How long does it take to walk a mile?

You've signed up for a charity walk, or your doctor suggested a mile a day, or you just want to know whether your 22-minute mile is slow. Search for how long a mile walk is and you'll find a dozen answers, from 12 minutes to 30, most with no source attached.

The spread is real, because a mile takes different people very different amounts of time. It also has clear causes. Pace explains most of it. Age and height explain a little more, and the setting (treadmill, sidewalk, trail or hill) adds the rest. This page gives you the numbers for each, taken from studies that timed real walkers: minutes per mile by pace and by age, steps per mile, how long 2, 3 and 5 miles take, and how treadmills and hills change your time.

How Long to Walk a Mile at Each Pace

Pace is the biggest factor by far. At 3 miles per hour, a common everyday walking speed, a mile takes exactly 20 minutes. Speed up to 4 mph, a brisk walk where talking takes some effort, and it takes 15. Slow down to a 2 mph stroll and it takes 30.

The step counts come from Tudor-Locke and colleagues (2019), who hand-counted the steps of 76 adults aged 21 to 40 walking on a treadmill at each speed. The average participant was about 5 ft 7 in tall, so shorter walkers take a few more steps per mile and taller walkers a few fewer.

Out on real sidewalks, people sort themselves into similar bands. Murtagh and colleagues (2021) pooled 35 studies of 14,015 healthy adults walking outdoors. At their usual pace they averaged 1.31 meters per second, about 2.9 mph, which works out to a 20.5-minute mile. A "medium" pace came out at about 18 minutes per mile, a fast pace at about 15.5 minutes and a slow one at about 33 minutes. Women's usual pace was about 21 minutes per mile and men's about 19.5.

So the average time to walk a mile is about 20 minutes if you walk the way you normally do, and 15 to 18 minutes if you walk with purpose. Anything from 15 to 22 minutes is a normal mile for a healthy adult.

Average Time to Walk a Mile by Age and Sex

Age changes your mile time less than most people expect, at least until your 70s. The best reference is a meta-analysis by Bohannon and Williams Andrews (2011), who pooled comfortable walking speeds from 41 studies and 23,111 adults and split them by sex and decade. Converted into minutes per mile, the averages look like this:

Speeds are the meta-analysis means (1.36 to 1.43 meters per second for men under 60, for example), converted to mph and minutes per mile and rounded.

Three things stand out. Men and women stay within about 2 minutes a mile of each other at every age. The average barely moves from the 20s through the 60s, staying within 2 minutes of a 20-minute mile. The big change comes after 80, when the average mile stretches to about 28 minutes.

These are comfortable speeds measured over short walkways in clinics and labs, so read them as typical everyday pace, not a fitness test. The authors note that the values don't apply to walks timed from a standing start or ones that include a turn. Your own mile can sit well above or below your age group's average, because fitness, leg length and health matter more than your birthday.

How Many Steps Are in a Mile?

A mile is about 2,000 to 2,500 steps for most adults at a normal walking pace. Two things set the number: how tall you are and how fast you walk. Most step counters estimate your step length at about 41 percent of your height, so taller walkers need fewer steps to cover the same mile:

Pace moves the count about as much as height does. Faster walking lengthens each step, so in the treadmill study above the same people needed about 2,880 steps for a mile at 2 mph and about 1,940 at 4 mph. That's why a tracker's mile count can drift on days you walk slowly. Our page on how many miles 10,000 steps is runs the same arithmetic the other way, from steps to distance.

How Long Does It Take to Walk 2, 3 or 5 Miles?

Multiply your mile time by the distance. At an average 3 mph, 2 miles takes 40 minutes, 3 miles takes an hour and 5 miles takes an hour and 40 minutes.

A 5K, which is 3.1 miles, takes about 47 minutes at 4 mph and a little over an hour at 3 mph. A 20-mile walk is 6 hours and 40 minutes of walking at 3 mph before any breaks, which is why charity walks of that length take most of a day.

Long walks usually take longer than the table says. Over several miles most people slow down as they tire, and they stop for water, traffic lights or a bathroom. When you plan a walk of 5 miles or more, add a few minutes for every hour on your feet.

Treadmill vs Outdoors: Why Your Mile Time Changes

Plenty of walkers notice they're slower on a treadmill, and the research backs them up. Malatesta and colleagues (2017) let 20 young adults and 25 active adults aged 66 to 80 choose their own comfortable speed on the ground and on a treadmill. Both groups walked about 9 to 10 percent slower on the treadmill. For the young adults, that's the difference between a 19.5-minute mile outdoors and a 21.5-minute mile on the belt. For the active older group, who walked a little faster, it was about 18.5 minutes against 20.5.

