Turnitin Similarity Score Is Grey — What It Means When No Number Shows

A grey similarity score — or a similarity column with no number in it — means the report is not currently visible to you. It is not a score of 0%. It is not a failed submission. Turnitin's student guide lists two reasons a similarity score does not appear: your instructor turned off student access to the Similarity Report, or the report is still being generated and will be updated once it has finished processing.

There is no grey band in Turnitin's color scale. Blue means no matching text. Grey — or an empty cell — means "no number is being shown to you right now": access is off, or processing is not done yet.

Students describe this as "I got 6% but it's grey" or "the score is grey." What is actually on screen varies by interface: a grey report icon with no percentage, a blank cell under the Similarity column, or a badge with dashes.

The important distinction is what the color is attached to. Turnitin's color scale — blue, green, yellow, orange, red — describes a report icon that has a percentage attached. When no number is displayed, you are not looking at a low score or a zero; you are looking at a state where the report is not being shown to you.

That is why "6% but grey" is a misreading of the screen. If a percentage is present, the color tells you the range. If no percentage is present, there is no score to color — and the grey or empty state has its own official explanation.

Turnitin's official description of the report icon colors is explicit. The color of the report icon indicates the submission's similarity score, based on the amount of matching text found, across a percentage range of 0% to 100%:

• Blue: no matching text
• Green: one word to 24% matching text
• Yellow: 25–49% matching text
• Orange: 50–74% matching text
• Red: 75–100% matching text

The follow-up sentence matters too: the color scheme may vary depending on the integration, and that is expected and does not affect the results.

Note what is not in the list. There is no grey range. Grey is not a similarity-score color — it is a state where no score is displayed. If an interface colors a badge grey while a percentage exists elsewhere, that is an integration-specific display. The score range itself has no grey tier, so "grey score" is best read as "no score shown."

Turnitin's student guide answers "why is there no number" with exactly two reasons:

1. Your instructor turned off student access to the Similarity Report. The report may exist on the instructor side — fully processed, percentage included — while the student side shows nothing. This is a permission setting, not a processing issue.

1. The Similarity Report is still being generated and will be updated once it has finished processing. The submission went through; the report is not done yet. The number will appear when processing finishes.

Both reasons mean the same thing for what you should not do: do not treat the missing number as evidence about the content. An empty cell is not a 0% and not a 100%. It is information about the report's visibility and state, not about your text.

There is a third, time-related case that trips students up more than the others, and it has its own official sentence.

The guide states that overwritten or resubmitted papers may not generate a new Similarity Report for a full 24 hours, and that this delay is automatic and allows resubmissions to correctly generate without matching to the previous version.

So if you just resubmitted — fixed the file, re-uploaded a draft — the empty or grey state is expected behavior, not a fault. The delay is deliberate: it prevents your new submission from matching the version it just replaced. The number comes back after processing completes, and the official figure to wait on is 24 hours.

When the similarity column is grey or empty, the sequence is short and the options are limited by design.

First, wait if you submitted recently. If you resubmitted or overwrote a file within the last day, the 24-hour delay applies. Let the report generate; check back after that window.

Second, ask the instructor whether student access to the Similarity Report is turned on. This is the one question the official guide itself points students to, and it is the difference between "the report exists and you cannot see it" and "the report is not generated yet." Both are normal states; the fix for the first is a setting, and only the instructor can change it.

What not to do: do not read the empty cell as a result, and do not treat it as proof that your paper is clean. Grey means no number is shown, not that the number is zero. The color scale only colors scores that exist, and no score exists while the report is hidden or unfinished.

A grey or empty similarity score has one meaning on Turnitin's own documentation: no score is being shown to you right now, for one of two reasons — the instructor turned off student access, or the report is still generating. Resubmissions add a documented 24-hour delay so the new version does not match the old one. Grey is not a color in the similarity scale, and it is not a zero. Wait out the delay if you just resubmitted, ask about the access setting, and read the number when it actually appears.