Average walking speed by age

The short answer

About 5 km/h, or 3.1 miles an hour, for adults under 50, which is a mile in roughly 19 to 20 minutes. Walking speed then eases slowly with age, to around 4.4 km/h (2.7 mph) in the sixties, 4.1 km/h (2.6 mph) in the seventies and 3.6 km/h (2.2 mph) after 80. The figures come from a 2023 meta-analysis that pooled 79 studies of 51,248 healthy adults (Andrews and colleagues, Journal of Physiotherapy).

Average walking speed by age

The comfortable walking speed of healthy, independent adults, in each decade of life:

Age	Average speed	A mile takes	A kilometre takes
18 to 29	4.9 km/h (3.1 mph)	about 19½ minutes	about 12 minutes
30 to 39	5.0 km/h (3.1 mph)	about 19½ minutes	about 12 minutes
40 to 49	4.9 km/h (3.0 mph)	about 20 minutes	about 12 minutes
50 to 59	4.6 km/h (2.9 mph)	about 21 minutes	about 13 minutes
60 to 69	4.4 km/h (2.7 mph)	about 22 minutes	about 14 minutes
70 to 79	4.1 km/h (2.6 mph)	about 23 minutes	about 14½ minutes
80+	3.6 km/h (2.2 mph)	about 27 minutes	about 17 minutes

These are one average per decade that we built from the study’s figures, weighting each by the number of people behind it, and converted from centimetres a second.

How speed changes with age

Slowly. Average walking speed barely changes from the twenties to the late forties, then eases a little with each decade, with the biggest step after 80. The variation between people also grows with age: for people in their sixties, the authors estimate that the true average of a new group could fall anywhere between about 3.0 and 5.9 km/h, a much wider range than for young adults, and they point to differences in health and height as part of the reason. So the table is a typical figure, not a target.

Does it depend on where you live?

No. The authors also split the data by continent and found that the ranges overlapped for almost every age group, so they concluded there is no need for separate walking speeds by region. The one exception was adults aged 18 to 29 in Asia, who walked more slowly, and the authors call that finding tenuous because it rests on fewer than 50 people.

What “comfortable speed” means here

These are speeds people chose when asked to walk at their normal, comfortable pace, timed over a short stretch of 2 to 30 m after a run-up, so the start and stop were not counted. Over a long walk, with crossings, hills and company, a real average pace can differ. For working out walking times, 5 km/h is a fair round number for an adult under 50, and 4 km/h for a relaxed walk at any age.

Your speed, in time and steps

How long it takes to walk a mile turns these speeds into times for common distances, how long it takes to walk 10,000 steps does the same for a step count, and the walking calculator lets you pick your own pace. If you want to know whether you are walking briskly, what is brisk walking has the simplest checks.

Any pace, counted toward somewhere

Speed matters less than you might think: a kilometre walked slowly is the same kilometre. reTrek turns your daily steps into distance along a real route, with a short film about the place waiting at each milestone, so every walk counts at whatever pace suits you. Everest Base Camp is free. Start walking it.