a lot with who takes it: in Mexico, test takers aged 18 to 20 score 340 points and those aged 26 to 30 score 518. The distance between those two groups is bigger than the distance between Argentina and Mexico.

Here is the full ranking, who takes that test, and what the exams that some countries give their own pupils show. After that, the level of English in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Brazil, country by country.

Where is the best English spoken in Latin America?

The map shows the EF EPI index (EF English Proficiency Index), the ranking that almost every news report repeats. EF Education First, a company that sells language courses, publishes it each November. The scores come from a free English test that people take online.

High (550 to 599)Moderate (500 to 549)Low (450 to 499)Very low (under 450)Not in EF's index

AR Argentina · BO Bolivia · BR Brazil · BZ Belize · CL Chile · CO Colombia · CR Costa Rica · CU Cuba · DO Dominican Republic · EC Ecuador · GT Guatemala · GY Guyana · HN Honduras · HT Haiti · JM Jamaica · MX Mexico · NI Nicaragua · PA Panama · PE Peru · PR Puerto Rico · PY Paraguay · SV El Salvador · UY Uruguay · VE Venezuela

Source: EF Education First, EF EPI 2025 (tests taken in 2024). Belize, Guyana, Jamaica and Puerto Rico are not in the index.

EF puts countries in five bands. In the 2025 edition, no Latin American country is in the top band, “very high”. Argentina and Honduras are “high”. Another 12 countries are “moderate” and 4 are “low”. Haiti and Mexico are “very low”.

Small differences do not mean much. Between El Salvador, in fifth place, and Guatemala, in thirteenth, there are only 13 points, on a scale that goes up to 800. Nine countries fit inside that gap.

On this page, Latin America means the 20 countries that EF groups under that name: the 18 countries of the Americas where Spanish is spoken, plus Brazil and Haiti. Belize, Guyana and Jamaica, which are English-speaking, are not on EF's list. Nor is Puerto Rico.

The full ranking: all 20 countries

For each country, the table gives its score on EF's test and its place among the 123 countries and territories that EF ranks. The last column says whether the country publishes the results of an English test given to its own pupils. A dash means we did not find one.

Country	EF scoreEF EPI 2025	Place in the worldof 123	Its own testwhat it tests, and the year
High proficiency · 550 to 599
1Argentina	575	26	–
2Honduras	553	32	–
Moderate proficiency · 500 to 549
3Uruguay	542	34	National Adaptive Testvocabulary, reading and listening, 2025
4Paraguay	531	43	–
5El Salvador	523	47	AVANZOreading, 2023
6Bolivia	521	49	–
7Venezuela	520	51	–
8Peru	519	52	–
9Chile	517	54	National Study of Englishreading and listening, 2017
10Costa Rica	516	55	Language Proficiency Test (PDL)reading and listening, 2021
11Cuba	515	56	–
12Nicaragua	512	60	–
13Guatemala	510	61	–
14Dominican Republic	503	63	–
Low proficiency · 450 to 499
15Panama	491	70	–
16Brazil	482	75	–
17Colombia	480	76	Saber 11reading and use of English, 2024
18Ecuador	466	83	–
Very low proficiency · under 450
19Haiti	444	99	–
20Mexico	440	103	–

Sources: EF Education First, EF EPI 2025; for each country's own test, the body that runs it (listed under “Where the numbers come from”). Searched in October 2026.

What does EF's test measure, and who takes it?

It measures how well the people who decided to take it did. That is a lot of people: in 2024 more than 2.2 million people took it around the world, and 31% of them lived in Latin America.

But nobody chooses those people. They choose themselves. Their average age is 26, and 85% are under 35. You need an internet connection and a wish to know your level of English. EF says so in its own report: “The test-taking population represented in this Index is self-selected and not guaranteed to be representative.”

A country needs only 400 test takers to be ranked, and a city needs 100. EF does not publish how many each one had.

Age changes the score more than country does

EF also gives the score by age group. This is the most surprising thing in the whole ranking.

Aged 18 to 20Aged 26 to 30

Source: EF Education First, country pages of the EF EPI 2025. EF gives no scores by age for Cuba.

In the 19 countries with figures, people aged 18 to 20 score lower than people aged 26 to 30. In Mexico the difference is 178 points. In Chile it is 155, and in El Salvador 150. Between the first country on the list and the last there are 135.

EF accepts this. Its report says that in several countries of the region the youngest group “trails working adults by almost 100 points”, and that this is the widest gap between age groups in the world.

