Training plans are written in pace: 9:30 per mile, 5:20 per kilometre, “10K effort”. Treadmills are labelled in speed: 10.5 km/h, 6.5 mph. A treadmill pace chart is the bridge between the two, and once you have the numbers memorised for your own range you stop guessing at the console and start hitting the paces your plan actually asked for.
Below is the full conversion table, the arithmetic behind it so you can do it in your head mid-session, and the three reasons your treadmill pace does not automatically transfer to the road.
The Arithmetic in One Line
Every conversion in this article comes from two divisions:
- Minutes per kilometre = 60 ÷ speed in km/h. At 10 km/h, that is 60 ÷ 10 = 6:00 per km.
- Minutes per mile = 60 ÷ speed in mph. At 6 mph, that is 60 ÷ 6 = 10:00 per mile.
To move between the two units: 1 mile = 1.609 km, so multiply your per-km pace by 1.609 to get per-mile pace. A 5:00 per km runner is running 8:03 per mile.
The useful anchor points, worth committing to memory:
- 10 km/h = 6:00/km = 9:39/mile. A clean round number in the metric column.
- 12 km/h = 5:00/km = 8:03/mile. The classic “sub-25 5K” gear.
- 6 mph = 10:00/mile = 9.66 km/h. The imperial equivalent anchor.
- 16 km/h = 3:45/km = 6:02/mile. Roughly the top speed of most home treadmills.
The Full Treadmill Pace Chart
Speeds run from a brisk walk to the ceiling of a typical consumer machine. The 5K column is the time you would finish in if you held that speed the whole way, which is the fastest sanity check there is when you set the belt.
| km/h | mph | Per km | Per mile | 5K at this pace |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.0 | 3.1 | 12:00 | 19:19 | 1:00:00 |
| 6.0 | 3.7 | 10:00 | 16:06 | 50:00 |
| 6.5 | 4.0 | 9:14 | 14:51 | 46:09 |
| 7.0 | 4.3 | 8:34 | 13:48 | 42:51 |
| 8.0 | 5.0 | 7:30 | 12:04 | 37:30 |
| 9.0 | 5.6 | 6:40 | 10:44 | 33:20 |
| 10.0 | 6.2 | 6:00 | 9:39 | 30:00 |
| 11.0 | 6.8 | 5:27 | 8:47 | 27:16 |
| 12.0 | 7.5 | 5:00 | 8:03 | 25:00 |
| 13.0 | 8.1 | 4:37 | 7:26 | 23:05 |
| 14.0 | 8.7 | 4:17 | 6:54 | 21:26 |
| 15.0 | 9.3 | 4:00 | 6:26 | 20:00 |
| 16.0 | 9.9 | 3:45 | 6:02 | 18:45 |
Two things to notice. First, the spacing is not linear: going from 6 to 7 km/h buys you 86 seconds per kilometre, while going from 15 to 16 km/h buys you 15. At the fast end, a 0.5 km/h change is a real change in effort but a small change on the clock. Second, walking speeds land in the 12 to 19 minute per mile range, which is exactly why incline, not speed, is the variable that makes walking hard. That trade-off is covered in incline walking vs running.
Half-step speeds
Most treadmills adjust in 0.1 km/h or 0.1 mph increments, so you will often want a value between rows. Interpolating linearly on pace is slightly wrong but close enough inside a 1 km/h band. For the speeds people actually use most:
- 9.5 km/h = 6:19/km = 10:10/mile
- 10.5 km/h = 5:43/km = 9:12/mile
- 11.5 km/h = 5:13/km = 8:24/mile
- 12.5 km/h = 4:48/km = 7:44/mile
Why the Chart Is Not Your Road Pace
The chart is arithmetic and the arithmetic is exact. What is not exact is the assumption that 12 km/h on your belt equals 12 km/h on tarmac. Three things break that assumption.
Air resistance is missing. Outdoors you push through still air; on a treadmill you do not. The effect is negligible at walking speeds and meaningful above roughly 12 km/h. The common correction is to set the treadmill to 1% incline for faster running, which brings the metabolic cost back in line with outdoor running at the same speed. Below about 8 km/h, the correction is small enough to ignore.
