How many steps is 8 miles?
About 18,300 steps for an adult of average height, from about 16,100 at 6 ft 4 in to 21,100 at 4 ft 10 in. On an eight-mile day you walk nearly four times as much as the average person in a worldwide study of 717,527 smartphone users.
The numbers
Steps in 8 miles, by height
| 4 ft 10 in (1.47 m) | about 21,100 steps |
| 5 ft (1.52 m) | about 20,400 steps |
| 5 ft 2 in (1.57 m) | about 19,700 steps |
| 5 ft 4 in (1.63 m) | about 19,100 steps |
| 5 ft 6 in (1.68 m) | about 18,600 steps |
| 5 ft 8 in (1.73 m) | about 18,000 steps |
| 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m) | about 17,500 steps |
| 6 ft (1.83 m) | about 17,000 steps |
| 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m) | about 16,500 steps |
| 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) | about 16,100 steps |
Step length is about 41% of height. Give or take 10% for how you walk.
For the average American woman and man (according to the CDC)
| A woman, 5 ft 3.5 in | about 19,300 steps |
| A man, 5 ft 8.9 in | about 17,700 steps |
Average heights of US adults, from the CDC. A woman's step is almost the same share of her height as a man's, so the gap comes from height.
Against a daily step count
| A 5,000-step day | 366% of it |
| A 7,000-step day | 261% of it |
| A 10,000-step day | 183% of it |
For an adult of average height, walking only this distance.
On a reTrek route
12.9 km is 1/5 of the way to Everest Base Camp. At that distance a day, the whole route takes about 5 days.
About the Everest Base Camp routeTry your own distance
Steps
about 18,300
16,500 to 20,100 depending on your stride, about 0.70 m a step at this height.
Distance
12.9 km · 8.0 miles
Time on foot
2 h 34 min
at 5 km/h, no stops
Calories
Depends on your weight more than anything else. Enter it to see an estimate.
That is 1/5 of the way to Everest Base Camp.
How many steps is 8 miles?
About 18,300 for an adult 5 ft 7 in (1.70 m) tall. Eight miles is 12,875 m, and a walking step is roughly 41% of your height, about 0.70 m for that adult. The average American woman (according to the CDC), at 5 ft 3.5 in, takes about 19,300, and the average American man, just under 5 ft 9 in, about 17,700. At a normal pace it is about two and a half hours of walking.
An eight-mile day, next to the rest of the world
In 2017, researchers at Stanford used smartphone step counts to measure how much people walk around the world: 68 million days of activity from 717,527 people in 111 countries (Althoff and colleagues, Nature). The average user recorded 4,961 steps a day. An eight-mile day is about 18,300 steps, nearly four times that. The study does not rank individuals, so nobody can tell you your exact place, but at almost four times the worldwide average, a day like that is far from ordinary.
Eight miles a day, counted toward somewhere
In reTrek those 18,300 steps become distance on a real trail. Pick a route, Everest Base Camp is free, and eight miles a day carries you from Lukla to Base Camp in four or five days, with a short film about the place waiting at each milestone. A day like that deserves to show up on a map.
Or take someone with you: walk the same route with a friend and pool your steps, or race each other to Base Camp.
Other distances in steps
Sources: One-mile step count at walking and running speeds, Hoeger et al., ACSM's Health and Fitness Journal, 2008 · Body measurements, average height of US adults, CDC FastStats (NHANES August 2021 to August 2023) · Large-scale physical activity data reveal worldwide activity inequality, Althoff et al., Nature, 2017 · Counting steps via smartphones leads to clues about obesity trends, Stanford Medicine, 2017