Army Combat Fitness Test Calculator

Read this first: the Army replaced this test

We are going to open with the most important thing on the page rather than bury it, because you may be about to make a decision based on a number.

The ACFT is no longer the Army's test of record. On 1 June 2025, under Army Directive 2025-06, it was replaced by the Army Fitness Test, the AFT. That is the test you will actually take.

What changed:

• The Standing Power Throw is gone. The AFT has five events, not six: maximum deadlift, hand-release push-up, sprint-drag-carry, plank, and the two-mile run. The Army removed the throw saying it was not promoting fitness and readiness as well as intended, and it carried injury risk, with height and technique skewing results more than power did. Soldiers called it the yeet, and they will not miss it.
• The maximum total is now 500, not 600, because one event's worth of points went with it.
• There are now two standards, and which one applies depends on your job. Soldiers in 21 designated combat military occupational specialties are scored on a single sex-neutral, age-normed scale and need 350 total. Everyone else is scored on sex- and age-normed scales and needs 300. Both need a minimum of 60 points in every event.

Combat MOS standards took effect on 1 January 2026 for the active component and 1 June 2026 for the Reserve and National Guard. Both dates have passed.

So: this calculator scores the six-event ACFT out of 600, which was the test of record from 2022 until mid-2025. If you need your current score for a record test, promotion points or a career decision, this is the wrong tool and you want the AFT standards from your chain of command or army.mil. The result box now carries that warning too, so it travels with the number. The rest of this page explains the test this tool scores, and why the Army keeps changing it, which turns out to be a genuinely interesting story.

The six events, and what each one was for

The ACFT was built to fix a specific complaint about the test it replaced. The old Army Physical Fitness Test was push-ups, sit-ups and a two-mile run, which is a reasonable measure of general fitness and a poor description of soldiering. Nobody in combat does sit-ups. Our APFT Calculator covers that test and why it lasted four decades anyway.

So each ACFT event was chosen to stand in for something a soldier actually does:

Look at the hand-release push-up in particular, since it is the one civilians find odd. At the bottom you flatten out and lift your hands off the ground entirely, then put them back and press up. It means you cannot bounce, and it removes any help from the elastic recoil of your chest. Every repetition starts from a dead stop. That is deliberate, and it is why the numbers are lower than an ordinary push-up.

The design intent was sound and the Army was right about the underlying problem. What followed was harder.

How the scoring works

Each event scores from 0 to 100, and there are two rules rather than one:

• You need at least 60 points in every single event.
• You need the required total across all events.

That first rule is the one people forget, and it is unforgiving. A strong total does not rescue you if you scored 59 on one event. You cannot bank points from the deadlift to cover the run. Six events, all of which must clear 60, which is exactly the point: the test is looking for a soldier with no holes rather than a specialist.

Where the scales came from is worth knowing, because it tells you what your score means. When the Army rebuilt them in 2022 it used nearly 630,000 recorded ACFT scores, historical performance on the old APFT, and scoring scales borrowed from other services, particularly for the plank.

Then it anchored them to percentiles. The maximum score for an event corresponds to roughly the 96th percentile of performance within your age and sex group, and the minimum sits at about the 5th.

That is worth sitting with. A perfect 100 does not mean you hit some absolute standard of soldiering. It means you performed at about the level of the top few percent of people like you. And a 60 is not a floor set by what combat demands. It is roughly the 5th percentile of what soldiers in your cohort actually do. The scale is a description of the Army, turned into a grade.

The question the Army could not settle

The ACFT was originally designed to be gender- and age-neutral. One test, one set of standards, everybody. The reasoning was straightforward: a casualty does not weigh less because the soldier dragging them is smaller, so the standard should reflect the task rather than the person. Momentum for it built after combat arms roles were opened to women in 2015.

The trials did not go as hoped. In 2019 testing, around 84 percent of women taking the test failed it. Congress ordered an independent review, which the RAND Corporation delivered in March 2022. RAND found that under the original design, about 52 percent of enlisted active-duty women passed, against 92 percent of men. Even among the best-performing occupational specialties, roughly a third of women did not pass.

RAND also framed the underlying dilemma more clearly than anyone else had, and it is worth quoting the shape of it, because it is a genuine dilemma and not a trick question. Should all soldiers, regardless of age, sex and job, meet the same physical standard, prioritising combat readiness? Or should the test be set so that all soldiers have a reasonable chance of passing, accepting that this means not everyone meets the same minimum?

Those are two different goods and you cannot have both. The Army chose the second, and moved the ACFT to age- and sex-normed scoring in April 2022, which is what this calculator implements and what the old APFT had always done.

The choice was contested at the time and has stayed contested. Supporters of neutral standards argue that physical demands in combat do not adjust for who turns up, and that normed scoring means soldiers doing identical jobs are held to different marks. Supporters of normed standards argue that a general fitness test taken by the whole Army is not the right instrument for gatekeeping specific combat roles, that job-specific screening is the correct tool for that, and that a test failing half of one group is more likely to be measuring the group than the readiness. RAND's own contribution was to point out that the evidence base for tying these particular events to combat performance was thinner than the argument required in either direction.