Do 19-year-olds really know so little English? These figures cannot tell us. EF does not publish how many people of each age take the test, or who they are. Perhaps young people know less English. Perhaps a different kind of person takes the test at 19 than at 28.

What we can say is that a country's score depends a lot on the age of the people tested. Look only at those aged 26 to 30 and the order changes. Chile, ninth on the main list, becomes second, with 592 points. Mexico is no longer last, although it stays near the bottom: it scores 518 points, almost the same as Colombia (521) and Ecuador (515).

Another exam, another order

There is another English exam with figures for all 20 countries: TOEFL, the one many universities in the United States ask for. Volunteers take it too, but they are different volunteers: mostly people who want to study abroad.

AR Argentina · BO Bolivia · BR Brazil · CL Chile · CO Colombia · CR Costa Rica · CU Cuba · DO Dominican Republic · EC Ecuador · GT Guatemala · HN Honduras · HT Haiti · MX Mexico · NI Nicaragua · PA Panama · PE Peru · PY Paraguay · SV El Salvador · UY Uruguay · VE Venezuela

Sources: EF EPI 2025; ETS, TOEFL iBT Test and Score Data Summary 2025, Table 16: average score by native country of people who took the exam in 2025. ETS publishes a country's average only if at least 30 people took the exam.

If the two exams agreed, the dots would form a line rising from left to right. They hardly do. The link between the two scores is weak: 0.38, where 1 would be complete agreement and 0 none.

Mexico is the clearest case. Last on EF's test, it has an average of 85 out of 120 on TOEFL: the same as Honduras and one point less than Argentina. Brazil, which EF puts in place 16 in the region, has 88.

ETS, the organisation that runs TOEFL, warns that putting countries in order with these averages is a misuse of the data, because the people who take the exam represent only themselves. It is right. And the same is true of EF's test.

At the two ends, the lists do agree. Argentina and Uruguay are in the leading group on both. Haiti is at the bottom of both.

What do each country's own tests show?

There is a better source than a test of volunteers: the exams that some countries give to all their pupils, or to a sample chosen to represent them. We looked in all 20 countries and found published results in 5. Only 4 say how many pupils reach each level: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Uruguay.

One warning before you look at them. Each test is different: another age, another exam, another year, other skills. They cannot be used to put countries in order, and we do not do that here. They are in alphabetical order, each beside the same country's EF score. The levels are those of the Common European Framework: A1 is the most basic, and with a B1 you can manage a simple conversation.

Beginner (A1) 68%Basic or intermediate (A2 or B1) 32%

Source: Agencia de Calidad de la Educación, Estudio Nacional Inglés III medio (2018). The study publishes levels A2 and B1 together. Chile's score on EF's test: 517 points, place 9 of 20.

Below A1 40%A1 30%A2 17%B1 10%Above B1 3%

Source: Icfes, Informe nacional de resultados del examen Saber 11.º 2024, figure 30b. Colombia's score on EF's test: 480 points, place 17 of 20.

A1 7%A2 57%B1 22%B2 12%C1 2%

Source: Universidad de Costa Rica and Ministerio de Educación Pública, Informe de resultados de las Pruebas de Dominio Lingüístico (December 2021), figure 8. The test is still given every year, but we found no national results by level after 2021. Costa Rica's score on EF's test: 516 points, place 10 of 20.

Source: ANEP and Ceibal, Resultados de la Prueba Nacional Adaptativa de Inglés 2025. The test is not compulsory: in 2025, 75% of urban primary pupils took it. Uruguay's score on EF's test: 542 points, place 3 of 20.

The fifth is El Salvador. Its AVANZO test, which every pupil takes at the end of school, has included an English paper since 2021, in reading only. The 2023 report gives the average share of questions answered correctly, not how many pupils reach each level, so it cannot be drawn like the others. Panama announced its first English test in primary schools in May 2026; we found no results.

The four tests above cannot be compared with each other, but they show similar things.

• Few pupils reach the level their own country sets. Colombia expects B1 at the end of school: in 2024, 13% reached it. Costa Rica expects B1 or B2, depending on the type of school: in 2021, 36% reached B1 or above. In Chile, A2 is the level expected in 8th grade. Three years later, in III medio, 32% had reached it.
• The big difference is inside each country. In Chile, 85% of pupils in the highest socio-economic group reached A2, and 9% of those in the lowest. In Costa Rica, 67% of pupils in private schools reached B2 or C1; in the whole country, 14%. In Colombia, the average English mark is 50 out of 100 in state schools and 61 in private schools.
• None of them tests how pupils speak. They all measure what the pupil understands. Colombia's and El Salvador's do not even have a listening part: they are written multiple-choice exams.

