Resting Heart Rate and Life Expectancy: What Your Pulse Says
A higher resting heart rate is linked to a higher risk of death, even within the normal range. Here is what the studies found and how to lower your pulse.
Picture someone sitting on the edge of their bed first thing in the morning, two fingers pressed to the side of their neck, watching the second hand on a clock. They count the beats for a full minute: 74. Yesterday it was 72. Their watch says the weekly average is 71. It feels like a meaningless number, one that sits comfortably inside the "normal" range of 60 to 100 that doctors quote.
But researchers who have followed tens of thousands of people for decades have found that resting heart rate is not as neutral as that range suggests. Within normal, a lower resting pulse is generally linked to a longer life, and a pulse that creeps up over the years can be an early warning sign.
Heart disease is the world's biggest killer, responsible for around 18.6 million deaths a year, a share you can see ticking up on our live death counter. Your resting heart rate is one of the easiest ways to keep an eye on the organ behind those numbers.
What resting heart rate means
Your resting heart rate is how many times your heart beats per minute when you are awake but completely at rest, ideally sitting or lying quietly. It reflects how hard your heart has to work to supply your body with blood.
| Resting heart rate | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| 40 to 50 bpm | Common in endurance athletes; can also signal a heart rhythm problem in non-athletes |
| 50 to 60 bpm | Very good in most adults |
| 60 to 70 bpm | Normal, healthy range |
| 70 to 80 bpm | Normal, but linked to modestly higher risk in long-term studies |
| 80 to 100 bpm | Still officially normal, but linked to clearly higher risk |
| Over 100 bpm | Tachycardia: worth discussing with a doctor |
A fit heart pumps more blood with each beat, so it needs to beat fewer times. That is why trained athletes often have resting rates in the 40s or 50s. A higher resting rate can reflect lower fitness, stress, illness, or simply a heart under more strain.
The Copenhagen study
One of the best-known studies on this question is the Copenhagen Male Study. In a paper published in the journal Heart in 2013, Magnus Thorsten Jensen and colleagues reported on nearly 2,800 middle-aged Danish men whose resting heart rate and fitness were measured in the early 1970s. They were then followed for around 16 years.
Even after allowing for physical fitness, blood pressure, smoking, weight and other factors, men with a faster resting heart rate were more likely to die during follow-up.
| Resting heart rate | Risk of death compared with 50 bpm or lower (approx.) |
|---|---|
| 50 bpm or lower | Baseline |
| 51 to 70 bpm | Modestly higher |
| 71 to 80 bpm | Around 50% higher |
| 81 to 90 bpm | Around double |
| Over 90 bpm | Around three times higher |
The important point is that the link held even among men who were similarly fit. Resting heart rate seemed to carry information beyond simple fitness. The authors suggested that a high resting pulse should not be dismissed just because it falls inside the conventional normal range.
The pattern across a million people
A single study can mislead. But a 2016 meta-analysis in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, led by Dongfeng Zhang, pooled 46 studies covering around 1.2 million people. It found a steady relationship between resting heart rate and death.
| Measure | Finding |
|---|---|
| Every 10 bpm higher resting heart rate | About 9% higher risk of death from any cause |
| Every 10 bpm higher resting heart rate | About 8% higher risk of cardiovascular death |
| Resting rate above about 60 bpm | Risk began to rise steadily |
| Resting rate of 80 bpm vs 45 bpm | Risk of death roughly 45% higher |
Other large cohorts, including the Nord-Trøndelag Health Study in Norway, have found that the direction of change matters too. People whose resting heart rate rose over a decade were more likely to die of heart disease than those whose rate stayed the same or fell.
These are associations. A high resting heart rate is often a sign of something else, such as low fitness, high blood pressure, an overactive thyroid, anaemia, smoking or chronic stress. But many cardiologists now see it as a useful, free marker that adds to the usual risk factors.
Why a fast pulse might shorten life
The reasons are partly mechanical and partly about what a fast pulse reveals.
| Possible mechanism | Explanation |
|---|---|
| More wear on arteries | Each beat pulses pressure through blood vessels |
| Less time for the heart to rest | The heart muscle gets its own blood supply between beats |
| Higher stress hormone levels | A fast pulse often reflects an overactive stress response |
| Lower fitness | A fitter heart pumps more blood per beat |
| Hidden illness | Infection, thyroid problems, anaemia and heart failure raise the pulse |
The first two are why some heart drugs, such as beta blockers, are used to slow the heart in people with certain conditions. The third connects to our article on how stress kills, where a constantly elevated stress response is one of the main routes from stress to disease.
The heartbeat myth
There is an old idea that every animal gets roughly the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime, so a slower heart buys a longer life. Small animals with racing hearts, such as mice, live briefly. Large animals with slow hearts, such as whales and elephants, live longer. Across many mammals, the total does come out to around a billion beats.
