5K Pace Calculator

What this page does

A 5K pace calculator answers two versions of one question: what pace does a 5K time cost, and what does that pace mean in the units you actually think in? This page is built for one distance only — 5 km, 5000 metres — and it spends that narrowness on three things a general pace tool cannot give you. It prints the 5K pace chart: every finish time from 15:00 to 45:00 in thirty-second steps, with the pace per kilometre, the pace per mile, the speed in km/h and the speed in mph on every row. It breaks the race into the 400 m laps you can read off a track. And it draws a printable band you can cut out and wear.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server, there is no account and no upload, and the target you type never leaves the page. The distance is not a field on the form, because it is not a variable here: five kilometres is the whole point.

The chart is the part that is genuinely new to this site. Every other page here that mentions a pace chart describes it as something it either replaces or collapses. The marathon pace band calls a chart "a grid: distances down one side, a range of finish times across the top, and a pace in every cell" and then prints the one row you need instead. The marathon split calculator says it "replaces the flat pace chart" by letting the pace move with the ground. This page prints the grid itself, for one distance, so you can look a time up without having a target yet.

How the numbers are calculated

There is no model here and nothing to tune. Every number on this page is one division, repeated in four units. For a 5K finish time T in seconds over a fixed distance of 5000 metres:

p_km = T ÷ 5 p_mi = T × 1609.344 ÷ 5000 v_km/h = 5 ÷ (T ÷ 3600) v_mph = 3.1068559611866697 ÷ (T ÷ 3600) lap₄₀₀ = T ÷ 12.5

T — your 5K finish time, in seconds. 20:00 is 1200 s.
D — the distance: 5000 m exactly. This is the 5 km road distance, not a measurement of any one course.
p_km — the even pace in seconds per kilometre. 5 km ÷ 1 km = 5, so it is T ÷ 5.
p_mi — the even pace in seconds per mile. 5 km is 3.1068559611866697 mi, so it is T ÷ that number.
v_km/h — average speed. 5 km is 5/1000 of the unit and T/3600 of the hour, so speed = 5 ÷ (T ÷ 3600).
v_mph — the same speed in miles per hour, using 5 km = 3.1068559611866697 mi.
lap₄₀₀ — the time for one 400 m lap. 5000 ÷ 400 = 12.5, so the lap is T ÷ 12.5.

The only numbers that are not derived from your own input are definitions, and every one of them is exact: 1 km = 1000 m; 1 mile = 1609.344 m, the international mile; a standard track lap is 400 m; and a 5 km race is 12.5 of those laps. There is no borrowed pace table, no age-grading factor, no weather model and no external data file anywhere on this page. Nothing here is transcribed from anywhere.

A worked example: 5 km in 20:00

The example the page opens on. Take T = 20:00 = 1200 s over 5000 m. The five numbers come straight out of the formulas above, and every one of them is what the page prints:

Pace per kilometre — 1200 ÷ 5 = 240 s, printed 4:00.
Pace per mile — 1200 × 1609.344 ÷ 5000 = 386.24256 s, printed 6:26.
Speed — 5 ÷ (1200 ÷ 3600) = 15.00 km/h, which is 9.32 mph.
400 m lap — 1200 ÷ 12.5 = 96 s, printed 1:36.
200 m run-in — 5 km is 12 full laps plus 200 m, so the last segment is 48 s, not a whole lap.

Change one number and the whole page moves with it. Four more rows of the chart, exactly as the page prints them:

15:00 — 3:00 per km, 4:50 per mile, 20.00 km/h, 12.43 mph, 1:12 per 400 m.
18:00 — 3:36 per km, 5:48 per mile, 16.67 km/h, 10.36 mph, 1:26 per 400 m.
25:00 — 5:00 per km, 8:03 per mile, 12.00 km/h, 7.46 mph, 2:00 per 400 m.
30:00 — 6:00 per km, 9:39 per mile, 10.00 km/h, 6.21 mph, 2:24 per 400 m.
45:00 — 9:00 per km, 14:29 per mile, 6.67 km/h, 4.14 mph, 3:36 per 400 m.

Two checks you can run on the numbers yourself

Both of these are arithmetic you can do on the printed page, which is the point of printing the working:

The laps have to add back up. 12.5 laps × 96 s = 1200 s = 20:00 exactly. If a lap column and a finish time ever disagreed, that multiplication is where it would show.
The two pace columns are one conversion apart. 240 s per kilometre × 1.609344 = 386.24256 s per mile — the same 6:26. The mile column is not a second calculation; it is the kilometre column with 1609.344 ÷ 1000 applied to it.

