Is My HRV Normal for My Age?
There is no single normal HRV. The typical number falls steadily with age, differs a little between men and women, and spans an enormous range at every age. What your reading means depends entirely on who you are compared to.
This page covers population reference values for HRV by age and sex, an interactive tool to place your own reading in context, what the research shows about why HRV declines with age, why your wearable's number often differs from clinical figures, and what the evidence does and doesn't say about what moves it.
Someone glances at their ring in the morning, sees an HRV of 28, and feels a small drop in their stomach. Someone else sees 62 and wonders if it's real. Neither number means much on its own, because the honest answer to "is my HRV normal for my age" is that normal HRV covers a very wide range, falls steadily as you get older, and differs only slightly between men and women. A reading that looks low at 25 can be entirely ordinary at 55. The most useful comparison is not someone else's number, or a figure you saw online, but where you sit among people your own age and sex, and how your own reading moves over time.
This page gives you the population reference values so you can do exactly that. The tool places your number against age- and sex-matched data, and the table beneath shows the full set. One caveat up front, because it matters: these figures come from clinical ECG recordings, and the number on your Oura or Garmin usually reads higher. We come back to why.
Enter your age, sex, and the HRV your wearable shows. We place it against population reference values so you can see where it falls. We show where your reading sits. What it means depends on your health, your history, and your trend over time.
Fill in all three to see where your number falls.
Reference values: Tegegne et al. (2020), Lifelines Cohort Study, 84,772 adults, European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. RMSSD from 10-second resting ECG. Open access, CC BY-NC.
What HRV is, in one paragraph
Heart rate variability is the variation in the tiny gaps between consecutive heartbeats. Your heart does not tick like a metronome; the interval between beats lengthens and shortens slightly from one beat to the next, and HRV measures how much. That variation is driven largely by your autonomic nervous system, the automatic control system that balances the "speed up" and "slow down" signals to your heart. Most wearables report it using a measure called RMSSD, in milliseconds, which is also the measure used in the reference data on this page. A higher number means more beat-to-beat variation, which is generally read as a sign the calming, parasympathetic side of that system is active.
What the reference numbers actually show
The clearest population data comes from the Lifelines Cohort Study, which measured HRV in 84,772 adults using short resting ECG recordings. Two patterns stand out, and both are useful for reading your own number.
The typical HRV value falls by more than three-quarters across adult life, from a median around 67 ms in the early teens to about 15 ms after 75.1 But the bottom edge of normal barely moves, staying near 5 to 12 ms the whole way. The average drops with age; the floor does not.
The second pattern is the sheer width of normal. At 40 to 44, a woman's normal range runs from roughly 10 ms all the way to 124 ms. That is not a measurement quirk; it is how much healthy people genuinely differ from one another. It is also the single best reason not to panic over one number. Here is the full reference set.
| Age | Women | Men | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Median | Range | Median | Range | |
| 13–14 | 66 | 17–232 | 67 | 13–213 |
| 15–19 | 61 | 12–226 | 60 | 10–213 |
| 20–24 | 52 | 11–206 | 48 | 10–174 |
| 25–29 | 48 | 12–181 | 42 | 10–173 |
| 30–34 | 42 | 12–161 | 37 | 10–141 |
| 35–39 | 38 | 11–142 | 33 | 9–124 |
| 40–44 | 34 | 10–124 | 29 | 8–106 |
| 45–49 | 29 | 8–110 | 26 | 7–96 |
| 50–54 | 27 | 8–96 | 24 | 7–88 |
| 55–59 | 22 | 7–84 | 21 | 6–90 |
| 60–64 | 20 | 6–79 | 19 | 5–87 |
| 65–69 | 18 | 5–83 | 18 | 5–111 |
| 70–74 | 18 | 5–116 | 16 | 5–162 |
| 75+ | 16 | 4–106 | 15 | 4–130 |
RMSSD in milliseconds, shown as median (2nd–98th percentile). Source: Tegegne et al. (2020), Lifelines Cohort Study, 10-second resting ECG, 84,772 adults. The 2nd and 98th percentiles mark the lower and upper edges of normal; about 96% of healthy people of a given age and sex fall between them.
How to read your own number against it
Find your age row and your column. The middle figure is the median, the point where half of people your age and sex sit above and half below. The two numbers in brackets are the edges of normal. If your reading falls between them, it is within the range seen in healthy people; the closer to the median, the more ordinary it is. None of that makes a number "good" or "bad," because HRV is not a grade. It is a signal you read in context.
