Yes. On average, self-esteem rises from adolescence through young adulthood and middle age, reaches its highest level at about sixty, holds for a decade, and then declines in old age; in the short term it also moves with mood and events, so two readings a month apart can differ.
The shape of the curve
The clearest evidence is a meta-analysis of 191 longitudinal studies by Orth, Erol and Luciano (2018), covering people from age 4 to 94. Self-esteem rose through childhood, levelled off in early adolescence, rose strongly from the late teens to about thirty, kept rising more slowly to sixty, stayed level to seventy and then fell, slowly at first and more steeply after ninety. The authors found no evidence for the popular idea of a sharp drop in adolescence: the teenage years are a plateau rather than a trough.
Orth and Robins (2014) reviewed the same literature and drew the same picture, and added that the rise through adulthood is tied to the ordinary business of adult life, such as work and stable relationships. The decline in old age tracks changes in health, income and social roles rather than age itself.
Two kinds of change
Mean-level change is the whole group moving, as above. Rank-order stability is whether the people with the highest self-esteem at twenty are still the highest at forty. Trzesniewski, Donnellan and Robins (2003) pooled fifty studies and found that rank-order stability of self-esteem is low in childhood, rises through adolescence and young adulthood, peaks in middle age and falls again in old age. The pattern, and the size of the correlations, matched those for personality traits, which was the first good evidence that self-esteem is as stable as a trait and not merely a passing state.
What a change in score does not mean
A move of a few points between two attempts does not mean your self-esteem has changed. The scale has ten items on four points, and test-retest correlations in the published samples are between .82 and .88, which leaves room for a few points of noise either way. A lower score at seventy-five than at fifty-five does not mean something has gone wrong; it is the average pattern. A rise or fall is not a diagnosis of anything.
What it means for your results
A result is a reading of now. If you are in your twenties, the average person’s score drifts up over the next decades whatever they do about it. If you take the test twice and the second score is in a different part of the strip, that is worth noticing; the site shows both attempts on the same strip so you can see your own trend rather than a single point.
The self-esteem test takes two minutes, is scored on your device and shows your score against the possible range of 10 to 40.