Treadmill pace chart

This is the master table the rest of the site is built from. The first column is the number on an imperial console, the second is the same speed in km/h for anyone following a metric plan, and the last two columns are the paces that speed produces. Scan it once and a pattern emerges: the pace gaps shrink as speed rises. Stepping from 3 to 4 mph buys you five minutes per mile; stepping from 11 to 12 mph buys you less than half a minute. That is why the first increases on a new plan feel dramatic and the later ones feel unfair — the arithmetic, not your fitness, is changing. If your question runs the other way, from a known pace to the speed it needs, the treadmill pace converter swaps between pace and speed in all four units at once.

Two rows are worth memorising. The 6.5 mph row, 9:14 per mile and 5:44 per kilometre, is the setting runners ask about more than any other — it sits at the boundary between a comfortable endurance run and honest work for many trained runners. The 8.0 mph row, a 7:30 mile, is where steady running turns into tempo for most of the same group.

If your machine thinks in kilometres, this is your home table. It is not a rounding of the mph chart: it is built on the whole km/h steps a metric console actually offers, from a 2 km/h stroll to a 20 km/h sprint, with the mph equivalent shown so an imperial plan can still be followed. Note the round rows: 10 km/h is a 6:00 kilometre, 12 km/h is a 5:00 kilometre, and 15 km/h is a 4:00 kilometre. Metric runners anchor their plans to those rows the way imperial runners anchor to the 10:00 mile. For a one-off conversion rather than the whole table, the calculator on the treadmill pace calculator homepage converts in both units live as you type.

An incline does not change your pace — the belt still moves at the speed you set — but it changes what that pace costs, and cost is what training actually trains. This table prices the difference. Each cell is the flat pace that would demand the same energy as the speed and grade at the head of its row and column, from the published Minetti energy-cost model: 7.0 mph at 3 percent is roughly a 7:18 flat mile, not the 8:34 mile on the belt. Coaches call this grade-adjusted pace, and it is the only fair way to log a hill session next to a flat one. At 0 percent, GAP is simply your pace. For the full grade range, energy cost at every percent and your elevation gain, the incline pace calculator does the same maths interactively.

Every other table on this page starts from speed, because that is what the treadmill shows. This one starts from pace, because that is what a training plan shows — and plans have a habit of arriving in the wrong unit. Find your plans pace in the first column and the row hands you the same effort per kilometre and the belt setting in both unit systems, for every pace from a 5:00 mile down to a 15:00 mile in 30-second steps. Keep this table next to the pace converter and no plan, in either ruler, can strand you again.

Charts speak in numbers; beginners need sentences. This table covers the speeds most new treadmill users will actually touch, from a warm-up walk to a comfortable run, and translates each one into how it feels and a sensible first dose. The doses are deliberately modest — the goal of a first month is a habit you repeat, not a workout you survive — and the honest progression is to extend the time on a row before climbing to the next one. If walking is your whole programme rather than your starting point, the walking pace calculator goes deeper: every walking speed with its pace, incline walking explained, and a gentle plan built from rows like these.

Every pace on this page comes from that single line. Speed says how many miles or kilometres the belt covers in an hour; dividing the 3,600 seconds in an hour by that speed gives the seconds each mile or kilometre takes, written here as minutes and seconds. The unit conversions underneath are exact: one mile is 1.609344 kilometres by international definition, so an mph figure multiplied by 1.609344 is the km/h figure with nothing lost. The incline table adds the one model on the page — the Minetti energy-cost curve — and expresses each grade as the flat pace of equal cost. Paces are rounded to the nearest second throughout, which is why a row can sit a second away from a hand calculation done with unrounded numbers. Full reasoning and sources are set out on the methodology page.

Formulas checked against Jones & Doust (1996) and Minetti et al. (2002) — every source is named on the Methodology page. Found a wrong number? Report an error.