Average half marathon time

Runsy's synthesis: the average half marathon finish time is around 1:59:40 for men and 2:19:11 for women. The one source publishing an overall figure gives a median of 2:14:59.

The men's figure is the most confidently sourced number anywhere on this site. Two studies, built from different samples and reporting different statistics (one a median, one an average converted from pace) land fifteen seconds apart at 1:59:48 and 1:59:33.

The women's figure from the same two studies is nine minutes and forty-four seconds apart. We do not have a confident explanation for the asymmetry, and rather than average it away quietly we are putting it at the top of the page. If you are a woman trying to work out whether your 2:18 is above or below average, the honest answer is that it lands squarely inside the range where the published sources cannot agree.

The Ljubljana figures sit outside the synthesis on purpose. They are one European city race in one year and both are markedly faster than the global numbers, which is what a single well-organised destination half marathon looks like. They are here as a third reading, not a third input, and the fact that a real race can be eight minutes quicker than the global median is itself worth knowing before you compare yourself to any average.

One further note on the mean-speed conversion: the paper publishes mean running speed in metres per second (3.14 for men, 2.77 for women), and the time equivalent of a mean speed is not the same as the mean of a set of times. Treat those two figures as approximate.

A likely error in one of the published tables

The percentile study's men's half marathon column reads 1:58:16 at the 40th percentile, 1:59:48 at the 50th and 2:09:58 at the 60th. A 92-second step followed by a ten-minute step is not a shape finish-time distributions have. We think one of those cells is wrong, we do not know which, and we have reproduced them as published rather than silently correcting somebody else's table. It is a reason to hold the men's median a little more loosely than its two-source agreement suggests.

Corrected on Oct 10, 2026

An earlier version printed the women's synthesis as 2:19:13 and the spread as 9:40. The arithmetic on the two published figures gives 2:19:11 and 9:44.

No single dataset reports finish-time distributions for road running. So instead of picking one number and calling it the average:

1. We collected every published central figure we could trace to a named source with a stated sample size.
2. We dropped anything we could not trace to its origin. A magazine quoting a statistic is not a source; we followed each figure back to the study that produced it.
3. We took the unweighted mean of what survived. Unweighted on purpose: the samples overlap heavily, so weighting by size would hand the answer to whichever study counted the most rows.
4. We printed the range as well as the midpoint. Where the sources disagree, the disagreement is the finding.

The result is Runsy's synthesis of published data, not a measurement of our own.

What the arithmetic cannot fix

Means and medians are being averaged together. The percentile study reports a 50th percentile; the others report an average. Finish times have a long slow tail, so a mean sits later than a median, which widens the range and pulls the midpoint slightly late.

Some figures are converted from a published pace. Where a source reports average pace per kilometre, we multiply by the race distance. That is arithmetic on their number, and each converted figure is labelled.

Most inputs share a publisher. The large studies all come from RunRepeat, so their agreement is one research operation agreeing with itself, not independent confirmation.

The two peer-reviewed papers on this page are independent of RunRepeat, but each covers a single city's race.

For a comparison that adjusts for your age and sex against a maintained published standard rather than against whoever entered, an age-graded percentage is the sounder instrument.

For a pace target instead, the half marathon pace chart covers every realistic finish time, and the half marathon pace calculator works out any goal between its rows.