Resting Heart Rate by Age: A Chart Built From Real Data

The short answer: age changes resting heart rate a lot in childhood and very little after that. In US national survey data, mean resting pulse falls from 129 bpm under age 1 to 78 bpm in early adolescence, then plateaus around 72 bpm in adults. Among adults, the spread between people (40 to 109 bpm in one large study) is far bigger than any difference between age groups, so your own baseline is the number that matters.

Resting heart rate by age: the chart

Most charts online slice adults into narrow bands like “athlete”, “good” and “poor”, but rarely say where those cut-offs come from. The cleanest reference data for the US comes from NHANES, the national health survey. A 2011 National Health Statistics Reports analysis used a normative sample of 35,302 people with no condition or medication affecting their pulse, measured after about 4 minutes of seated rest.

The drop is steep through childhood and then stops. After adolescence, the adult mean plateaus at 72 bpm.

For babies and children, the most thorough reference is a 2011 systematic review in The Lancet that pooled heart rate data from 69 studies covering 143,346 healthy children. Median heart rate rose from 127 bpm at birth to a peak of 145 bpm at about 1 month, then fell to 113 bpm by age 2. The authors also found striking disagreement between their centiles and the ranges published in existing guidelines, which is a good reason to be skeptical of any chart that doesn’t name its source.

Adults: the spread between people beats the age band

Once you’re an adult, the question “what’s normal for my age?” has a disappointing answer: almost everything.

A 2020 PLoS ONE study followed 92,457 US adults who wore a wrist tracker for at least 35 weeks. Their mean daily resting heart rate was 65 bpm, but individual averages ranged from 40 to 109 bpm. The authors put it plainly: two people’s normal resting heart rates can differ by as much as 70 bpm.

Age did show up: the mean differed significantly by age, sex, BMI and average sleep duration. But that is a shift in averages, not a reason to judge one reading against an age band. A separate 2019 npj Digital Medicine study of 66,788 people who checked their heart rate with a smartphone app also found that increasing age was associated with a lower heart rate. Those readings were on-demand spot checks rather than true resting measurements (the mean was 79.1 bpm), but the upper limits it reported are a useful sanity check by age:

Women vs. men

Women tend to run higher. In the 92,457-person wearable study, mean resting heart rate differed significantly by sex, and in the 66,788-person smartphone study, female sex and higher BMI were both associated with a higher heart rate.

The practical takeaway:

• A chart that ignores sex is already blending two different distributions.
• A chart split by sex and age still can’t tell you what’s normal for you, because the spread within each group is wide.

Why your own baseline matters more than any chart

The same wearable study is the best argument against reading too much into a single number. Most people were stable week to week, but 20% had at least one week in which their resting heart rate moved by 10 bpm or more. There was even a seasonal pattern, with resting heart rate lowest in July and highest in January.

That’s the same logic that applies to HRV on the Apple Watch: a personal trend is informative, and a one-off comparison with strangers mostly isn’t. A sustained rise above your usual range is more useful information than where you sit on a chart, especially alongside sleep and recent training load.

How training changes resting heart rate

Fitness moves the number more than age does. A 2005 meta-analysis in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise pooled 13 controlled studies with 651 previously sedentary older adults (group mean ages of 60 or more). Aerobic training lowered resting heart rate by about 6 bpm on average, an 8.4% reduction. The larger, statistically significant drop appeared in programs longer than 30 weeks, so expect months, not weeks.

That’s why “athlete” columns on charts sit so low. A 2025 review in Folia Medica Cracoviensia notes that training-induced resting bradycardia is typical of endurance athletes but also often occurs in less-trained, physically active people. The same review adds a caveat: rates below 40 bpm could be a matter of concern for athletes’ health. A very low number, or a sudden change you can’t explain with training, is worth a conversation with a clinician rather than a chart lookup.

Tracking your resting heart rate over time

If you wear an Apple Watch, resting heart rate is already being recorded in Apple Health every day, so you don’t need to count your pulse by hand. Corpus reads it (along with sleep, HRV and recent training load) as optional recovery context next to your body-composition check-ins; the methodology page lists exactly which signals it uses. A resting heart rate that stays above your usual range for several days is one of the signals worth weighing before deciding whether you need a deload.