Loading Pace Unit Converter…
m:ss
3.333
The base every row below is converted through
A mile is 1609.344 metres exactly, so min/km and min/mile differ by that ratio and nothing else — a 5:00 kilometre is an 8:03 mile, not an 8:00 one. Pace and speed are reciprocals with an hour folded in: 3600 divided by a pace in seconds gives the speed, and the same division takes it back.
A treadmill belt speed is not a road pace. Belts are calibrated to the motor rather than to your stride, drift as they wear, and read in km/h in most of the world and mph in the United States — which is the conversion this page exists for. Nothing here adjusts for gradient.
Minutes per kilometre, minutes per mile, kilometres per hour and miles per hour describe one thing. Which one you meet depends on where you are standing: a European road race marks kilometres, an American one marks miles, and almost every treadmill and exercise bike in either place reports a speed rather than a pace. Converting between them on a phone keypad is a small, error-prone chore, and this page is that chore automated.
Pace and speed are inverses with an hour folded into them. Divide 3600 by a pace in seconds and you have the speed; divide 3600 by the speed and you have the pace back. It is the same division in both directions, which is why one of these is never harder than the other.
Rather than maintaining twelve conversions between four units, the page converts whatever you type into metres per second and dresses that single value up four ways. Four conversions can be checked; twelve drift apart at the edges, and the pair that drifted is always the pair nobody tested.
Metres per second is also worth reading in its own right. It is the unit sports science papers report running speeds in, so a threshold or an economy figure quoted from a study lines up with the top line here without any further arithmetic.
A belt is set in km/h across most of the world and in mph in the United States, which is why a session written by a coach in one country reads as nonsense on a machine in the other. Ten km/h is 6.21 mph and a 6:00 kilometre; eight mph is 12.87 km/h and a 7:30 mile. Those are the numbers this converter exists to hand over without a pause at the console.
Belt speed is a claim by the motor rather than a measurement of you, and calibration drifts as a machine ages. If indoor and outdoor efforts at the same displayed number feel unlike each other, believe the effort. Andrew Jones and Jonathan Doust reported in the Journal of Sports Sciences in 1996 that a 1 per cent gradient most closely matches the energetic cost of running outdoors at speeds between 2.92 and 5.0 metres per second — one of the few adjustments in this area with a study behind it, and one this page deliberately leaves to you rather than baking in.
Three or four fixed points make most conversions estimable in your head. A 6:00 kilometre is 10 km/h. A 5:00 kilometre is 12 km/h and a shade over eight minutes a mile. A 4:00 kilometre is 15 km/h. Ten mph is a 6:00 mile, and 6 mph is a 10:00 mile — the mph scale is unusually friendly that way.
From any anchor, the direction of travel is the part people invert: a bigger pace number is slower, a bigger speed number is faster. If a conversion comes back looking wrong, that reversal is the first thing to check.
Because it is the value every row underneath is derived from, and showing it makes the structure of the page visible rather than hidden. It is also the unit physiology literature uses, which makes comparing against a published figure straightforward.
Divide sixty by the pace in decimal minutes. A 5:00 kilometre is 5.0 minutes, and sixty divided by five is 12 km/h. It works in the imperial system unchanged: a 7:30 mile is 7.5 minutes, and sixty over 7.5 is 8 mph.
So that the value on screen always means what its label says. Leaving "5:00" in the box after a switch to km/h would silently reinterpret a five-minute pace as a five kilometre an hour walk, which is a different exercise entirely.
No. It converts one number between units and makes no claim about effort, terrain or conditions. Anything that changes what a given speed costs you physiologically is outside what a unit conversion can honestly express.