Average breath hold time by age
Hold your breath, stop the timer, and the page places the result against two published reference sets: breath-hold times by age band, and the static requirements of the freediving certifications.
The answer to the question in the title is unsatisfying and worth knowing. Age barely moves this number. Protocol moves it enormously.
Opens with age-band scoring already switched on
- Same 30-second preparation, same timer
- Age bands from the one study that publishes them
- Certification and untrained reference times
- Your result placed against both, on the page
Nothing is sent anywhere. The comparison runs in your browser against published figures, and the study behind the age bands is named below.
Press Start when you are ready
What the age data actually shows
One published study reports mean breath-hold duration by age band: Trembach and Zabolotskikh, 2017, in BioMed Research International, on 47 healthy adults aged 25 to 85 in Krasnodar. Its four bands came out at 51 ± 13, 48 ± 11, 48 ± 8 and 47 ± 7 seconds.
Four seconds separate the youngest band from the oldest. The variation inside any one band is two to three times that. The authors state the result plainly: no correlation between age and duration (r = 0.13), and no significant difference between the groups. So the honest age table is a flat line, and anyone selling you a decade-by-decade decline is not reading a study.
Why your number will not match theirs
That study used a hold taken after inhaling two thirds of vital capacity, ended when an experimenter felt the diaphragm start to contract. Not a full breath. Not your own judgement of when to stop. You cannot run it on yourself, and the timer above does not.
Protocol is the largest single influence on any of these numbers. In the published literature on healthy young adults the means run from roughly 25 seconds after a tidal breath to over 100 seconds after a deep inhale, in populations that are otherwise alike. Compare your result with the level table below, where the entry conditions are at least stated, and compare it with your own previous attempts above all.
What a single attempt is worth
Very little on its own. Repeat measures in the same person move with distraction, time of day, caffeine, and how many attempts you have already made that hour. One study of successive trials found durations climbing by more than a third across six goes.
The test is reliable when the conditions are held still — reported within-subject variation of around six percent on a one-month retest. So hold the conditions still. Same position, same time of day, one attempt, three separate days, and take the middle value.
What this page is not
- Not a percentile against other visitors. Nobody's result is stored, so there is no distribution to rank you in. The bands are published figures and nothing else.
- Not a measure of your lungs. Breath-hold time is not a lung-capacity test and we do not present it as one. A short hold does not indicate a problem.
- Not a health check. No number here means anything about a condition, and none of it is medical advice.
- Not a target. The certification rows are pass marks for a course, reached with training and supervision. Chasing them alone in a pool is how people get hurt. Read the safety guide.
The reference bands this page scores against
Compiled 2026-09-04 from the published sources named in each row; the age rows are the four bands in Table 2 of Trembach and Zabolotskikh (2017), n = 47 in total.
| Band | Reference time | n | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Age 25 to 44 | 51 ± 13 s | 14 | Trembach & Zabolotskikh 2017 |
| Age 45 to 59 | 48 ± 11 s | 13 | Trembach & Zabolotskikh 2017 |
| Age 60 to 74 | 48 ± 8 s | 12 | Trembach & Zabolotskikh 2017 |
| Age 75 and over | 47 ± 7 s | 8 | Trembach & Zabolotskikh 2017 |
| Untrained adult | 30 to 60 s | 78 | Measured resting mean 29.67 ± 11.55 s |
| PADI Freediver | 1:30 | — | Published course standard |
| AIDA 2 | 2:00 | — | Published course standard |
| PADI Advanced Freediver | 2:30 | — | Published course standard |
| AIDA 3 | 2:45 | — | Published course standard |
| PADI Master Freediver, AIDA 4 | 3:30 | — | Published course standard |
| Competitive static apnea | 6 min and up | — | Finals-level competition times |
Read the age rows and the level rows as two different kinds of thing. The age rows are means from one small study, 8 to 14 people per band, on a protocol you cannot reproduce at home. The level rows are published pass marks, which is why they are exact.
The age rows span four seconds across fifty years of life. That is the finding. The study concluded that duration “did not depend on the age and did not differ between the groups”, and two further studies in this literature reach the same conclusion. The band you pick on this page will barely change the comparison, which is the point of showing all four.
Where this stops working: there is no dataset with per-decade percentiles for healthy adults, so this page cannot tell you what percentile you are in. It tells you which published reference times your result reaches. Anything offering you a percentile by age is making it up.
Sources: Trembach N, Zabolotskikh I, The Influence of Age on Interaction between Breath-Holding Test and Single-Breath Carbon Dioxide Test, BioMed Research International 2017, article 1010289 (PMID 28251147); the untrained figures and certification standards are the ones cited in how long can humans hold their breath.
Questions
- What is the average breath hold time by age?
- In the only published study reporting it by band, adults aged 25 to 44 averaged 51 seconds, 45 to 59 averaged 48, 60 to 74 averaged 48, and 75 and over averaged 47. The authors found no significant difference between the bands and no correlation between age and duration.
- Does breath hold time decrease with age?
- The evidence does not show that in healthy adults. Three independent studies report no age effect. The four-second spread across fifty years in the one age-banded dataset is smaller than the variation between people of the same age.
- What is a normal breath hold time for an adult?
- Most untrained adults land between 30 and 60 seconds. A measured resting mean in 78 healthy untrained young adults was 29.67 seconds with a standard deviation of 11.55, so a normal person in that sample sat anywhere from about 18 to 41 seconds.
- Why is my result different from the study averages?
- Mostly protocol. Holds after a deep inhale run two to four times longer than holds after a normal breath, in the same people on the same day. The age-band study also ended each hold when an experimenter felt the diaphragm contract, which is not what this timer measures.
- Does this page compare me with other users?
- No. Nothing you do here is stored or sent anywhere, so there is no pool of results to rank you against. Every band on the page comes from a published source that is named.
- How many times should I test to get a real number?
- Once per session, on three separate days, and take the middle value. Repeated attempts within one session drift longer because carbon dioxide is already raised, which flatters the result.
Where to go next
- Breath hold timer — the same timer without the reference bands, for tracking your own attempts
- BOLT score test — a shorter, steadier measurement taken after a normal exhale
- CO2 table for beginners — what to do with the number once you have one
- How long can humans hold their breath — the full sourcing behind every reference time on this page