Half Marathon Pace Chart: Every Goal Time From 1:15 to 3:30

A half marathon goal is really a pace you have to hold for 13.1 miles. The chart below turns every finish time from 1:15 to 3:30 into that number, per mile and per kilometer, and the table after it gives the 5K, 10K and 10-mile splits for the goals runners chase most.

The math is the easy part. The harder parts are choosing the right line on the chart and then running it on a morning when the first mile feels effortless, so the rest of this guide covers how to pick a goal you can hold, how to pace the race, and why your watch will disagree with the course.

The half marathon pace chart

A half marathon is 13.1094 miles, or 21.0975 kilometers. Paces are rounded to the nearest second, and every five minutes on your goal time works out to about 23 seconds per mile.

If your goal is a round number, you have plenty of company. In Brian Rock’s analysis of roughly a million U.S. half marathon results from 2024, finish times bunch up just under the round numbers, with the biggest spike between 1:57 and 1:59 and smaller ones among men around 1:30, 1:45, 2:00 and 2:15 (Outside). Those clusters are goals being met, a lot of them with seconds to spare.

Splits for the most common goals

These are even-pace splits for the three checkpoints most races mark or time.

If you follow the race plan further down and start a little slower than goal pace, expect to reach 5K about 15 to 30 seconds behind these numbers. That’s the plan working, and it’s a gap you can close over the last 5K.

How to pick your goal time

The best goal comes from what you’ve already run, checked against how your training is going. Three tools do most of the work.

A recent race. Greg McMillan’s rule of thumb is to double your 10K time and add 10 to 15 minutes, using the smaller number if you’re a faster runner and the larger one if you’re slower. The same estimate works from pace: add 15 to 30 seconds per mile to your 10K pace, or take 15 to 30 seconds per mile off your marathon pace (McMillan Running). Peter Riegel’s formula is the other common converter. It scales a race time by the ratio of the two distances raised to the power of 1.06, and Riegel described it as holding for efforts between about 3.5 and 230 minutes (Wikipedia). For a runner with a 50:00 10K, Riegel predicts 1:50:19, and McMillan’s rule gives a range of 1:50 to 1:55.

Your training. McMillan also tests goal pace in workouts, because half marathon pace is hard to judge by feel. His progression is 2 to 3 × 3 miles at goal pace with 2 to 3 minutes of jogging between, about eight weeks out, then 2 × 4 miles about four weeks out, then 6 to 8 miles at goal pace two to three weeks before the race. The first 2 to 4 miles of that last run should feel very comfortable, and you should finish it feeling like you could have kept going for another mile or two (McMillan Running). If it doesn’t feel that way, the goal needs to move.

Your threshold. Lactate threshold is roughly the effort you could hold for 45 to 60 minutes in a race. For competitive runners that’s close to 15K or half marathon pace, but for most runners training 3 to 5 hours a week it sits closer to 10-mile race pace (RunnersConnect). If your half will take well over an hour, as it does for nearly everyone outside the front of the race, your goal pace should be slower than your tempo run pace, not the same.

When the three disagree, start from the slowest of them. A goal you beat by a minute is a better day than a goal you chase for ten miles and then watch slip away.

What it takes to break two hours

Two hours is the most popular goal on the chart, and it asks for 9:09 per mile, or 5:41 per kilometer. It’s also faster than the typical finisher. The median time in Rock’s 2024 data was about 2:13 overall, 2:03:28 for men and 2:21:42 for women (Outside), and the guide to good half marathon times breaks those numbers down by age.

On fitness, a sub-2 half lines up with a 10K of roughly 52:30 to 55:00 by McMillan’s rule, or about 54:23 by Riegel’s formula, which also points to a 5K of about 26 minutes. If your recent races are in that range, the goal is realistic. If they’re a few minutes slower, 2:05 or 2:10 is the better target this time, and the 18-week half marathon plan sets every training pace from a recent race so the next block moves you toward 2:00.

If your race has a 2:00 pace group, it’s worth running with. Even at the World Half Marathon Championships, athletes who stayed in a pack for the whole race lost less pace than those who didn’t (Hanley, 2015).

