It is recommended that screening for COPD be restricted to symptomatic individuals, but supporting evidence islacking. We determined the performance of wheeze, cough, phlegm, and dyspnea in discriminating COPD versusnon-COPD in a population-based sample of 1332 adults. Area Under the Receiver Operating Curves (AUC) indicatedthat symptoms had modest performance whether assessed individually (AUCs 0.55–0.62), or in combination (AUC fornumber of symptoms as the predictor 0.64). AUC improved with the inclusion of multiple other factors (AUC 0.71).Restricting screening to symptomatic individuals is unlikely to substantially improve the yield of general populationscreening for undiagnosed COPD.