A third check crosses to another page on this site. The half marathon split calculator publishes the 5 km mark of a 1:45:00 half marathon as 24:53, because 1:45:00 over 21.0975 km is 298.613580 s per kilometre and five of those is 1493.068 s. That is the identical five-kilometre division this page's kilometre column performs, on a different target — two pages, one division, and the numbers agree.

The 5K pace chart, and why it is a chart

The chart above is a reference document, not a result. It holds 61 rows: every finish time from 15:00 to 45:00 in thirty-second steps, and beside each one the pace per kilometre, the pace per mile, the speed in km/h and the speed in mph. The row nearest your own target is highlighted, so the chart doubles as a way of reading the page at a glance.

The reason it exists as a chart rather than another calculator is that the question people ask most often about a 5K is not "what are my splits" but "what does a 25-minute 5K actually mean". That question has no input. A calculator answers it only if you already know the number you are asking about; a grid answers it by showing you the number and its neighbours at the same time, which is also how you find out that 25:00 and 24:30 are one second per kilometre apart.

Three notes on reading it. The pace columns are rounded to the nearest second and the speed columns to two decimal places, so a row can look "wrong" by a fraction of a second — the underlying division is exact, the print is rounded. The chart starts at 15:00 and ends at 45:00, which covers a serious club runner at one end and a first-timer at the other; a target outside that range still builds the laps and the band, it just has no row to highlight. And the chart is deliberately in steps of 30 seconds rather than one minute: a minute is coarse enough that two people who run 20:20 and 20:40 would both be told "20:00 or 21:00".

The 400 m laps, and the band you can wear

A 5K on a track is 12.5 laps of 400 m. That is the single fact that makes this page's lap table possible, and it is why the table has a 400 m mode at all. On a road course the kilometre marks are what is painted on the ground, so the same page also builds a one-kilometre table; the difference between the two modes is where the checkpoints fall, not how the arithmetic works.

Two details in the lap table are worth knowing before you race off it:

The finish row is a 200 m run-in, not a lap. Twelve laps of 400 m is 4800 m, and the race ends at 5000 m. The final row is therefore half a lap — 48 s if you are running 20:00 — and the table says so rather than printing a thirteenth lap that would take you 200 m past the line.
The 1600 m row is not a mile. It is 9.344 m short of one. If you are watching a mile split rather than a lap, the mile mark falls between the 1600 m and the 2000 m rows, and the pace per mile in the stats above is the number you want.

The band is the same rows collapsed onto a strip of paper. It is drawn 170 mm wide with a 50 mm scale check near the top: print it, hold a ruler against that line, and if it measures 50 mm the band came out the size it was drawn — print dialogs default to "fit to page", which quietly rescales it. Cut along the border, fold down the middle, and tape the ends around your wrist.

The 400 m band is the version you cannot get anywhere else on this site, and that is not an accident of taste. The band on the running split calculator offers 1 km, 1 mile, 5 km and 5 miles, and its own limits section states that those are the four and that there is no custom interval field — so a lap band has to be built here, on a page that knows the distance. If you have no printer, Download band writes the same rows to a plain-text file and Copy band puts them on your clipboard; neither is a substitute for the printed strip, but the text file reprints identically whenever you want it.

Supported range and limits

Distance: the 5 km road distance only — 5000 m. There is no distance field. This is not a general pace calculator, and the reason is in the next section.
Finish time: 10:00 to 1:30:00, entered as hours, minutes and seconds, with minutes and seconds between 0 and 59. Times outside that window are refused rather than silently clamped.
Chart: 15:00 to 45:00 in 30-second steps, 61 rows. A target outside that window still builds the laps and the band; only the highlighted row is absent, and the page says so.
Lap markers: 400 m or 1 km. The 400 m mode is the 12.5-lap breakdown of a track 5K; the 1 km mode gives the five kilometre marks.
Pacing: even splits only. One pace, repeated, which is what a flat-course target means. There is no negative-split mode.
Cost: none. No account, no email, no paywall, no daily limit, no request to a server.
Privacy: every number is computed in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored — reload the page and it is gone.
Works offline once the page has loaded, and on a phone.

