Average CTR by Google position, measured on real data
You want to know what a position is worth before you spend a quarter chasing it. Every published table gives a different answer, and none of them is your site.
The published curves disagree because they are averages of averages
Every CTR-by-position table you have seen is an average across categories that behave nothing like each other. Branded navigational queries click at 40% or more. Ambiguous informational queries in a crowded results page click at under 2% in the same position. Averaging them produces a number that describes neither.
The curve is not smooth, and that is the useful part
On this site's own data, positions 1 to 3 returned 29.95% click-through, positions 4 to 5 returned 7.57%, positions 8 to 10 returned 1.47%, and positions 10 to 15 returned 2.69%. That last band is higher than the one above it. A position band is not one population, and a curve that only ever falls has been smoothed until it stopped being true.
Build your own curve, it takes ten minutes
Export your Search Console queries, bucket them by position, and divide clicks by impressions in each bucket. That curve is the only one that can price a ranking change for you, because it already contains your category, your snippet quality and your competition.
Brand queries will inflate your curve until you remove them
On this site, 42.3% of all clicks came from people searching the product name. Those queries sit at position 1 and click at rates no non-brand page will ever reach. Leave them in and your curve tells you position 1 is worth 40%, so you spend a quarter chasing position 1 on a term where it will be worth 8%. Filter brand out before you compute anything.
A position is not a promise, it is a distribution
An average position of 9.07 does not mean the pages sat at 9. It means the impressions were spread above and below it, on a number that is itself averaged across every query, country and device. The same page can hold position 3 on a phone and 14 on a desktop and report 8. Price the band, not the point.
Measured, not asserted
Across 224 days, this site recorded 1,228,913 impressions at an average position of 9.07 and an overall click-through rate of 3.44%. The banded curve above comes from the non-brand subset of that data.
Free tool for this: Position Value Calculator. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.