The belt does not pull you along, but the flat surface helps. There is no camber, no wind, no potholes, and no undulation. That consistency is a training advantage, not a cheat, but it does mean a treadmill 10K feels smoother than a road 10K at identical splits.
Your treadmill may simply be lying. Consumer machines drift. A belt that reads 12.0 km/h and actually runs 11.4 km/h will quietly make every pace in your log 5% optimistic, and after a few months of that, race day is an unpleasant surprise.
Calibrating the Belt in Ten Minutes
Do this once a year, and immediately after any belt replacement or tension adjustment:
- Unplug the machine. Put a strip of tape across the belt so you can see it pass a fixed point.
- Measure total belt length: mark the belt and the deck at the same point, then walk the belt around by hand until the marks realign, measuring as you go. Most home belts are 2.7 to 3.4 metres.
- Plug in, set the speed to 8.0 km/h, and let it stabilise for a minute.
- Count belt revolutions for exactly 60 seconds.
- Multiply revolutions by belt length in metres, then by 60. That is metres per hour. Divide by 1000 for km/h.
Example: a 3.0 m belt turning 44 times in a minute covers 132 m per minute, which is 7,920 m/h, or 7.92 km/h. Within 1% of the display, so the machine is honest. If you are more than 3% off, note the error and adjust the console speed to hit your true target pace, or have the machine serviced.
Turning the Chart into Sessions
A pace chart is only useful when it produces a number you can dial in. Three ways to use it:
Pick your easy pace from the top down, not the bottom up. Take your current 5K finish time, find it in the last column, then subtract 1.5 to 2.5 km/h from that speed for easy running. Someone whose honest 5K is 27:16 (11 km/h) runs easy at 8.5 to 9.5 km/h, not 10.5. Most people run their easy days about a full km/h too fast, which is easier to see on a heart-rate graph than on the console. Cross-check with Apple Watch heart-rate zones: if your easy run has 20 minutes in Zone 3, the chart is not the problem, your ego is.
Set interval speeds as a pace band, not a single number. For a 400 m repeat, decide the target split first (say 1:45), then convert: 400 m in 105 seconds is 3.75 m/s, or 13.7 km/h. Round to 13.5 or 14.0 depending on whether the session is meant to build volume or top-end speed. The mechanics of running those repeats well are in treadmill sprint intervals for speed.
Use the 5K column as a progress ledger. Every four to six weeks, run one honest 5K on the belt and note the average speed. If it moves from 11.0 to 11.5 km/h, your whole pace table shifts with it and every easy, tempo and interval target moves up together. A structured build that does exactly this is laid out in the intermediate 5K treadmill plan.
Doing the conversion by hand mid-run is the part nobody enjoys. Treadmill Pro connects to the machine over Bluetooth and displays live pace in whichever unit you think in, changes belt speed from the phone so you can program a session in splits rather than in km/h, and writes the finished workout to Apple Health with speed and incline attached.
Questions About Treadmill Pace
Should I log treadmill distance as running distance? Yes, with the calibration caveat above. If your belt is within 3%, the distance is as valid as a GPS trace, and arguably steadier since GPS drifts under tree cover and between buildings.
Why does 10 km/h feel harder on the treadmill than outside? Usually heat. There is no airflow, so core temperature climbs faster and heart rate follows it. A fan in front of the machine changes perceived effort at a given pace more than any other single adjustment.
Do I need 1% incline for walking workouts too? No. The air-resistance correction matters at running speeds. For walking, incline is a training variable in its own right, not a correction factor.
My treadmill only shows mph and my plan is in min/km. What is the shortcut? Divide 37.28 by your mph number to get min/km. At 6.5 mph that is 5:44 per km. It works because 37.28 is 60 multiplied by 0.6214.
Where to Start
Find your current 5K speed in the chart, write down three numbers on a sticky note on the console: easy speed, tempo speed, interval speed. Calibrate the belt once so those numbers mean something. Retest every month or so and move the whole set up together.
The point of a pace chart is not precision for its own sake. It is that a plan written in minutes per mile becomes a plan you can execute, one belt speed at a time.
