What’s a good mile time?

Updated August 26, 2026 · By the Runked team

A timed mile is the distance used in FITNESSGRAM's school fitness test (see below) and a simple casual benchmark to time without a track or a race entry. "Good" still depends on age, sex and training history. Running Level publishes a five-band mile scale, Beginner through Elite, and the tables below transcribe it directly.

Mile time by age and sex

This table is Runked's own arrangement of Running Level's data: the site's "Intermediate" band (its middle of five levels) at six adult ages, for men and women.

Running Level's standards repeat the same figures across the 20s and 30s before rising with age from the mid-30s on; that repetition comes directly from the published source data.

Mile time by ability level

The same source publishes all five bands at once. Here they are for the 20s-to-30s age group, where Running Level's own age brackets are identical:

Running Level defines each band against its own runner population: Beginner is "faster than 5% of runners," Novice "faster than 20% of runners," Intermediate "faster than 50% of runners," Advanced "faster than 80% of runners," and Elite "faster than 95% of runners," alongside the source's own experience description for each band (Beginner "has started running and has run for at least a month"; Elite "has dedicated over five years to become competitive at running"). The site does not state the size of that comparison population, so read the bands as a labeled scale rather than a claim about every runner. Because each band is relative, the word "Beginner" points to a different clock time at every age in the first table.

For scale: the world record

Per World Athletics, the ratified men's mile world record is 3:42.66, run by Josh Kerr at the Diamond League meeting in London on 18 July 2026, improving on Hicham El Guerrouj's mark that had stood since 1999. Per World Athletics, the ratified women's mile world record is 4:07.64, run by Faith Kipyegon in Monaco on 21 July 2023. Both times are track records under competition conditions; nobody reading this table needs to get near them. They exist here only to give "good" a ceiling.

The school mile: a fitness-test benchmark

If your only prior mile time comes from a school fitness test, this is likely the standard it was measured against. The FITNESSGRAM Standards for the Healthy Fitness Zone, published by the Cooper Institute in the FITNESSGRAM/ACTIVITYGRAM Test Administration Manual (4th edition, 2007), set a one-mile-run time range for each school age rather than a single cutoff. The copy verified here is hosted on a Virginia public school district's website rather than the Cooper Institute's own domain, but it carries the Cooper Institute's original copyright notice. A selection:

Running the mile inside that range (or faster than the fast end) meets FITNESSGRAM's Healthy Fitness Zone at that age; slower than the range falls below it. It is a health screening threshold set for school-age testing. Comparing a decade-old school time directly to the adult standards above conflates two scales built for two different purposes.

How to apply it

Treat the tables above as reference points for a single session:

• Time a mile on a flat, measured course. A track lap times four is the simplest way to get a comparable number; road GPS distance can be off by a few percent, which matters more over a single mile than a longer race.
• Warm up before treating it as a time trial. A cold, first-effort mile reads slower than a mile run after ten minutes of easy jogging and a couple of strides.
• Compare the number to yourself, not to the runner next to you. Runked's rank starts everyone at Bronze and only moves on your own runs, so progress reads against your own history instead of an age-group average.
• Build toward it with a mix of paces. Runked's 5K training plan includes the easy running and interval work a faster mile is built on, since a mile time rarely improves from mile time trials alone.

Common mistakes

• Comparing a first attempt to the Elite column. Running Level's Elite band sits near its comparison group's 95th percentile; it is not the standard a first timed mile should be judged against.
• Ignoring age when comparing to a training partner. The age-and-sex table above shows why: an Intermediate mile at 60 is 1:31 slower than at 30 for men and 1:59 slower for women, on the same source's own numbers.
• Treating a school fitness-test time as an adult standard. FITNESSGRAM's ranges are set for school-age testing; the adult tables above use a different source and a different population.
• Running the whole mile at the fastest sustainable pace from the gun. A first quarter mile run too fast tends to cost more time in the last quarter than it gains early; steady effort across four laps of a track is easier to judge than a fast start.

What to do next

A mile time trial is a useful one-off check, but a single number does not show whether training is working over weeks. Runked's race-time predictor estimates current pace across distances from recent training instead of requiring a fresh time trial each time, and fitness and fatigue tracking flags when a harder training block is about to pay off or backfire. For the next distance up, what counts as a good 5K time runs the same exercise on 5K data, and average running pace covers the same ground in minutes per kilometre or mile rather than a fixed race distance.

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