Abstract Background People who have suffered a stroke perceive to a large extent unmet needs of rehabilitation. Needs of health care services can be viewed from the perspective of the phenomena underlying the need i.e. the disability/problems and also from the perspective of the people with stroke as well as the health professionals. The aim was to describe disability/problems from the perspective of the people with stroke, represented by felt problems, reported by patients three months after stroke and to examine if there were differences between men and women. A further aim was to explore the concurrence between the perspective of the people with stroke (felt problems) and the perspective of the health professionals (assessed problems). Methods The patients (n=203) received care at the stroke units at Karolinska University Hospital, Sweden. Felt problems, collected using an open question, were categorized. Results from three established assessment tools: Katz Extended Index of ADL (KE); Barthel Index (BI) and Stroke Impact Scale (SIS) represented assessed problems. Items/domains in the assessment tools that corresponded to the categories with felt problems were identified and comparisons performed. Results Fatigue was the category in which the largest number of patients reported felt problems (n=58, 28%). More women than men had felt problems in the category Acquisition, meals and housework (p=0.01) whereas more men had felt problems in the categories Employment (p=0.02) and Driving (p=0.009). Fourteen out of the 28 categories of felt problems had corresponding items/domains in the KE/ BI and the SIS. The KE/BI failed to capture 16-57 % of the felt problems whereas the SIS failed to capture 0-33 %. Conclusion There was a substantial lack of concurrence between felt and assessed problems indicating that the use of assessment tools has to be complemented with open questions if health services are to address the problems experienced by the patients.