How Many Pull-Ups Should I Be Able to Do? Sourced Standards by Age

Short answer: nobody has counted pull-ups in a representative sample of adults, so there is no true average. The best sourced benchmark is the US Marine Corps scoring table. For men, the minimum that scores is 5 pull-ups from age 21 to 45, 4 at 17–20 and 46–50, and 3 at 51 and over; full marks take 18 to 23. For women, the minimum runs from 1 to 4 and full marks from 4 to 12, depending on age. Marines are young, screened and trained, so these numbers sit well above the general public. In one trial, recreationally active male students averaged about 2. For an untrained adult, one strict pull-up is a real result.

Everything below says where each number comes from and what kind of people it describes.

Why most pull-up charts have nothing underneath them

Search for pull-up norms and a familiar grid appears: rows by age, columns for "beginner", "average" and "elite", numbers to the single repetition. Follow the citations and they lead to other blogs, to a commercial app's user logs, or nowhere.

A real average would need a random sample of adults, including those who cannot do a single repetition, all tested under the same rules. No such dataset for pull-ups could be found for this article.

What does exist is narrower but checkable:

The first three are used here. A standard is a different kind of number from an average. It says what an organisation has decided is enough, not what people typically manage.

Marine Corps pull-up standards for men by age

The Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test is the only large, official scale found that scores pull-ups by age and sex. The governing order, MCO 6100.13A, sets a minimum number that earns points and a maximum that earns 100 points. The table below is from the order as issued on 17 January 2018.

Source: US Marine Corps, MCO 6100.13A (17 January 2018), Table 2-2. Minimum scores 40 points; maximum scores 100.

The demand is highest between 21 and 35, not at 17–20, and the scale barely bends with age: a Marine over 50 still needs 18 for full marks.

The rules matter as much as the count. The order describes a dead-hang pull-up: arms fully extended under the bar, feet off the ground, body motionless. A repetition counts when the chin is raised above the bar and the body is lowered until the arms are straight again. Kipping, kicking and swinging are not allowed, and the knees may not rise above the waist. There is no time limit; the test ends when the Marine drops off the bar.

A caveat on currency: these figures are dated 17 January 2018. The Marine Corps publications library lists a later version of the order (MCO 6100.13A with administrative change 5) as current, and that file could not be opened for this article, so the men's table has not been checked against it. The September 2018 message that revised the women's table, covered next, does not mention the men's pull-up standards.

Marine Corps pull-up standards for women by age

Women's pull-up standards were revised from 1 January 2019. The figures were published in MARADMIN 539/18, and they are higher than those in the January 2018 order, where the minimum was 1 at every age and the maximum ranged from 3 to 10.

Source: US Marine Corps, MARADMIN 539/18 (24 September 2018), effective 1 January 2019.

The peak band for women is 26–30. At 21–25 the women's maximum (11) is under half the men's maximum (23).

Marines of either sex may choose push-ups instead, but the order caps push-ups at 70 points. Only pull-ups can earn 100. The companion piece on how many push-ups an adult should manage covers that exercise.

Other official standards that include pull-ups

Two more official thresholds could be opened and checked.

Source: MARADMIN 232/25 (16 May 2025) for Marine officer candidates; navy.com, the US Navy's official recruiting site, for the SEAL Physical Screening Test.

The SEAL figure is not directly comparable with the Marine table: it is done inside a two-minute window, after a 500-yard swim, push-ups (minimum 50) and sit-ups. The Navy page does not describe the form required.

Taken together, the official documents cluster in a narrow band. For men, the service floor is 3 to 5, selective entry asks for 8 to 11, and the top of the scale is about 20. For women, the floor is 1 to 4 and the top is about 10 to 12.

How to read these numbers if you are not a Marine

Three adjustments are needed before comparing a living-room result with a military table.

Marines are a selected population. They are recruited, screened and trained for the job, and this test is part of it. The minimum of 5 is what the Corps expects of its least prepared serving man aged 21 to 45. It does not describe a typical man of that age.

The age bands show policy, not biology. One men's minimum from 21 to 45 means a committee chose one number, not that strength is flat for 25 years.

The scale stops at 51. The oldest band is an open-ended "51+", so the table says nothing specific about people of 60 or 70.

One measured figure gives a sense of the gap. In a 2025 training trial, 34 recreationally active male students, about 19 years old and 62 to 65 kg, with no systematic upper-body training in the previous six months, averaged 2.18 pull-ups before the programme began. Everyone enrolled had to manage at least one, so men who could do none were excluded. That is one small sample from one university, but it shows that young, light, active men can sit below the Marine minimum for their age.