How to pace a half marathon

Almost everyone runs the second half slower than the first. A study of 133,268 half marathon finishers at the Vienna City Marathon from 2006 to 2018 found positive pacing, meaning a slowdown, in every performance group of men and women. The fastest men’s pace varied by about 3 percent over the race and the slowest men’s by about 6 percent, with a similar spread among women, and the authors’ conclusion was simple: better runners paced more evenly (Ristanović et al., 2023). At the World Half Marathon Championships, the best men and women largely held their pace from 5 to 15 kilometers, while slower athletes were already slowing from 5K on (Hanley, 2015).

Jack Daniels put the lesson into one line. The seventh of his basic laws of running is that most mistakes in races are made early in the race (Human Kinetics). A plan that respects it looks like this.

Miles 1 to 3. Run 5 to 10 seconds per mile slower than goal pace. It will feel too slow, and people will pass you (RunnersConnect). By the 5K mark, that adds up to 15 to 30 seconds.

Miles 4 to 10. Settle into goal pace and, if you can, find a group running your pace or a little faster and stay with it (RunnersConnect). Expect the effort to start feeling real somewhere around mile 8, even though the pace hasn’t changed.

The last 5K. McMillan points to the last 3 to 4 miles as the stretch where most runners feel the grind of a half (McMillan Running), and this is where the patient start pays off. Hold the pace through mile 11, then with a mile to go start reeling in the runners ahead of you one at a time (RunnersConnect).

As for how it should feel, McMillan describes half marathon pace as “a fast-but-fun level of effort” (McMillan Running). If the first 10K feels like a tempo run, you’re closer to threshold than a 13.1-mile race allows, and the last 5K will tell you so.

Why your watch won’t match the course

Certified courses are measured along the shortest possible route, the line a runner would take by cutting every corner, and most runners never run that line, so their GPS distance usually comes out long (RunWashington). Measurers also add a short course prevention factor of 0.1 percent, the value World Athletics and USA Track & Field use to make sure a certified course is never short (Wikipedia). On a half, that’s up to about 21 extra meters. Tall buildings and tree cover make GPS less accurate on top of all that (RunWashington).

The result is a watch that reads long and a pace display that looks faster than you’re actually going. At 1 percent long, a true 2:00 pace of 9:09 per mile shows up as 9:04 on your wrist, and the watch reads 13.24 miles at the finish. Across the chart, that gap is about 4 to 7 seconds per mile. Either lap your watch manually at the mile markers, or aim a few seconds per mile faster than the chart on the watch’s display.

Heat changes the math

Warm weather slows everyone, and it slows slower runners the most. An analysis of marathon results across a range of conditions, measured by wet-bulb globe temperature, which accounts for humidity and sun as well as air temperature, found the top men finishing 1.7 percent off the course record in the coolest conditions (5 to 10°C) and 4.5 percent off in the warmest (20 to 25°C). Runners further back in the field slowed more than the leaders as conditions warmed (Ely et al., 2007).

That study looked at marathons, but the lesson carries over to the half. Even the leaders’ extra 2.8 percent would add more than three minutes to a two-hour half. On a warm morning, pick a slower line on the chart before the start rather than finding out at mile 9.

FAQ

What pace is a 2-hour half marathon?

9:09 per mile, or 5:41 per kilometer. With a watch that reads about 1 percent long, that shows up as roughly 9:04 per mile on your wrist.

What pace do I need for a 1:45 half marathon?

8:01 per mile, or 4:59 per kilometer. Your even-pace 10K split is 49:46 and your 10-mile split is 1:20:06.

What pace do I need for a 1:30 half marathon?

6:52 per mile, or 4:16 per kilometer, which puts you through 10K in 42:40.

How do I predict my half marathon time from a 10K?

Double your 10K time and add 10 to 15 minutes, using the smaller number if you’re a faster runner. Riegel’s formula gives a single number instead of a range: a 50:00 10K predicts 1:50:19.

Should I run even splits or negative splits?

Aim for an even effort with a slightly conservative start. Every performance group in the Vienna data slowed in the second half, and the runners who slowed least were the fastest ones, so a start that feels too easy is usually the right one.

What’s a good half marathon pace for a beginner?

There isn’t one number. The median U.S. finisher in 2024 ran about 2:13, which is 10:09 per mile, but a first half is better paced from your own recent 5K or 10K than from anyone else’s results.