The context that matters most is your own history. A 42-year-old woman with a reading of 25 ms sits below her age-group median of 34, but comfortably inside a normal range that stretches past 120. On its own, that tells her very little. What would tell her something is the same reading appearing night after night when she used to run higher, or a steady drift in one direction over several weeks. One number is a snapshot in poor lighting. The trend is the photograph.
One night's HRV is a snapshot in poor lighting. What you're actually looking for is the trend, and your own baseline is the only fair thing to compare against.
Kate Maren, Editor
Do men and women differ? In this data, women aged roughly 20 to 45 had slightly higher median HRV than men, by about 5 ms. The gap narrowed after 45 and disappeared below 20 and above 60. Real, but small next to the variation between two people of the same age and sex.
Why your wearable shows a different number
This is the part most "HRV by age" charts leave out, and it is the reason people get needlessly alarmed. The reference values here were measured with 10-second resting ECG, a clinical method. Your Oura ring, Whoop, Garmin, or Apple Watch measures HRV a different way, usually averaged across hours of overnight sleep when the calming side of your nervous system is most active. Overnight wearable readings therefore tend to run higher than these short daytime ECG figures.2
So comparing the 38 your ring reported this morning directly against a clinical reference table is not quite comparing like with like. The age and sex patterns hold across methods: HRV declines with age, the range is wide, the sexes differ only slightly. But the absolute numbers shift with how and when the reading is taken. This is exactly why your own baseline, built from your own device over weeks, is more useful than any published figure.
What moves HRV beyond age and sex
Age and sex are the two largest predictors in the population data, but they explain only part of why any individual's number lands where it does. Research and the day-to-day reports of people who track closely point to the same shorter-term influences: a night of poor or short sleep, alcohol in the evening, an intense workout the day before, acute stress, and the early stages of illness all tend to lower HRV temporarily. Fitness and consistent sleep tend to track with higher readings. The point of naming these is not to hand you a to-do list. It is so that when your number moves, you have somewhere realistic to look, rather than assuming the worst.
What the data doesn't capture
Reference ranges tell you where your number sits among people like you. They do not tell you whether nudging it up will improve your health. That causal link, the idea that raising your personal HRV changes outcomes, has not been cleanly demonstrated, and the reference studies were not designed to test it.
Two honest limits sit on top of everything above. First, lower HRV is associated with poorer health outcomes in longitudinal research,3 but association is not causation, and the direction is not fully settled; declining health may lower HRV as much as the reverse. Second, the reference data and your wearable speak slightly different languages, as we covered, so treat any single cross-comparison loosely. What the evidence supports is using these ranges for orientation and watching your own trend. What it does not support is treating a number as a verdict on your body.
If you came here because a number on your wrist looked low and you wanted to know whether to worry, the most defensible reading is this: check where it falls for your age and sex above, remember how wide normal is, and watch what your own trend does over the next few weeks rather than what one morning showed. That is the honest amount the data can tell you, and it is more than enough to stop guessing.
Common questions
What is a good HRV for my age?
There is no single good number. The middle value falls from around 67 ms in the teens to around 15 ms past 75, and the normal range at every age is very wide. What matters more than a target is where you sit for your own age and sex, and which way your own trend is moving.
Is my HRV too low for my age?
Only about 2% of healthy people of a given age and sex fall below the lower edge of the reference range, and that lower edge stays fairly stable across life even as the average drops. A single low overnight reading is usually just one night. The trend over weeks tells you far more than any one number.
Do men and women have different HRV?
In the largest population study, women aged roughly 20 to 45 had slightly higher median HRV than men, by about 5 ms, with the gap shrinking after 45 and gone below 20 and above 60. The difference is real in midlife but small next to the variation between individuals of the same age.
Why does my wearable show a different HRV than these numbers?
These reference values come from 10-second resting ECG. Wearables measure HRV differently, usually over hours of sleep, so their overnight numbers often read higher. Compare your wearable reading to your own baseline rather than directly to clinical reference tables.
References
- Tegegne BS, Man T, van Roon AM, et al. (2020). Reference values of heart rate variability from 10-second resting electrocardiograms: the Lifelines Cohort Study. doi:10.1177/2047487319872567
- Dial MB, Hollander ME, Vatne EA, et al. (2025). Validation of nocturnal resting heart rate and heart rate variability in consumer wearables. doi:10.14814/phy2.70527
- Jarczok MN, Weimer K, Braun C, et al. (2022). Heart rate variability in the prediction of mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of healthy and patient populations. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104907
Factors that move HRV from day to day, including alcohol, sleep, stress, exercise, and illness, are covered with their own sources in the linked articles above.