How to calculate how long a hike will take from distance and elevation gain

The short answer

Work out how long the distance alone would take at an ordinary walking pace, then add extra time for the climbing. A long-standing rule of thumb in hill walking adds roughly an hour for every 600 metres (about 2,000 feet) of elevation gain, on top of the distance-based estimate. A 10-kilometre walk with almost no climbing and the same 10 kilometres with 900 metres of ascent are not the same afternoon, and this is the simplest way to put a number on that difference before setting out.

Two different costs, added rather than blended

Walking a given horizontal distance costs time at whatever pace a person normally covers ground. Climbing height costs additional time on top of that, because moving upward for a given amount of forward progress is slower than moving across flat ground for the same forward progress. Rather than trying to guess one blended pace that accounts for an uneven trail all at once, this rule of thumb keeps the two costs separate and adds them: a flat-ground estimate from distance, plus a climbing estimate from elevation gain.

That separation is also why the rule reads the same distance and elevation gain figures a hiking app already reports at the end of a walk. Nothing extra needs measuring — the two inputs it wants are the two numbers already sitting in a route summary.

A worked example

Say a planned route covers 14 kilometres and gains 900 metres. At a normal walking pace of 12 minutes per kilometre, the distance alone would take 14 × 12 = 168 minutes. The climbing adds 900 ÷ 600 = 1.5 hours, or 90 minutes. Total estimated time: 168 + 90 = 258 minutes, a little over 4 hours and 15 minutes.

In miles and feet, the same idea holds with the imperial version of the constant, roughly an hour per 2,000 feet of gain: an 8.5-mile route at 19 minutes per mile is 8.5 × 19 ≈ 162 minutes from distance alone, and 2,600 feet of gain adds 2,600 ÷ 2,000 = 1.3 hours, about 78 minutes, for a total near 4 hours.

Why the constant is a starting point, not a promise

The 600-metres-per-hour figure describes an average walker on an average trail, and it was never meant to be more precise than that. Loose scree, mud, a heavy pack, an unfamiliar trail and simple day-to-day variation all push the real number away from the constant in either direction. It is also an ascent-only rule — it says nothing about descending, which some hikers find nearly as slow as the climb on steep or technical ground and others find genuinely quick. Treat the total it produces as a reasonable first estimate for planning daylight and pacing, not as a number the hike is obligated to match.

Turning the generic rule into a personal one

A hiking app that records distance, moving time and elevation gain for every walk already holds everything needed to replace the generic 600-metres-per-hour figure with a personal version of it, built from a person's own past hikes rather than an average stranger's.

Take a hike already recorded: distance, moving time and elevation gain are all sitting in its summary. Multiply the distance by an ordinary flat-ground pace to estimate what that distance alone would have taken. Subtract that estimate from the actual moving time — what is left over is roughly how much of the hike's time came from the climbing rather than the distance. Divide that leftover time by the elevation gain, and the result is a personal constant: minutes of extra time per metre climbed, on terrain similar to the hike it came from.

As an example, a 10-kilometre hike at an ordinary flat pace of 11 minutes per kilometre gives a flat-ground estimate of 110 minutes. If the recorded moving time for that hike was actually 170 minutes and it gained 500 metres, the climbing accounted for roughly 60 of those minutes — 60 ÷ 500 works out to about an hour of extra time per 500 metres of gain, rather than the generic 600. That difference is exactly the kind of thing a generic rule of thumb cannot know about a specific person on specific terrain, and a handful of recorded hikes reveal it directly.

Things that trip people up

• Using elapsed time instead of moving time as the flat-ground baseline — elapsed time already includes rest stops, and folding those into a pace estimate double-counts the same minutes the elevation-gain term is meant to add separately.
• Applying the same constant to a much faster or slower activity than walking — the rule describes walking pace on foot, and does not transfer to running or cycling without a very different constant.
• Assuming the estimate accounts for scrambling, off-trail travel or technical footing — the rule was built around ordinary trail walking, and rough or exposed ground slows a hike by more than the elevation-gain term alone predicts.
• Expecting the same personal constant to hold on completely different terrain — a constant built from smooth, well-graded switchbacks will underestimate a hike with loose or steep climbing, and the other way around.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam records distance, moving time, pace and elevation gain for every hike, so past routes already carry the two numbers this estimate is built from without any extra tracking to turn on. Looking back at a handful of similar hikes turns a generic rule of thumb into a sense of your own pace on climbs that no rule written for an average walker can quite match. TrailCam is free to download.