How your heartbeats are counted
Your heart rate changes a lot as you grow, so the calculator adds up each stage of life separately, using the average resting rate for that age.
| Age | Typical resting rate | Beats a day |
|---|---|---|
| Under 1 | 120 a minute | 172,800 |
| 1 to 5 | 100 a minute | 144,000 |
| 6 to 12 | 85 a minute | 122,400 |
| 13 and over | 72 a minute | 103,680 |
Your real heart speeds up when you exercise and slows down while you sleep. A resting average sits between the two, so treat the total as a good estimate rather than an exact count.
Heartbeats in a lifetime
At these rates, a person passes one billion heartbeats at about 22½ years old, two billion at about 49 and three billion at about 75. By their 80th birthday they've had nearly 3.2 billion.
Biologists have long noticed that many mammals, from mice to elephants, get through roughly a billion heartbeats in a lifetime: small animals have fast hearts and short lives, large ones the opposite. Humans are the odd one out, managing about three times that.
What's a normal resting heart rate?
For most adults, a resting heart rate is between 60 and 100 beats a minute. Very fit people can be lower. This page is for curiosity rather than medical advice, so if your heart rate is often outside that range, or you notice it racing or fluttering, speak to a GP.
Questions
How many times does the heart beat in a day?
About 100,000 times for an adult, or nearly 38 million times a year.
How much blood does the heart pump?
At rest, about 5 litres a minute, which is the whole of an adult's blood supply every minute and around 7,200 litres a day.
Is my birth date stored anywhere?
Only in your own browser, so you don't have to type it again on other pages of this site. It's never sent to us or anyone else.