What’s a ‘Good’ 5K Time? Here’s What the Latest Data Says

Recently, I saw a discussion on Reddit where a runner was aiming to get his 5-kilometer time under 20 minutes. It’s a really common goal for younger men, and he was looking for training advice on how to get there. Someone else responded, unhelpfully, that there are millions of people running under 20:00.

Perhaps the “millions” here was meant to be an exaggeration. But the implication is that 20:00 is an easy target, and it shouldn’t be hard to beat.

But that’s not true. I gathered (literally) 2.2 million individual finish times from 5K road races in the United States in 2024, and I can tell you that result is not common. In fact, there were only 41,150 results (1.85%) sub-20:00 5Ks in this large and representative sample.

If you narrow it down to just men who are between 15-22 years old, an age range that would include high school and college athletes, there were 11,641 out of 198,361 finishes (5.87%).

RELATED: A 10-Week Advanced 5K Training Plan

All this to say, if you’re looking for what a good 5K time is for you, don’t believe the trolls on Reddit. We all know a “good” or “fast” time is largely subjective and individual, but there is some objective data on the averages and ranges of recreational runners. My curiosity in the subject led me to look at these numbers, so you can see where you fall in your age group and gender.

Breakdown of Women’s 5K Results Analyzed

Breakdown of Men’s 5K Results Analyzed

Looking at 5K Averages by Median

A good starting point for defining a good 5K time is to take a look at the median result for each gender and age group. The median is a kind of average. It’s the midpoint of a group of data points. In this case, if you lined up 100 runners by their finish times, the median would be the runner who finished in 50th place.

The advantage of using a median time is that it’s more resistant to extreme outliers. The nature of race times is that you can only get so much faster, but you can get a whole lot slower. The fastest young men are going to be 10 to 12 minutes below that median time, but the slowest runners could be 30 or more minutes slower. If you calculated the straight average (the mean), those slower times would skew things far upwards.

The median finish time for a 5K in 2024 was about 36:00. But when you take a step back and segment that by gender, it turns into a 32:00 median for men and a 39:00 median for women. Add age to the mix, and those times will diverge even further.

For these purposes, I’ve limited results to times between 12 minutes (for reference, the men’s 5K road record is 12:49) and 1 hour, and I’ve limited runners to between 10-79 years of age. The age groups for younger runners are broken down to line up roughly with high school and college ages, and after that, runners are grouped into 10-year age groups.

For men, the fastest age group is 15-18 with a median time of 26:16. Runners younger than that were slower (30:38), and as you move up the age brackets the median slowly increases. Runners in their teens and 20s still come in beneath 30:00, but the median for men in their 30’s is just over 30:00. At the extreme end, men in their 70’s are under 39:38.

For women, the fastest age group is also 15-18 (33:44). The pattern is similar, with younger women slightly slower, and median times increasing with age. For the 50-59 age group and above, the median finish time is in the 40s.

A ‘Good’ 5K Time By Range

Another way to look at this question is to ask, “What is the range of normal finish times?” The interquartile range is the span that covers the middle 50% of results, inclusive of runners who are both slightly faster and slightly slower than the average.

Let’s take runners in their 30s as an example.

The median time for women is 36:34. If you move up to the top 25% mark, you’re at a finish time of 31:05, and if you move down to the bottom 25% mark, you’re at a finish time of 44:37. So the range of typical results is between 31:05 and 44:37. Anything faster than that is in the top 25% of results, and you could objectively call that faster than average.

For men in their 30’s, the median finish time is 30:32. The range between the top 25% and bottom 25% is 25:45 to 37:29.

So one simple answer to the question, “What’s a good 5K time (for runners in their 30s)?” is about 25:00 for men and 30:00 for women. Those times aren’t elite, and they probably aren’t going to win any local races, but they’re well faster than the average.

But let’s say you’re not content with just being faster than average. You’re competitive, and while you’re not going to win the race, you want to know what time will put you toward the front of the pack or perhaps get you an age-group award.

For that, you can look at the time in the top 5-10% of a given age group.

You’ll see in the table below that for men in their teens and early 20s, the top 5% mark is just over 18:00. For women, it’s 23:00 to 24:00.

The times for runners in their late 20’s and 30’s are similar—about 20:00 for men and 25:00 for women. So, if you think 20:00 is a good benchmark for a good time for men, 25:00 is a similar benchmark for women.

From there, the times increase with age. Through the 40s, 50s, and 60s, every ten years adds about a minute to the benchmark. There’s a much bigger gap between the 60s and 70s, and that top 5% mark is still 26:16 for men and 31:47 for women.

A ‘Good’ 5K Time by Distribution

A final way to help put this all into perspective is to look at the overall distribution of finish times. To do that in a normalized way, I grouped finish times in one-minute increments (20:00 to 20:59, etc.) and calculated what percentage of a given age group finished within that timeframe.

When you look at the distribution, you can quickly see that there is a small group of faster runners to the left, a large group of runners in that middle section of average times, and a longer tail to the right of slower-than-average runners.

Let’s zoom in on one particular age group,23 to 29, and see what these distributions look like for women and men.

This graph summarizes everything we’ve already said about what a “good” 5K time is for women.

The midpoint is at around 35 minutes, with the broader range of typical finish times spanning 30 to 43 minutes. To the left, the top 5% (25 minutes) and top 10% (27 minutes) are marked.

So you can see that once you move past 25 minutes, there’s still quite a ways to go. But you’re in exceedingly rare company. A 23-29-year-old woman finishing under 20 minutes would be in the top 1% of her age group.

And here’s a similar graph to summarize the data for men in that same age group. The median time is around 30 minutes, with a range of typical times spanning 25 to 36 minutes. The top 5% mark is around 20 minutes, and the top 10% mark is around 22 minutes.

It’s All About Perspective

At the end of the day, what constitutes a good 5K time is a personal question. And, any data analyst will tell you, a number, absent any context, isn’t that meaningful. A good time is going to vary quite a bit based on your gender, age, and training history. A former D1 athlete is going to look at things differently from an adult-onset runner in their 50s.

But when you take stock of where you are and set goals for where you want to get to, it helps to be realistic about what other runners in your age group are doing. This data offers some clear benchmarks to use, and you can decide how high you want to climb up the ladder.