What’s a good mile run time for your age? Times sorted by age and sex

The mile is one of the oldest yardsticks in adult fitness testing. The times that coaches and clinicians treat as "excellent," "good" or "average" shift with each decade of life.

Widely referenced mile-run benchmarks compiled from Cooper-style fitness testing put an excellent mile at under 7 minutes for a man in his 20s and under 8 minutes for a woman in her 20s. Those thresholds ease by roughly 30 to 60 seconds a decade, tracking the gradual decline in aerobic capacity that begins in the mid-20s and steepens after 40.

Mile run benchmarks by age and sex

The bands below are commonly cited targets for adult men and women, adapted from Cooper testing standards. Times are in minutes and seconds.

Treat these as targets for reasonably active adults rather than population averages. A time in the "average" band is a solid marker of everyday cardiovascular fitness for a non-athlete.

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The longer test behind the numbers

The mile benchmarks trace back to work done by Dr. Kenneth Cooper, an Air Force physician who built the modern field-testing playbook. His own institute, the Cooper Institute in Dallas, publishes norms for a slightly longer distance, the 1.5-mile run, drawn from decades of testing at the Cooper Clinic.

At the 50th percentile, a man aged 20 to 29 covers 1.5 miles in about 11 minutes 58 seconds, and a woman in the same age range in about 14 minutes 15 seconds, according to a compiled version of the norms. Median times slow by roughly a minute per decade for men and a little more for women.

Cooper Clinic patients are self-selected for preventive-health assessment, so these medians skew slightly faster than what a random cross-section of adults would produce.

An alternative for people who dislike an all-out mile

Before there were mile-run charts, there was the Cooper Test. In 1968, Dr. Cooper published a 12-minute run test that has become one of the most widely used field tests of aerobic fitness worldwide.

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He was looking for a low-cost way to estimate aerobic fitness outside a lab, and validated the test against direct VO2 max measurements in 115 Air Force personnel, reporting a correlation of 0.897.

Standards for the 12-minute test put "excellent" for men aged 20 to 29 at more than 2,800 meters and for women in the same age group at more than 2,700 meters, with thresholds falling by roughly 100 to 200 meters per decade. If a timed all-out mile is uncomfortable, the 12-minute test spreads the effort more evenly.

How to use the numbers

A benchmark is only useful if you plan to retest. Run the mile on the same flat route, in similar weather, and after a similar warmup, then look for a 15 to 30 second improvement over a training block of eight to twelve weeks.

If you are returning to exercise after a long break, building up to a full mile without stopping is a reasonable first goal. Our archive covers that starting point in a piece on how far you should be able to run continuously by age.

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Anyone with cardiovascular disease, uncontrolled high blood pressure or a history of chest pain on exertion should talk to a doctor before attempting an all-out timed run.

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This article is made and published by Jesper Bengtson, who may have used AI in the preparation.