live estimate
people walking right now
171,154,685people
2.083% of humanity
modelled estimate · updated every second · nothing here is actually being counted
walking since you opened this page
0
walks taken every day
8,215,424,893
walks starting every second
95,086
by the numbers
steps taken
285,257,809
steps per second
distance walked
237,715
km per second
Are you walking right now?
Nobody is counting the world. We can count you, though.
confirmed walkers today0 people
said not right now0 people
See what's happening in your country
We only use your location to work out your country. We don't store your address.
by country — right now
| country | local time | awake | people |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | 09:18 | 93% | 27,252,584 |
| India | 06:48 | 25% | 7,624,300 |
| United States | 20:18 | 85% | 6,052,440 |
| Indonesia | 08:18 | 85% | 5,059,647 |
| Mexico | 19:18 | 90% | 2,474,004 |
| Japan | 10:18 | 96% | 2,467,335 |
| Philippines | 09:18 | 93% | 2,262,747 |
| Brazil | 22:18 | 50% | 2,216,796 |
| Bangladesh | 07:18 | 60% | 2,196,086 |
| Vietnam | 08:18 | 85% | 1,799,141 |
How this works (the honest bit).
This is our assumption rather than a measurement, and walking is the hardest activity on this network to define: crossing a room is walking, and so is a ten-mile hike. We count one purposeful walk a day, of about thirty minutes, which excludes the incidental steps of simply being on your feet. That puts roughly 170 million people mid-walk at any moment. If you would count all walking rather than deliberate walks, the true figure is far higher; if you would count only walking as transport, it is lower. We have stated ours rather than hidden it. Every figure on this page is a model built from population data, each country's local clock and the assumptions above. It is an estimate, it moves every second, and at least one of them is certainly true.
Why does walking feel easy?
Walking is not a weaker version of running. It is a different machine, and one of the things humans do better than almost any other animal.
- You fall forward and catch yourself. A walking step is a controlled fall. You tip over your planted leg, then swing the other forward to stop the fall. Nothing pushes you along; gravity does the work and you choose when to interrupt it.
- The leg recovers most of the energy it spends. A stiff leg vaulting over the ground behaves like an inverted pendulum. Tendons and the arch of the foot stretch on landing and spring back, returning something like a fifth to a third of the energy the step cost.
- Humans are unusually good at it. Our gluteus maximus and the ligament at the back of the neck are specialisations few other primates share. They keep the trunk stable so the legs can work, which makes long-distance walking cheap for us and expensive for a chimpanzee.
- It costs so little that it gets dismissed. The energy is spread thinly enough that a walk does not feel like training, so it is counted as not exercise and quietly adds up to more than a gym session.
The often-quoted 10,000 steps is a marketing figure, not a research finding. It came from a 1960s Japanese pedometer campaign. The evidence supports more than you currently do; it does not support a magic number.
Biomechanics of the inverted-pendulum model of walking and human locomotor specialisations in comparative primatology.