No comparable measured baseline for untrained adult women could be opened for this article.

Why body weight decides most of the result

A pull-up is a lift in which the load is the lifter. Every extra kilogram is extra load on every repetition, whether it is fat or muscle in the legs.

A 2016 study of 25 trained male athletes by Sánchez-Moreno and colleagues, read here as an abstract, measured maximum pull-ups alongside lat pull-down strength and body composition. Pull-up count was negatively related to body mass (r = −0.55), lean body mass (r = −0.51) and fat mass (r = −0.52). It was essentially unrelated to absolute one-repetition-maximum strength on the lat pull-down (r = 0.09). It did track the number of lat pull-down repetitions done with a load equal to body weight (r = 0.62). In that group, raw pulling strength said almost nothing about pull-up count until it was set against what the athlete weighed.

A 2024 conference poster abstract by Bayonas-Ruiz and colleagues, which is not a full peer-reviewed paper, makes the same point from the other side. In 69 men and 15 women, the researchers measured the heaviest weighted pull-up each person could do once, and divided the added load by body weight. That ratio explained the maximum number of bodyweight repetitions almost completely (R² = 0.96), with a mean absolute error of 1.08 repetitions across a range of 4 to 32. The relationship did not differ between men and women (p = 0.863). Body weight and BMI were similar across strength groups, but the group with the highest strength-to-weight ratio had significantly less fat mass and a lower body-fat percentage.

Two consequences follow. Heavier people face a harder test, including heavier muscular people. And the gap between the sexes on the Marine table appears to lie in the ratio of pulling strength to body weight, since the poster data put men and women on one line once that ratio is known. That finding rests on 15 women in a conference abstract, so it should be held loosely.

The older papers usually cited on this subject, including Vanderburgh and Edmonds (1997) on added mass and Flanagan and colleagues (2003) on training college-age women, could not be opened in full or as abstracts for this article. Their figures are therefore not used.

How pull-up ability changes with age

No study that follows pull-up counts across adult life in the general population was found. Two indirect lines of evidence exist.

The first is the Marine table itself. The men's maximum falls from 23 at 21–35 to 18 at 51 and over, a drop of about a fifth. The women's maximum falls from 12 at 26–30 to 4 at 51 and over, a drop of two thirds. Those are policy numbers.

The second is grip strength, the one upper-body measure with true population norms. Dodds and colleagues pooled 12 British general-population studies, with 49,964 participants and 60,803 observations. Median grip peaked at 51 kg in men between ages 29 and 39 and at 31 kg in women between 26 and 42, and the decline began as early as the fifth decade of life. Grip is not the same as pull-up ability, but the peak years line up with the Marine bands that carry the highest pull-up demands. The site's tables of grip strength by age give more detail.

A reasonable reading is that pulling strength peaks from the late twenties to the late thirties and falls slowly from the forties. Body weight tends to rise over the same years, which would make the pull-up fall faster than grip does. That last step is inference, not measurement.

Other capacities have better age data. Lower-body strength is covered by the 30-second sit-to-stand test, and endurance by the tables of VO2 max by age and average mile time by age.

Pull-up, chin-up and dead hang: what is being counted

The terms are used loosely, which makes numbers hard to compare.

The Marine Corps treats pull-ups and chin-ups as the same event. Many people find the palms-toward-you grip easier, and gym tradition says it shifts work to the biceps. No electromyography study comparing the two grips could be opened for this article, so no figure is given for the difference.

No official standard or opened study gives norms for the timed dead hang, and hanging time is not interchangeable with pull-up count.

What the evidence says about getting a first pull-up

Sourced evidence on progressions is thinner than the volume of advice suggests.

Lat pull-down training was followed by more pull-ups in one trial of young men. In the trial by Li and colleagues, 34 male students who could already do at least one pull-up did only lat pull-downs, three sessions a week for eight weeks, four sets of 12 slow repetitions, starting at 65% of their one-repetition maximum and rising by 5% every two weeks to 80%. Pull-ups rose from 2.18 to 5.82 in the group using a standard machine, and from 2.18 to 8.47 in a group whose bar was hung from elastic bands to make it unstable. Body mass did not change significantly. The study had no untrained control group, tested only men, and came from a single laboratory.

Negatives, band-assisted pull-ups and inverted rows. These are the three progressions most often recommended: lowering slowly from the top position, using an elastic band to take part of the weight, and rowing the chest to a low bar with the feet on the floor. Each reduces the load below full body weight. No controlled trial comparing them, or showing how long each takes to produce a first pull-up, could be opened for this article.