Humans break the rule. A heart beating 70 times a minute for 80 years gives roughly 2.9 billion beats, far more than most mammals.
| Resting heart rate | Beats per day | Beats per year | Beats in 80 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60 bpm | 86,400 | About 31.5 million | About 2.5 billion |
| 70 bpm | 100,800 | About 36.8 million | About 2.9 billion |
| 80 bpm | 115,200 | About 42 million | About 3.4 billion |
So there is no fixed budget of heartbeats that you spend. The live death counter is driven by disease, injury and age, not by a heart running out of beats. But the idea contains a grain of truth: a heart that works less hard at rest tends to be a healthier heart.
Fitness is the bigger story
Resting heart rate is closely tied to cardiorespiratory fitness, the ability of your heart and lungs to supply oxygen during effort. And fitness is one of the strongest predictors of survival ever measured.
A 2018 study by Kyle Mandsager and colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic, published in JAMA Network Open, followed more than 120,000 people who had done a treadmill test. Those with the lowest fitness had a death risk several times higher than the fittest group, and the gap was larger than the risk linked to smoking, diabetes or heart disease in the same study. There was no upper limit at which more fitness stopped helping.
Our sibling articles on how many steps a day you need to live longer and grip strength and how long you will live cover other simple markers of fitness that predict survival.
How to measure your resting heart rate properly
| Do | Why |
|---|---|
| Measure first thing in the morning, before coffee | Caffeine and activity raise the pulse |
| Sit or lie quietly for a few minutes first | Gives the true resting value |
| Count for a full 60 seconds | Shorter counts multiply errors |
| Repeat on several days | Single readings vary a lot |
| Note illness, poor sleep, alcohol or stress | All raise resting heart rate temporarily |
Wrist wearables are reasonably accurate for resting heart rate, especially when averaged overnight. A rising trend over several weeks, without an obvious reason such as illness, is worth noting.
How to bring it down
Resting heart rate responds well to lifestyle change, often within weeks.
| Change | Typical effect |
|---|---|
| Regular aerobic exercise | Can lower resting rate by several beats a minute over months |
| Stopping smoking | Nicotine raises heart rate; quitting lowers it |
| Cutting back on alcohol | Heavy drinking raises resting rate, especially overnight |
| Better sleep | Poor sleep raises the next day's resting rate |
| Losing excess weight | Reduces the heart's workload |
| Managing stress | Lowers the background stress hormone response |
| Staying hydrated | Dehydration pushes the pulse up |
Several of these overlap with the advice in our pieces on sleep deprivation and death and how much exercise it takes to lower your risk of dying. The same few habits move many risk markers at once.
Resting heart rate changes with age and sex
Resting heart rate does not stay fixed across life. It is very fast in babies, falls through childhood and settles in early adulthood. Women tend to have slightly faster resting rates than men, by a few beats a minute, partly because their hearts are smaller on average.
| Group | Typical resting heart rate |
|---|---|
| Newborn babies | 100 to 160 bpm |
| Children aged 6 to 15 | 70 to 100 bpm |
| Adult men | Often 60 to 75 bpm |
| Adult women | Often a few beats higher than men |
| Older adults | Similar to midlife, though rhythm problems become more common |
What matters in later life is less the exact number and more the trend and the rhythm. A pulse that becomes irregular, or that climbs steadily for no clear reason, deserves a closer look. Atrial fibrillation becomes much more common past 65, which is one reason people in the 70 to 84 age group are often encouraged to check their pulse regularly.
When to see a doctor
A resting heart rate above 100 bpm, a very slow rate (below 50) when you are not an athlete, or a pulse that feels irregular, fluttering or pounding should be checked by a doctor. So should palpitations combined with dizziness, fainting, chest pain or breathlessness. Atrial fibrillation, an irregular rhythm that becomes much more common with age, raises the risk of stroke and is often found first by people checking their own pulse.
What this means for you
Your resting heart rate is one of the few health numbers you can measure for free, every day, in under a minute. It will not tell you exactly how long you will live. But a resting pulse that sits comfortably in the 50s or 60s is generally a good sign, and one that drifts upward over time is worth paying attention to.
If you want to see how your habits add up, try the risk calculator, or estimate your remaining years with the Death Clock.
While you were reading
This article takes about 12 minutes to read. In that time, roughly 1,400 people have died worldwide, around 118 a minute. About a third of all deaths are from cardiovascular disease, and a meaningful share of those hearts had been working harder than they needed to for years. You can watch the total grow on our live death counter.
Your heart has probably beaten more than 800 times since you started reading. A slower, steadier rhythm is one of the quietest signs of a long life.
Data sources: Jensen et al., "Elevated resting heart rate, physical fitness and all-cause mortality: a 16-year follow-up in the Copenhagen Male Study", Heart, 2013. Zhang et al., "Resting heart rate and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in the general population: a meta-analysis", CMAJ, 2016. Nauman et al., "Temporal changes in resting heart rate and deaths from ischemic heart disease", JAMA, 2011. Mandsager et al., "Association of cardiorespiratory fitness with long-term mortality among adults undergoing exercise treadmill testing", JAMA Network Open, 2018. American Heart Association guidance on heart rate. World Health Organization cardiovascular disease fact sheet. Figures are rounded and describe associations, not proven cause and effect.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. If you have concerns about your heart rate or rhythm, speak to your GP.
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