What is a good HRV for my age?

No age chart can grade your night. HRV does fall with age, fastest before your fifties. But healthy people of the same age differ by ten times or more, and every device measures it a little differently. Compare yourself with your own normal.

People look for an age chart because it feels like the fair comparison. The trouble is the spread. HRV researcher Marco Altini reports values from 5 to 80 ms among people in their sixties, and from 10 to 230 ms among teenagers. A chart’s middle line hides almost everyone.

What we’d do: use age to set expectations, and your own nights to judge. Expect your average to drift down slowly over the decades. That drift is normal and slow. A drop over a week or two is about something else.

How fast does HRV fall with age?

In a 1998 study of 260 healthy people aged 10 to 99, 24-hour RMSSD in people in their fifties was about half of what it was in teenagers. After that it levelled off.

In data from more than 8 million Fitbit users, HRV fell with age too. People who took more steps a day had higher HRV, at every age.

Oura’s 2026 figures from 6 million members show the same slope, with an average of 41 ms across all adults. Its age chart prints no values for each age.

Men and women

In the 1998 study, women under 30 had lower HRV than men, and the gap was gone by 50. In the Fitbit data, RMSSD showed no clear difference between the sexes.

What does my device say about age?

• Garmin. Balanced, Unbalanced and Low compare you with your own baseline. Only Poor brings in age: your values are averaging well below the usual range for your age.
• Oura, WHOOP. Both report RMSSD, so their figures sit on the same kind of scale as the studies above.
• Apple Watch. It reports SDNN, a different measurement. An RMSSD age chart can’t place an Apple Watch number.