Part of the gap is caution. A moving belt sets the pace for you, so many people shorten their steps or reach for the rails. Holding the rails takes some of your weight off your legs, so a speed that feels comfortable while gripping the rails is easier than the same speed outdoors.

Outdoors has its own drag: traffic lights, curbs, wind and uneven ground. A GPS watch that keeps running at every crossing will log a slower mile than your true walking pace. For a fair comparison, time a mile on a flat track or path with no stops.

You may have heard that a treadmill should be set to a 1 percent incline. That advice comes from running research. Jones and Doust (1996) found a 1 percent grade made treadmill running cost about the same energy as running outdoors, to make up for the missing air resistance. At walking speeds air resistance is small, so a flat treadmill is a fair match for a flat sidewalk.

How Much Do Hills Slow You Down?

Hills add time to every mile, and the steeper the grade, the more they add. Walkers and hikers have estimated it for more than a century with two rules of thumb. Naismith's rule, from 1892, allows an hour for every 3 miles on the flat plus an extra hour for every 2,000 feet of climb. Tobler's hiking function, published in 1993, predicts walking speed from slope and puts the fastest pace on a very slight downhill. Campbell and colleagues (2019), who modeled travel speed from the GPS tracks of 29,928 people on trails around Salt Lake City, note that both rules estimate about 1.4 meters per second on flat ground, a little over 3 mph.

Applied to one mile, the two rules give these ranges:

• Flat ground: about 19 to 20 minutes.
• Gentle 5 percent grade (about 260 feet of climb per mile): about 23 to 28 minutes.
• Steady 10 percent grade (about 530 feet per mile): about 27 to 36 minutes.
• Steep 15 percent grade (about 790 feet per mile): about 32 to 44 minutes.

By our arithmetic, the lower figure in each range comes from Tobler's function and the higher one from Naismith's rule. Downhill isn't free either. On steep descents people slow down to brake and pick their footing, which is why both Tobler's function and Campbell's models show speed falling again as the slope gets steeper in either direction.

Effort climbs faster than time does. If you try to hold your flat pace uphill, your heart rate rises quickly, which makes hills and treadmill inclines an easy way to get more exercise out of the same 20 minutes. Our review of incline walking research covers what the studies show.

How to Walk a Faster Mile

Most people can take a minute or more off their mile with practice. The quickest win is cadence, the number of steps you take each minute. Take shorter, quicker steps instead of longer ones, bend your elbows and swing your arms, and push off from your toes. About 100 steps a minute is where walking becomes moderate exercise for most adults, and about 130 is vigorous, according to the same 2019 treadmill study. Count your steps for 15 seconds and multiply by four to find your own cadence.

Then practice the faster pace in short stretches. One or two walks a week with one to two minutes quick and one to two minutes easy, repeated, build speed better than the same steady pace every day. Leg strength helps too, especially after 60. Our guide on how to walk faster has the technique steps and a six-week plan.

If you'd like to jog part of the distance, our guide to how long it takes to run a mile covers running times by age and experience.

Is a 20-Minute Mile Good?

Yes. A 20-minute mile is a normal, healthy pace for most adults, within 2 minutes of the average for every age group from the 20s to the 60s. A 15- to 17-minute mile is brisk. If your comfortable mile takes more than about 25 minutes before your 70s, it's worth working on, because walking pace tracks fitness.

Pace also tracks health. Hamer and Chida (2008) pooled 18 prospective studies covering 459,833 people. Those who walked the most had a 31 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 32 percent lower risk of dying during follow-up than those who walked the least. Walking pace predicted risk more strongly than walking volume did. These are observational studies, so a brisk pace may partly reflect people who were already healthier. Still, every brisk mile counts toward the 150 minutes of moderate activity a week that health guidelines recommend.

For perspective, the fastest mile ever walked under race-walking rules took Britain's Tom Bosworth 5 minutes 31.08 seconds, set in London in 2017. Race walking is a sport of its own, with a technique most walkers will never use. For everyone else, a steady 15 to 20 minutes is a solid mile.

What This Means for You

Time one mile this week on a flat path or track, at the pace you'd use for a fitness walk. Under 20 minutes puts you at or ahead of the average for your age. Over 20 is a starting point, and the faster-mile steps above will bring it down.

The harder part is keeping the walks going week after week. When people stop walking, it's usually because the walk never got a fixed place in their day. Pick a time, attach the walk to something you already do and keep it short enough to survive a busy day. If you want help with the rest of your training, our guide to the best fitness app for beginners shows how FitCraft pairs bodyweight and dumbbell workouts with streaks and leaderboards, led by 3D AI coaches who demonstrate every exercise. As Katie, a FitCraft user, put it: "I've tried everything. This is the first time I've stuck with something past two weeks."