How many steps are in a flight of stairs?
About 16. On an iPhone, Apple Watch, Garmin or Fitbit a flight is not a count of steps at all: it is roughly ten feet of climbing, and ten feet of ordinary stairs is about 16 steps. A StairMaster counts exactly 16 of its 8-inch steps as one floor. In a house, the stairs from one storey to the next usually run 13 to 16 steps.
Apple Watch and iPhone
Apple Health does not count stairs. The barometer in the phone and the watch measures air pressure, turns the change into height, and scores a flight for roughly every ten feet you climb on foot. Apple does not publish the exact threshold, but ten feet is the figure the other trackers state outright, and the one this site uses for every Health comparison.
Ten feet is 120 inches. Divide by a normal step, about 7½ inches, and you get 16. On the steepest steps a house is allowed, 7¾ inches, it is nearer 15; on office stairs, capped at 7 inches, nearer 17. So “one flight” in Health means about sixteen steps, whatever the staircase in front of you looks like.
Garmin and Fitbit
Both say it outright. Garmin’s manuals define a floor climbed as 3 m (10 ft). Fitbit’s help pages say a floor registers when you climb about ten feet, which Fitbit picked as the midpoint between a typical home and a typical office storey. Same altimeter trick, same ten feet, same sixteen-ish steps.
StairMaster
The one device that really does count steps. StairMaster’s owner’s manual says the Floors display is based on an 8-inch step, with 16 steps per floor. That makes a StairMaster floor 128 inches, about 10 ft 8 in, a little taller than a watch’s flight.
And a watch will not see any of them. A StairMaster keeps you at the same height, and a watch or phone counts height, so an hour on the machine adds floors to its console and none to Flights Climbed.
A flight in an actual building
To a builder, a flight is the run of steps between two landings, and the codes cap how tall it can be. The International Residential Code allows a riser of up to 7¾ inches and a flight that rises no more than 151 inches before it needs a landing, which works out to about 20 steps. The commercial code is stricter: risers of 7 inches at most, and 12 feet between landings, so about 21 shallower steps.
Most house stairs never get close to the limit. With an 8-foot ceiling and the floor structure on top, the climb from one storey to the next is about nine feet, which is 13 to 16 steps. So one storey at home is a little less than one of Health’s flights.
What ten flights of steps equals
Each one links to where the number came from.
- 138 stepsa football pitch, end to endSource