When investigating listening effort the individual subjective feedback is important to learn about and take into account the situations in which hearing impaired suffer in terms of listening effort and the relationship of listening effort to speech intelligibility. Here, we present results from a daily life questionnaire study and results from a new tool to evaluate listening effort subjectively under controlled conditions in the lab. A research questionnaire was used to determine the individual subjective listening effort in daily life in a systematic way. The questionnaire with 29 well described situations was used in a multi-center study in Denmark, Germany, and USA with 112 subjects to identify the most relevant effortful situations (e.g., “watching news in TV” or “talking at the kitchen table”). As a lab procedure we developed an adaptive categorical listening effort scaling procedure. It is based on a non-adaptive version that turned out to be a sensitive lab method in which subjects rate listening effort at predefined signal to noise ratios. The new method automatically finds the SNRs corresponding to subjective ratings from “extreme effort” to “no effort.” First results show the relationship between listening effort and intelligibility for different SNRs and background noises.