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Split a 0-10 score into NPS buckets

Turn a "how likely are you to recommend" column into Detractor, Passive, and Promoter groups, with color-vision-safe colors and boundaries you can move.

3 min readUpdated August 27, 2026

Net Promoter Score groups a 0-10 recommend question into three buckets and reports promoters minus detractors. Golden creates that grouping for you as a field on your dataset, so it then behaves like any other category: you can put it on Color, count it, filter by it, or split a chart by it.

From the Color shelf

  1. Build a bar chart - plain, stacked, 100% stacked, or any of their horizontal forms - with your score field on it.
  2. Open the Color shelf's field picker.
  3. Under the "Survey" heading, choose "NPS Buckets" (hint: "Promoter / Passive / Detractor").

That single click does the whole job: it creates the bucket field, puts it on Color, switches the chart to a 100% stacked bar if it is not already one, and applies the bucket colors. It counts as one step in history, so one undo takes all of it back.

Note: The option appears only when a field on the chart both reads like a recommend question and actually holds a 0-10 scale. That double check is deliberate - it keeps a column merely named "recommended price" out, and keeps every unrelated 0-10 rating (pain scales, difficulty ratings) from being labeled as NPS.

From Chart Options

On a 100% stacked bar, the Format pane's Chart Options section carries an "NPS Options" block. It gives you the boundary controls plus a "Create NPS Buckets" button; once a bucket is in play the button reads "Update NPS Buckets" instead.

  • Recommend Score Field (0-10) - which numeric measure to bucket. Shown until a bucket is active.
  • Detractor max - the highest score still counted as a detractor. Default 6.
  • Passive max - the highest score still counted as a passive. Default 8.
  • A row of pills previewing the result: Detractor (0-6), Passive (7-8), Promoter (9-10).

The two boundaries cannot cross - raising one pushes the other out of the way. Creating from this block adds the field but leaves it to you to drag onto Color, which the helper text says: "Creates a bucket field - drag it onto Color to render the split."

The field it creates

The new field is named after its source - "Recommend Score (NPS Bucket)". Move the boundaries off the default and the name carries them too, as in "(NPS Bucket 5-7)", so a chart using a custom split cannot quietly overwrite a chart using the standard one.

Note: A response outside 0-10, or a skipped question, falls into no bucket rather than being counted as a detractor - so it stays out of the denominator instead of dragging the score down.

Bucket colors are fixed and chosen to stay distinguishable with color vision deficiency - blue for Promoter, gray for Passive, orange for Detractor. They are deliberately not a red-yellow-green traffic light.

Heads up: If the button is disabled and you see "This field isn't a 0-10 scale, so an NPS split can't be computed", the chosen column's values fall outside 0-10. Pick the actual recommend column, or fix the values in Prepare first.
Tip: Dashboards offer the same option in the Color shelf's field picker, so a board tile can carry the split without going back to Analyze to build it.