The guide

How many steps do you need?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 14, 20267 sources

About 7,000 steps a day. In a 2025 review of 57 studies, 7,000 against 2,000 went with 47% lower risk of death, and the curve bent at about 5,000 to 7,000. For people 60 and up it flattened at 6,000 to 8,000. The 10,000 target started as a business slogan.

10,000 is everywhere. It’s the default goal on most watches, the number on the office challenge poster, the one your phone celebrates with fireworks. So a person who walks 6,000 steps a day feels like they’re failing, when the studies put them on the steep, rewarding part of the curve. And a person at 12,000 can feel like they’ve done their exercise for the day, when their arms, back and chest haven’t done any work at all.

Where did 10,000 come from?

It didn’t come from a study. In 2004, two step researchers, Catrine Tudor-Locke and David Bassett, wrote that the 10,000 figure “can be traced to Japanese walking clubs and a business slogan 30+ years ago”. They thought it was a reasonable mark for an active, healthy adult, and they proposed a scale around it: under 5,000 steps a day as sedentary, 5,000 to 7,499 as typical of daily life without exercise, 7,500 to 9,999 as somewhat active, 10,000 and up as active, and over 12,500 as highly active. They also warned that 10,000 “may not be sustainable for some groups, including older adults and those living with chronic diseases.”

Fifteen years later, a team studying 16,741 older US women opened their paper by saying 10,000 “is commonly believed by the public to be necessary for health, but this number has limited scientific basis.” Then they measured what those women actually needed, which is further down this page. The 10,000 steps myth has the rest of the story.

What does the curve look like?

In 2022, researchers pooled 15 studies from around the world where 47,471 adults wore a step counter, and followed them for a median of 7.1 years. They split people into four equal groups by steps a day and compared each with the least active group.

Lower risk of death than the least active quarter, at each group’s median steps a day. Paluch and colleagues, Lancet Public Health, 2022. Shaded, where the curve flattened for adults under 60. For adults 60 and up it flattened at 6,000 to 8,000.

The second group, at a median of 5,801 steps, already had 40% lower risk than the first group at 3,553. The third group, at 7,842, had 45% lower. The most active, at 10,901, had 53% lower. Most of the drop came with the first couple of thousand extra steps. The age split is the part that changed the advice: risk kept falling until about 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day in adults under 60, and until about 6,000 to 8,000 in adults 60 and older.

The biggest review yet

In 2025, a team led by Ding Ding pulled together 57 studies from 35 groups of people, every study they could find where adults wore a device that counted steps. Against 2,000 steps a day, 7,000 went with these drops in risk.

It also went with 37% lower risk of dying of cancer, 14% less type 2 diabetes and 22% fewer depressive symptoms. For deaths, heart disease, dementia and falls, the curve bent at around 5,000 to 7,000 steps and flattened after that. The authors wrote that 10,000 “can still be a viable target for those who are more active”, and that 7,000 “might be a more realistic and achievable target for some”. They rated their certainty as moderate for most of these, and very low for falls.

What about Americans, and older women?

• US adults 40 and up. In 4,840 Americans from a national health survey who wore an accelerometer for a week and were followed for 10 years, 8,000 steps a day went with 51% lower risk of death than 4,000, and 12,000 with 65% lower.
• Women around 72. In 16,741 US women in the Women’s Health Study, as few as about 4,400 steps a day went with lower death rates than about 2,700. Rates kept falling with more steps and leveled off near 7,500.

A picture from daily life

Think of a store that only takes deliveries while its loading door is open. A gym hour opens the door wide once a day. Walking around through the day opens it again every time you get up.

That’s close to how your muscles handle sugar. A working muscle moves sugar transporters (GLUT4) to its surface and pulls sugar in from the blood by its own signals, and training adds more transporters. The muscle pulls hardest while it’s working, so steps spread across the day keep that going between workouts.

Does it matter how fast you walk?

For the steps curve, less than you’d think. In the 15-cohort study, once total steps were counted, the time people spent walking at 100 steps a minute or faster didn’t add a clear benefit. The US study and the study of older women found the same: faster stepping looked better at first, and most of that went away once total steps were taken into account.

Pace still counts for the other goal. Steps at about 100 a minute or faster are brisk walking, so those minutes count toward your 150 a week. Slower steps count toward your steps and not toward the 150. What counts as exercise?

How long does it take?

At a brisk 100 steps a minute, 1,000 steps is about 10 minutes of walking, so 7,000 would be about 70 minutes and 10,000 about 100. Nobody walks them all in one go. Ordinary life without any exercise already comes to about 5,000 to 7,500 steps for many adults, by Tudor-Locke and Bassett’s scale, so the gap to 7,000 is often one walk. Under 60 at 4,500 steps a day, the flat part of the curve is about 3,500 steps away, a 35-minute walk. At 60 and up, it’s about 1,500 steps away, a 15-minute walk. Steps for your age works out yours.

Isn’t 10,000 still better?

What these studies can’t tell you

They count steps for about a week and then follow people for years, so a single week stands in for a lifestyle. People who were already sick walk less, and the researchers tried to adjust for that, but they can’t remove it completely. The 2025 review also noted there weren’t enough studies to split every result by age. None of this gives you a personal risk, and steps count only part of the week. Your strength days still need their own time, and the calories in a day of steps are on tdee.guide.