Do these tests confirm EF's order? They cannot confirm it or contradict it. For that, every country would need to take the same exam. EF says so in its own report: national tests “are not comparable to each other”.

What they do show is who EF tests. In EF's own table of levels, Colombia's score (480 points) stands for level B1, and Costa Rica's (516) for B2. In the exams that every pupil takes at the end of school, 13% reach B1 in Colombia, and 14% reach B2 in Costa Rica. The people who take EF's test are not the average pupil of their country.

We are not the first to notice. In 2017 the Inter-American Dialogue reviewed ten countries in the region. Seven set the level of English their pupils should reach. Only two, according to that report, had an exam in place to check it.

The exam that is coming

In 2025 the OECD's PISA study tested the English of 15-year-olds for the first time: reading, listening and speaking, with a sample chosen to represent pupils of that age who study English. 22 countries and territories took part. From Latin America, 3: Colombia, Peru and the Dominican Republic. Spain took part too.

The OECD has announced the results for April 2027, and Spain's education ministry gives the day: 6 April 2027. Then there will be, for the first time, a real comparison between those countries.

What is the level of English in Mexico?

On EF's test, the lowest in Latin America: 440 points, “very low”, place 103 of 123 in the world. But it is also the country where the average tells you the least.

Mexico's score comes from two very different groups. Test takers aged 18 to 20 score 340 points and those aged 21 to 25 score 403. Those aged 26 to 30 score 518 and those aged 31 to 40 score 520.

Source: EF Education First, Mexico's page of the EF EPI 2025. EF does not publish how many people of each age took the test.

In 2011 Mexico was second in the region, with 505 points, three behind Argentina. Since then it has fallen by 65. All of the fall in the last ten years is among people under 25. People over 25 have gone up. Whether young Mexicans know less English today, or different young people now take the test, EF does not say.

Inside the country the differences are large too. EF gives its best score to Nuevo León (519) and to Monterrey (532). It gives Mexico City 428.

And the country's own exams? There is none with national results. The official evaluation of the National English Programme for 2017-2018, carried out by El Colegio de México, said so: the national tests measured only Spanish and mathematics, and the programme did not evaluate how much English pupils learned. We found no national measurement since. There are two partial studies, and they agree on the main point.

• 2014. The organisation Mexicanos Primero tested 4727 pupils who had just finished state lower secondary school in 11 cities. It chose pupils with good marks on purpose. Even so, only 3% had level B1, the level the education ministry (SEP) sets for that age.
• 2018. The SEP asked the University of Cambridge for a study in urban schools in 6 states. It was not published, but the official evaluation reports the result: 1.5% of pupils in the third year of lower secondary reached B1.

Neither of the two represents the whole country. Both say the same thing: very few pupils finish lower secondary school with the level the curriculum sets.

What is the level of English in Colombia?

On EF's test, low: 480 points and place 17 of 20 in the region. And Colombia is one of the countries that knows best how its pupils are doing: it tests all of them, every year, and publishes the result by level.

Each year, pupils finishing school take the Saber 11 exam, which includes an English paper. In 2024, in calendar A, 40% were below level A1, the most basic. Another 30% were at A1. 13% reached B1 or above.

Two things to keep in mind. The paper tests reading, vocabulary and grammar: it does not measure what the pupil understands when listening, or how the pupil speaks. And it is improving slowly: in 2017, 10% reached B1 or above.

The difference between schools is very large. In the private schools of calendar B, where families have more money, 71% of pupils reach B1 or above.

On EF's test, the country's best score is Bucaramanga's (518), ahead of Medellín (516) and Bogotá (513). By age the picture is the same as in Mexico: 521 points among those aged 26 to 30, and 403 among those aged 18 to 20.

What is the level of English in Peru?

On EF's test, moderate: 519 points and place 8 in the region, just ahead of Chile and Costa Rica. Ten years ago it had 498.

The difference inside the country is bigger than the difference between countries. EF gives 544 points to Lima and 383 to Cajamarca: 161 apart. Between Argentina and Mexico there are 135.

In 2015 Peru approved a national policy, “Inglés, puertas al mundo” (English, doors to the world). The decree that created it includes no measurement of pupils' level, and we found no national English test with published results.

That is going to change. Peru is one of the three countries in the region that took the PISA English exam in 2025.

What is the level of English in Argentina?

The highest in Latin America on EF's test: 575 points, “high”, place 26 of 123 in the world. It has been first in the region in all 15 editions of the index.

It is also the only country in the region where the women who take the test score higher than the men: 577 against 573. The best scores by city are Mar del Plata's (597) and Buenos Aires's (594).

