How many steps to get anywhere?

What this calculator does

Most step converters ask you for a distance you already know. This one starts a step earlier: give it two place names and it finds them both, measures between them, and applies a correction for the fact that nobody walks in a straight line.

The distance between two coordinates is a straight line across the surface of the Earth. The distance you actually walk is longer, because buildings, rivers and street grids get in the way. Research on pedestrian networks generally puts that detour ratio between about 1.15 and 1.45 depending on how a city is laid out, and this calculator applies a median value of 1.28. It is an estimate, and the methodology page sets out exactly how it is built and where it is likely to be wrong.

Why your height changes the answer

A step is not a unit of distance. It is a unit of your particular body covering ground, and the size of it varies by more than a quarter across the adult range. Walking step length is usually estimated at about 0.414 times your height, which means a 1.55-metre walker takes roughly 2,515 steps to cover a mile while a 1.95-metre walker takes about 1,987.

That is why the calculator asks for your height rather than assuming an average. Two people walking the same route side by side, both with accurate devices, will legitimately record step counts differing by a quarter — and neither of them is wrong. If you want a figure closer still, measuring your own stride takes about five minutes and our guide explains exactly how to do it.

What a step count is good for

Steps are a convenient measure because phones count them automatically, not because they are the right unit of health. They ignore cycling and swimming entirely, they say nothing about strength or balance, and they count a mile through an airport the same as a mile up a mountain. What the research behind step targets is really measuring is time spent not sitting down.

The evidence on how many you need is less demanding than the target on your watch suggests. Large studies have generally found the mortality benefit curve flattening somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 steps a day depending on age — well below the familiar 10,000, which turns out to have come from the name of a Japanese pedometer sold in 1965 rather than from any study.