App Store Age Rating Questionnaire: How to Answer It Correctly (4+, 9+, 13+, 16+, 18+)

The App Store age rating questionnaire is a required app information property in App Store Connect. You go through a list of content descriptors, in-app controls and capabilities, and for each one you declare whether it is present in your app and how often. Apple translates those answers into a global age rating of 4+, 9+, 13+, 16+ or 18+, plus additional region-specific ratings where a country requires them. The rating shows on your product page and drives parental controls on the device. Apple states plainly that an Unrated app cannot be published on the App Store, so you cannot skip it, and App Review Guideline 2.3.6 says to answer the questions honestly so your app aligns with parental controls, adding that a mis-rated app could trigger an inquiry from government regulators.

The reason it trips people up now is that the questionnaire changed. On July 24, 2025 Apple announced an updated age rating system that added 13+, 16+ and 18+ to the existing 4+ and 9+ ratings, introduced a new set of required questions covering in-app controls, capabilities, medical or wellness topics and violent themes, and added the ability to override to a higher rating. Apple asked developers to provide responses for every app by January 31, 2026 to avoid an interruption when submitting updates. That deadline has passed. If you built your app record before the change and never went back, the new questions are still sitting unanswered, and you find out when you try to submit an update. If you are creating a fresh app record today, the questionnaire is one of the steps in [setting up App Store Connect for your first app](/blog/how-to-set-up-app-store-connect-for-your-first-app), and this post is the part that guide only had room to mention.

Apple publishes the exact triggers for each rating in its age ratings values and definitions reference. Below is the global table, trimmed to the items an indie app built with Expo is likely to touch. Regional tables for Australia, Brazil, Korea and Vietnam differ, and I cover those further down.

Read the 4+ row twice, because it surprises people. User-generated content, messaging and chat, and advertising are all listed under 4+. Those are capability declarations, not content ratings, and on their own they do not raise the tier. What raises the tier for a normal app is the small set of capabilities and frequency answers in the 13+ and 16+ rows, and that is where I see most builders answer wrong.

Inside App Store Launch Club we call these the Three Traps, because between them they account for nearly every case where a member's ordinary app came back rated 13+ or 16+ and they did not understand why. Each one is a capability question where the honest answer depends on how you built the feature, not on what the feature is called.

Most content descriptors in the questionnaire take one of three answers: none, infrequent or frequent, and the tier jumps with frequency. Cartoon or fantasy violence is 9+ infrequent and 13+ frequent. Contests are 4+ infrequent and 13+ frequent. Realistic violence is 13+ infrequent and 18+ frequent. Simulated gambling is 13+ infrequent and 18+ frequent. Mature or suggestive themes are 9+ infrequent and 16+ frequent. Apple's definitions page describes what each descriptor contains but does not publish a numeric threshold for what counts as frequent, so the working rule I use is simple: if the content is a feature of the app rather than an incident inside it, it is frequent.

Two descriptors are yes or no rather than frequency. Gambling, meaning betting with real money or currency that converts to real money, is a straight 18+. Loot boxes, meaning randomized virtual items for purchase, are 9+ globally but carry their own regional consequences, which is why a game with a gacha mechanic needs to read the regional tables before deciding on the mechanic at all.

After the content questions, App Store Connect shows your calculated rating in the Additional Information step and offers three choices under Age Categories and Override. Not Applicable keeps the calculated rating. Made for Kids is available only when your calculated rating is 4+ or 9+, puts the app in the Kids category with a chosen age range, cannot be changed once App Review approves the app, and commits you and every future update to the Kids category guidelines. Override to Higher Age Rating raises the displayed rating above what Apple calculated; the App Store shows your chosen rating while the content descriptors still reflect your answers.

The override is not optional in one case. Apple states that if your app has a EULA with a minimum age requirement that exceeds the calculated rating, you must override to a rating that adheres to it. So if your terms say users must be 18, a 4+ calculated rating is wrong and the override is the fix. The same step has an optional Age Suitability URL field for a page on your site that explains age suitability, and an Unrated option that exists only for apps distributed through alternative marketplaces or your own website in the European Union.

Your answers produce one global rating and a separate rating in each country with its own standard, and the regional one is what shows on that country's product page. The regional tables punish the same three traps harder. In Australia, social media and loot boxes rate 16+, and infrequent simulated gambling is R 18+. Apple announced on May 21, 2026 that from June 18, 2026 the 15+ rating is gone in Australia, and apps with unrestricted web access, frequent medical or treatment information, or loot boxes moved to 16+. Vietnam, from the same date, requires a region-specific rating of 00+, 12+, 16+ or 18+ under Article 38 of Decree 147. Brazil uses its own AL to A18 pictograms, and unrestricted web access or social media land at A16 there. In Korea, frequent or intense simulated gambling is only allowed with a Rating Classification Number from GRAC, entered under Add RCN next to Republic of Korea.

In App Store Connect open your app, click App Information under General in the sidebar, and click Set Up Age Ratings in the Age Ratings section. The first dialog lists in-app controls and capabilities; select any your app includes and click Next. Then work through each section of the progress bar, choosing the frequency for each descriptor, until you reach Additional Information, where you handle the override and click Save. You need the Account Holder, Admin, App Manager or Marketing role. To change it later, open App Information and click Edit at the top of the page. This is the same page where you set the privacy policy URL and category, so it pairs naturally with [filling in App Privacy details](/blog/app-privacy-details-app-store-connect).

If you use EAS Metadata to push store listing fields from a store.config.json, know what it does and does not cover. Expo's schema has an apple.advisory block that maps to the age rating questions, and its docs say it fills each one with the least restrictive answer by default. As of the schema published today that block contains the descriptor questions (alcohol, contests, simulated gambling, horror, mature themes, medical information, profanity, sexual content, violence), the gambling and unrestrictedWebAccess booleans, a kidsAgeBand, and the override fields. It has no fields for the in-app controls or capabilities Apple added in 2025, such as social media, user-generated content, messaging, advertising, health or wellness topics, guns or loot boxes. EAS Metadata is also still marked beta. So treat store.config.json as a way to keep the descriptor answers in version control, never accept its NONE defaults without checking, and finish the capability questions in App Store Connect by hand.

A mis-rated app is a metadata problem in Apple's eyes, and the reviewer can cite it the same way they cite a wrong screenshot or category. [The Guideline 2.3 rejection post](/blog/app-store-rejection-guideline-2-3) covers that family, and [how to pass Apple App Review](/blog/how-to-pass-apple-app-review) covers the rest of the submission. For the full pre-submission list, use the [App Store submission checklist](/guides/app-store-submission-checklist).

The App Store age rating questionnaire is required, sits under App Information in App Store Connect, and produces a global rating of 4+, 9+, 13+, 16+ or 18+ from your answers on content descriptors, in-app controls and capabilities. Apple rebuilt it in July 2025 with new required questions and wanted every app answered by January 31, 2026, so an old app record with unanswered questions gets stopped at its next update. For a normal indie app the tier is decided by three capability answers: unrestricted web access (16+), social media (13+), and medical or treatment information (13+ or 16+). User-generated content, messaging and advertising stay at 4+ on their own. Answer by what the build can actually do, override upward when your EULA requires a minimum age, and finish the capability questions by hand because EAS Metadata's advisory block does not have them.

The Three Traps came out of members posting a confused screenshot of a 16+ rating on an app that had no business carrying one. Inside App Store Launch Club you can post your feature inventory before you answer and get it checked by someone who has already been through the questionnaire and the reviewer's follow-up. Join at applaunchclub.co for $9 a month and get the rating right the first time.