What we did not find is a national English exam. The City of Buenos Aires has started to test a sample of pupils in 7th grade and in the 3rd year of secondary, with a pilot in 2023. We found no published results.

So Argentina's first place depends only on exams taken by volunteers. They do agree with each other: on TOEFL its average is 86 out of 120, one of the highest in the region.

What is the level of English in Chile?

On EF's test, moderate: 517 points, ninth in the region. But after Mexico it is the country where the score changes most with age: 592 points among those aged 26 to 30, the second-best score in Latin America, and 437 among those aged 18 to 20.

The country's own latest exam is from 2017. The Agencia de Calidad de la Educación tested a sample of pupils in III medio in reading and listening. 32% reached level A2 or B1. 68% stayed at A1, which in that study means everyone who does not reach A2. In 2014, when Chile tested the whole country and not a sample (154,097 pupils), 53.2% were below level A1. Of the 2017 study, the Agencia itself said this: seven in ten pupils in III medio had not reached what is expected in 8th grade.

That study gave the most surprising figure on this page. 85% of pupils in the highest socio-economic group reached A2, and 9% of those in the lowest. We found no later national study.

What is the level of English in Brazil?

On EF's test, low: 482 points and place 16 in the region. On TOEFL it is the other way round: an average of 88, more than Argentina.

Brazil is also one of the countries where, on EF's test, the distance between reading and listening is widest: 48 points.

Here too there is no national English exam. A British Council study of 2015 put it this way: there are no indicators for the teaching of English like those that exist for Portuguese and mathematics. The nearest thing to a national figure is a survey from 2013: 5% of people over 16 said they had some knowledge of English. That is what people say about themselves, not an exam.

And compared with Spain?

Spain scores 540 points on the same test, “moderate”, place 36 in the world. Only 3 Latin American countries score higher: Argentina, Honduras and Uruguay.

The warning is the same: these are the people who take the test, not the country. Spain has a second source, a European Union survey that asks a sample of the whole population. In Latin America we found nothing like it: the Latinobarómetro survey asked about English in 1995 and 1996, and the question is not in its questionnaires from 1997 to 2018. What the European survey says is in Which European countries speak the best English?

Is English improving in Latin America?

According to EF, very little. The region's average was 484 points in 2015 and is 489 now. EF works out that average by each country's population, so Brazil and Mexico count most.

Source: EF Education First, country pages of the EF EPI 2025. EF changed its scale in 2020; earlier years are shown as EF publishes them today.

Country by country, the picture is mixed. El Salvador, Venezuela and Uruguay have gone up by more than 60 points in ten years. Mexico has gone down by 48 and the Dominican Republic by 36.

Be careful with big jumps. Honduras entered the index in 2018 with 446 points and has 553 today: 107 more in seven years. In a single edition, 2025, Mexico fell 19 points and Costa Rica 18, while Brazil rose 16. A country's English does not change that much in a year. What changes is who takes the test.

The countries' own exams, where they exist, show slow improvement. In Colombia, pupils below level A1 were 44% in 2017 and are 40% in 2024. In Uruguay, 23% of 6th-year pupils reached A2 in listening in 2022, and 28% do in 2025.

So what can you trust?

The general picture. Argentina comes first on EF's test year after year, and it and Uruguay are in the leading group on TOEFL too. Haiti is at the bottom of both.

Do not trust the order in the middle of the table, where nine countries fit inside 13 points. Or the changes from one year to the next. Or Mexico's last place on its own: it is the score of a very young group of test takers, and another volunteer exam puts Mexico in the upper half.

And one thing you can trust, because the real exams say it: inside each country that tests its pupils, the distance between one school and another is very wide.

What you can do

No ranking tells you what your own level is. What these figures do show is where the English learned in class is usually weakest.

EF gives one score for reading and another for listening. In all 20 Latin American countries, the listening score is the lower of the two: 33 points lower in Mexico, 52 in Colombia, 41 in Peru. In the Netherlands, the country with the best score in the world, the difference is 6.

ListeningReading

Source: EF Education First, country pages of the EF EPI 2025. These are the scores of one year only, 2024.

The countries' own exams do not always say the same. In Uruguay, listening is by far the weakest part: 47% of 6th-year pupils reach A2 in reading, and 28% in listening. In Costa Rica, by contrast, pupils did better in listening than in reading. In Chile the two scores were close, and which one was ahead changed from one test to the next. Each exam uses its own recordings and its own questions.