Which is roughly where the AFT landed in 2025: a sex-neutral, age-normed standard for the 21 combat specialties, and sex- and age-normed scoring for everyone else. Both sides of the argument got the half they cared most about, sorted by job rather than applied to the whole Army at once.

The event that could not measure what it claimed to

One casualty of all this deserves its own section, because the reasoning is genuinely elegant and it is the best illustration of how hard fitness testing is.

The original ACFT tested core strength with the leg tuck: hang from a bar and bring your knees to your elbows, repeatedly. It looks like an excellent core test, and in a sense it is.

The problem RAND identified was not that it was too hard. It was that it could not measure what it was there to measure. To do a leg tuck you must first hang from a bar and hold yourself there, which is upper body and grip strength. So a soldier with a genuinely strong core but modest upper body strength scores zero, and their zero says nothing about their core. The event could not distinguish "weak core" from "cannot hang from a bar". Around 41 percent of women could not complete a single repetition, and many were not failing on the thing being assessed.

That is a measurement failure rather than a fitness failure, and it is a subtle one. The leg tuck was replaced by the plank, which requires no equipment, no grip, and isolates the core reasonably well.

Though RAND was even-handed about this too: it noted that neither the leg tuck nor the plank was well supported as a predictor of performance on actual combat tasks. The plank is a better measurement of core endurance. Whether core endurance measured this way predicts soldiering is a separate question, and one nobody had properly answered.

What this calculator is still good for

Given the AFT superseded it, the honest uses of this page are narrower than they were.

It is close to the AFT for five of the six events. The deadlift, hand-release push-up, sprint-drag-carry, plank and two-mile run all carried forward. If you are training and want a rough read on where you stand, ignore the throw and treat the rest as indicative. Do not treat the total as your AFT score, because the totals are not comparable.

It is a reasonable historical reference, if you have an old ACFT scorecard and want to understand what the numbers on it meant.

It is not a substitute for current standards. AFT results feed promotion points, assignments, schools and career progression, and repeated failure has consequences. That is too much weight for a calculator on a website to carry, especially one scoring a retired test. Get your standards from your chain of command or army.mil.

And a broader point that applies to every page in this section. Army fitness standards have changed three times since 2020. The APFT ran for about four decades and was replaced; the ACFT lasted three years in its final form before the AFT; the AFT itself came with phased dates that have only recently landed. These are the only tools on this site with an expiry date on their correctness, which is why we would rather tell you the date than let you assume.

Questions people ask

Is the ACFT still the Army's test?

No. The Army Fitness Test replaced it on 1 June 2025. The AFT has five events rather than six, drops the standing power throw, and maxes at 500.

What score do I need?

On the AFT, 60 points minimum in every event, plus 350 total for the 21 combat specialties on the sex-neutral age-normed scale, or 300 total for everyone else on sex- and age-normed scales.

Why was the standing power throw removed?

The Army said it was not promoting fitness and readiness as well as intended. It also carried injury risk, and height and technique influenced the result more than raw power did.

Does 100 points mean I hit an absolute standard?

No. The maximum corresponds to roughly the 96th percentile within your age and sex group, and the minimum to about the 5th. The scale describes the Army rather than defining combat.

What was the test before this?

The Army Physical Fitness Test: push-ups, sit-ups and a two-mile run. Our APFT Calculator covers it and why it survived for four decades.

References

Where this comes from. The Army's own AFT page sets out the replacement of the ACFT on 1 June 2025, the five-event format, the removal of the standing power throw, and the two standards of 350 for the 21 combat specialties on a sex-neutral age-normed scale and 300 for combat-enabling specialties. The Army's 2022 announcement covers the move to age- and sex-normed scoring and the replacement of the leg tuck by the plank. RAND's congressionally mandated independent review reported the pass rates of 52 percent for enlisted active-duty women against 92 percent for men under the original design, and found that neither the leg tuck nor the plank was well supported for predicting combat task performance. Reporting in Army Times covers the scale construction from nearly 630,000 scores and the anchoring of maximums to the 96th percentile and minimums to the 5th.

1. U.S. Army. Army Fitness Test. https://www.army.mil/aft/
2. U.S. Army. Secretary approves implementation of revised Army Combat Fitness Test. 2022. https://www.army.mil/article/254875/secretary_approves_implementation_of_revised_army_combat_fitness_test
3. RAND Corporation. More evidence needed to support performance goals of current Army Combat Fitness Test. 2022. https://www.rand.org/news/press/2022/03/23.html
4. U.S. Army. Army introduces new fitness test for 2025. https://www.army.mil/article/285501/army_introduces_new_fitness_test_for_2025
5. Army Times. Army Combat Fitness Test debuts with major changes to scoring April 1. 2022. https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/03/23/army-combat-fitness-test-debuts-with-major-changes-to-scoring-april-1/