Introduction: Designing the effective interventions to prevent and control the HIV/AIDS whose characteristics is different from other communicable diseases, needs appropriateness with audience’s HIV/AIDS health literacy. This study aimed at developing a tool for measuring HIV/AIDS literacy for Iranians.

Materials & methods: By assessing the usual tools for measuring health literacy, TOFHLA was selected as the basic framework. At first general content was developed through searching the Persian literature relevant to HIV/AIDS and its skill portion was extracted. Disease Prevention Cure and Care and Health Promotion were considered as three main subjects for categorizing the content. By developing the primary items and placing them into the known skills in health literacy (search and obtain, interpret and understand, and use of health information and services), the questionnaire draft were developed. Content validity through expert panel and determining CVR & CV, and reliability by estimating Cronbachs Alpha and test-retest method were confirmed.

Findings: CVR and CVI were estimated as ≥ 0.8 and ≥ 0.77 respectively. Cronbachs Alpha was 0.75 and correlation between test-retest scores was 0.78.

Discussion & conclusions: Developed tool for measuring HIV/AIDS literacy had acceptable reliability and validity. This tool can be used for categorizing Iranian society, and designing and implementing the appropriate educational programs based on their health literacy levels.