If you read English better than you understand it when people speak to you, what you are missing is hours of listening. In Europe, the countries where English is spoken best do not start earlier or give more hours of lessons: their children hear English outside the classroom.

Listening a lot is essential, and it works best with a transcript and some guidance. We set out the research in Why learn English with real conversations?

That is what we make: real conversations between English speakers, at natural speed, with nothing scripted. There are more than 150 free episodes on this site. You can start with Zapp! English Listening.

The workbooks add the full transcript in English, a glossary, and exercises with answers for every episode.

Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39

Frequently asked questions

Which Latin American country speaks the best English?

According to the EF EPI index for 2025, Argentina, with 575 points. Honduras (553) and Uruguay (542) follow. That is the score of the people who chose to take a free online test, not of a sample of each country.

Where does Mexico rank for English?

In the EF EPI index for 2025, last of 20 Latin American countries and 103 of 123 in the world, with 440 points. The score changes a lot with the age of the test takers: 340 points among those aged 18 to 20 and 518 among those aged 26 to 30.

What is the level of English in Colombia?

In the EF EPI index for 2025, 480 points, a “low” level, and place 17 of 20 in Latin America. In the Saber 11 exam of 2024, which every pupil takes at the end of school, 13% reached level B1 or above, and 40% were below A1.

Which Latin American countries test their pupils' English?

Of the 20 countries, we found published results in 5: Chile (a sample of pupils, in 2017), Colombia (every pupil who finishes school, every year), Costa Rica (every pupil in the last year, with national results up to 2021), El Salvador (every pupil who finishes school, reading only) and Uruguay (state schools, every year). They cannot be compared with each other.

Is EF's English ranking reliable?

It tells you how the people who took the test did in each country. It tells you little about the whole population. Volunteers take it online, and their average age is 26. EF warns in its report that there is no guarantee they are representative, and it does not publish how many people were tested in each country.

Is English better in Spain than in Latin America?

On EF's test for 2025, Spain scores 540 points. Only Argentina (575), Honduras (553) and Uruguay (542) score higher. EF's average for Latin America is 489 points and for Europe 550.

When does the EF EPI ranking come out?

Each November. The 2025 edition was published on 19 November 2025. We update this page when a new one comes out.

Where the numbers come from

• Test scores: EF Education First, EF EPI 2025: the ranking, each country's page, the method annex of the report, and its table of equivalent levels in the Common European Framework.
• TOEFL: ETS, TOEFL iBT Test and Score Data Summary 2025, Table 16.
• Chile: Agencia de Calidad de la Educación, Estudio Nacional Inglés III medio. Informe de Resultados 2017 (2018), and Síntesis de Resultados de Aprendizaje 2014, III medio, Simce Inglés.
• Colombia: Icfes, Informe nacional de resultados del examen Saber 11.º 2024, and the exam guide for 2025-1. The B1 target: Ministerio de Educación Nacional, Programa Nacional de Bilingüismo.
• Costa Rica: Universidad de Costa Rica, Escuela de Lenguas Modernas, Informe de resultados. Pruebas de Dominio Lingüístico (PDL) (December 2021), published by the Ministerio de Educación Pública.
• El Salvador: Ministerio de Educación, Ciencia y Tecnología, Informe general de resultados AVANZO 2023.
• Uruguay: ANEP and Ceibal, Resultados de la Prueba Nacional Adaptativa de Inglés 2025, and the 2022 report.
• Mexico: El Colegio de México, Evaluación de Consistencia y Resultados 2017-2018 del Programa Nacional de Inglés; Mexicanos Primero, Sorry. El aprendizaje del inglés en México (2015), chapter 4.
• Peru: Decreto Supremo 012-2015-MINEDU, Política Nacional de Enseñanza, Aprendizaje y Uso del Idioma Inglés, “Inglés, puertas al mundo”.
• Panama: Ministerio de Educación, notice of 7 May 2026.
• Brazil: British Council, O ensino de inglês na educação pública brasileira (2015) and Learning English in Brazil (2014).
• The exam that is coming: OECD, PISA 2025 Results (Volume I) (September 2026), Table 1, and its press release of 8 September 2026; the exact day, on the PISA 2025 page of Spain's Instituto Nacional de Evaluación Educativa.
• The 2017 review: Cronquist, K., and Fiszbein, A. (2017). English Language Learning in Latin America. Inter-American Dialogue. The report was paid for by Pearson, a company that sells English exams and courses.
• The 1995 and 1996 survey: Latinobarómetro, questionnaires and code books from 1995 to 2018.

We have not merged these measures into one score, and we have not put countries in order by their own exams. Where we did not find a figure, we say so.