How long it takes. No sourced figure exists for the time to a first pull-up. The one trial above shows that men who could already do about two roughly tripled that in eight weeks. Starting from zero, at a higher body weight, or as a woman, the timeline is unmeasured. General strength adapts over weeks to months, as set out in the article on how long it takes to build muscle.

What is not worth doing

Ranking yourself on an unsourced percentile chart. If a table says the "average" 45-year-old woman does a given number of pull-ups and cites nothing, it is describing no one.

Counting swung or half repetitions against a strict standard. The Marine numbers assume straight arms at the bottom, chin over the bar at the top and no kip. A count done another way is a different test.

Comparing across body weights without adjustment. A 95 kg person doing five moves far more load than a 65 kg person doing five.

Treating the pull-up as a health marker. Grip strength, walking speed and chair-rise tests have population data linking them to later health. Pull-ups have none that could be found. An adult who cannot do one is not shown to be unhealthy by that fact.

What to actually do

Decide which question is being asked. For "is this acceptable for a trained young adult", the Marine minimum is the reference: 3 to 5 for men, 1 to 4 for women. For "is this strong", look at selective entry: 8 to 11 for men, 4 for women. For "is this excellent", look at the maximums.

Test strictly, and the same way each time. Dead hang, chin over the bar, full extension, no swing, no time limit. Record the grip used.

Track body weight alongside the count. The two move together. A change in either explains a change in the result.

If the count is zero, the evidence runs out. Lat pull-downs have one trial behind them, in men who could already do at least one pull-up. For negatives, bands and rows, no trial could be opened, so nothing can be said here about how well they work.

Compare with your own earlier results. Without population norms, a personal record under fixed rules is the only fair comparison most adults have.

Questions people ask

How many pull ups can the average person do? No one knows, because no representative sample of adults has been tested. The Marine Corps minimum is 3 to 5 for men and 1 to 4 for women, but Marines are selected and trained. A small group of recreationally active male students, all able to do at least one, averaged about 2 before training.

What are average pull ups by age? True averages do not exist. The Marine Corps scale gives men a minimum of 4 at 17–20, 5 from 21 to 45, 4 at 46–50 and 3 at 51 and over, with 18 to 23 for full marks. For women the minimum runs from 1 to 4 and the maximum from 4 to 12.

How many pull ups can the average man do? There is no measured population figure. Male Marines must do at least 3 to 5 depending on age. In one trial, 34 active male students of about 19 averaged 2.18 strict pull-ups before training, so some active young men fall below the military minimum.

How many pull ups should a woman be able to do? The Marine Corps asks women for at least 1 at 17–20, 3 at 21–25, 4 at 26–30, 3 at 31–40 and 2 from 41, with 4 to 12 for full marks. Female officer candidates need 4. Those are standards for trained, selected women, not a general expectation.

Is 10 pull ups good? Yes, by official standards. For a man, 10 strict pull-ups is twice the Marine minimum, equals the Navy SEAL screening minimum listed on navy.com and is one short of the Marine officer candidate minimum of 11. For a woman, 10 earns full marks in the 36–40 band and comes close at 21–35.

Is 20 pull ups good? It is near the top of every official scale found. Twenty earns a male Marine full marks at 17–20 and at 41 and over, and falls three short of the 23 required at 21–35. It also exceeds the 15 the Navy lists as an elevated SEAL screening score.

How many pull ups for Marines? Male Marines need a minimum of 3 to 5 and 18 to 23 for a perfect pull-up score, depending on age. Female Marines need 1 to 4 and 4 to 12. Male officer candidates need 11 at induction and female candidates 4. Push-ups can be substituted on the regular test but score at most 70 points.

Why can't I do a pull up? Usually because pulling strength is low relative to body weight. In trained athletes, pull-up count fell as body mass rose and was nearly unrelated to absolute pull-down strength. A higher body weight, more body fat, or little upper-body training each make a first repetition harder. It is not evidence of poor health.

How long does it take to do one pull up? No study that could be opened gives a timeline from zero to one. In an eight-week trial of lat pull-down training three times a week, men who began at about 2 pull-ups reached roughly 6 to 8. Starting from zero is likely to take longer and is unmeasured.

What is the difference between chin ups vs pull ups? A pull-up uses palms facing away and a chin-up uses palms facing the body. The movement is otherwise the same. The Marine Corps counts either grip and forbids commanders from requiring one. No sourced figure for how much easier a chin-up is could be verified for this article.

This article summarises published military fitness standards and research for general information and is not medical advice or a training plan. Anyone with a shoulder, elbow or wrist injury, a heart condition, or returning to exercise after a long break should speak to a clinician before attempting maximal pull-ups or hanging exercises.