What this page deliberately does not do

No other distance. This page is 5 km, full stop. That is the trade: fixing the distance is what buys the 400 m lap table and the chart. For any other race, the running split calculator takes 400 metres to 100 miles, and the race time predictor on the home page covers 100 metres to 100 miles.
No hill adjustment. The laps assume a flat course. A hilly 5K needs a per-kilometre elevation profile and a published energy-cost model; the marathon split calculator and the race time calculator do that job on this site. This page does not borrow their model, because a lap table that quietly mixes two models is worse than one that states a single one.
No prediction. This page starts from a finish time you already believe. It does not tell you what you are capable of — that is the race time predictor, which moves a recent race result along the distance curve, and the race time calculator, which prices a course on top of it.
No second clock. Every row carries one clock, the one you keep. If your race is chip-timed and you want to know what the gun clock above the markers reads, the splits calculator carries both side by side with a start-line-gap estimate.
No negative splits. A lap table carries one target and one number per row; a negative split is a shape, not a target, and printing one needs a model of how much slower the first half should be. That would be a guess about you, so the page prints even splits and leaves the shape to you.
No aid-station markers and no course presets. Both need one race's own layout or profile, and courses are re-measured. There is no "Bushy Park" option and no water-stop column.
No age grading and no weather correction. Both need published tables or models this page does not have. Rather than ship a made-up coefficient, it leaves them out and prints the numbers it can defend.
No treadmill mode. A treadmill pace is a different question — belt speed, incline and the calibration of the machine all sit between the setting and the effort — and this page has no source it can stand behind for any of them.

Questions

What is a 5K pace calculator?

It turns one 5K finish time into the pace you have to hold — per kilometre, per mile and as a speed — and breaks the 5 km into the laps and splits you can actually check on the day. This one is fixed at 5 km on purpose, so it can also print a 400 m lap-by-lap table, a pace chart covering 15:00 to 45:00, and a band you can wear.

What pace is a 5K in 20 minutes?

4:00 per kilometre, 6:26 per mile and 15.00 km/h, which is 9.32 mph. Over 5 km that is 12.5 laps of a 400 m track at 1:36 each, plus a 200 m run-in of 0:48. The chart above carries the same numbers for every finish time from 15:00 to 45:00, so you can read the pace off any other time without typing it in.

Why is this page only 5 km?

Because fixing the distance is what makes the rest possible. With the distance known, the page can give you a 400 m lap table — 5 km is exactly 12.5 laps — and a chart that covers the whole range of realistic 5K times. For any other distance, the running split calculator takes 400 metres to 100 miles and the race time predictor on the home page covers 100 metres to 100 miles.

What is the 5K pace chart for?

It is a reference grid rather than a result: finish times down one side, and the pace in kilometres, the pace in miles, the speed in km/h and the speed in mph in every row. It answers the question you have before you have picked a target — what does a 25-minute 5K actually mean in pace — and it shows the neighbouring times at the same time, which a single result never does.

Why 400 m laps?

Because 5 km is 12.5 laps of a 400 m track, so the lap is the natural checkpoint for a 5K and the only one you can read off a track without doing arithmetic. The band on the running split calculator offers 1 km, 1 mile, 5 km and 5 miles, and its own limits section says there is no custom interval field — so a lap band has to be built here, on a page that knows the distance. The table above shows both the lap time and the elapsed clock.

Does this work for a hilly 5K or a treadmill?

No, and it says so. The arithmetic here is even splits on a flat course: 5 km divided by your target time, repeated. A hilly course needs a per-kilometre elevation profile and a published energy-cost model, which the marathon split calculator and the race time calculator do on this site. A treadmill run is a different question again — belt speed, incline and machine calibration all sit between the setting and the effort — and this page does not attempt it.

Does it predict my 5K time from another race?

No. This page is the reverse direction: you bring the finish time and it tells you what that time costs per kilometre, per mile and per lap. Predicting a 5K from a 10K, or a 10K from a 5K, is the home page's job — the race time predictor moves one recent result along the distance curve.

Can I print the band?

Yes. Print band opens the print dialog with only the band on the page, drawn at 170 mm with a 50 mm scale check so you can confirm the printer kept it at 100%. If you have no printer, Download band writes the same rows to a plain-text file and Copy band puts them on your clipboard.

The 5K pace chart

Your laps

Your printable 5K pace band