Navy PRT Calculator

What this calculator does not adjust for

One honest note before you read your score, because it affects how much weight to put on it.

This calculator does not adjust for altitude. The Navy does. Run at Fallon or Colorado Springs and the same effort produces a slower time than it would at sea level, because there is less oxygen to work with, and the Navy publishes adjusted standards to account for it. Those adjustments are set out in the Navy's own physical readiness instruction, and they are the authority.

We do not reproduce them here. An earlier version of this page claimed the tool asked where you were standing. It did not, and the code behind that claim applied a made-up number: the comment beside it described a 30 second adjustment while the code applied 40, and there were no Navy altitude tables in the tool at all. On a test that decides whether a sailor is retained, an invented constant is worse than an absent feature, so it was removed rather than dressed up.

The practical effect: if you test above 5,000 feet, the score here will read low against what the Navy will actually credit you. Check your command's fitness leader or the current instruction for the adjusted times. The rest of this page, the events, the categories, and the arithmetic behind them, is unaffected.

Row it, swim it, or run it

The other quietly generous thing about this test is the menu. Your cardio event can be a 1.5-mile run, a 2-kilometre row, a 500-yard swim, or a 450-metre swim.

Two swims, a row, and a run. That is a wider choice than any other service on this site offers, and it makes obvious sense once you remember whose test it is. The Navy is the service that spends its career on and around water, on ships where the running options are limited and the treadmill may be pitching. A test that insisted on a 1.5-mile run would be a test that half the fleet could not train for.

There is a fairness question buried in it, though, and it is worth being honest about. These four events are not equivalent, and they are not equivalently trainable. Swimming is the most technical activity here by a distance. A sailor who swam competitively as a teenager and a sailor who learned to swim in the Navy are not separated by fitness in a 500-yard swim; they are separated by twenty years of stroke mechanics. Running is nearly technique-free by comparison: almost everyone's running is roughly as efficient as anyone else's, so the run measures fitness fairly cleanly.

So the choice is a real choice. If you swim well, the swim will flatter you relative to your actual fitness. If you do not, it will punish you for something the test is not trying to measure. The row sits somewhere in between, being more technical than running and much less than swimming.

None of which is a criticism. A test the whole fleet can actually take, on a ship, is worth more than a perfectly calibrated one that half of them cannot. It is just worth knowing that picking your event is picking your yardstick.

The categories, and why they are not pass or fail

Your total lands you in a named band rather than a bare pass:

Notice what that structure does that a pass mark cannot. The Army's tests hand you a number and a verdict: 60 per event, a total, in or out. This one places you on a ladder, and the rungs have names people actually use about each other.

That is a different instrument. A pass-fail test asks "are you adequate", answers it, and stops caring. A banded test keeps asking. The distance between Satisfactory and Outstanding is forty points of somewhere to go, and it is legible to everyone: your chief knows what Outstanding means and so do you.

Whether that motivates people or merely labels them is a fair argument, and both effects are real. What is not in dispute is that the Navy chose to describe a range rather than draw a line, and that a sailor sitting at Good has been told something more useful than "you passed".

The obvious caveat applies here as everywhere in this section: PRT results have career consequences, the rules around failures and their effects are set by Navy instruction rather than by us, and they change. Take the number here as a training check and take the standards from your command.

The Navy dropped its sit-ups too

One more thing worth noticing, because it is part of a pattern across every service.

This test measures your core with the plank. It used to use curl-ups, and they went around 2020, for the same reasons the Army eventually dropped its sit-ups: repeatedly flexing a loaded lumbar spine is associated with back injury, and the movement recruits the hip flexors heavily enough that it is not cleanly measuring the abdominal muscles it is credited with. Our APFT Calculator goes through that evidence, since the Army tested sit-ups for roughly forty years before reaching the same conclusion.

What makes it interesting is the timing. The Navy moved to the plank around 2020. The Army replaced its leg tuck with the plank in 2022. The Air Force now offers a forearm plank as one of its core options. Three services, arriving independently at the same exercise within about two years of each other.

When that happens it usually means the evidence stopped being arguable. And the underlying insight is sound: your core's actual job, under a loaded pack or on a moving deck, is to resist movement and stop you folding. It is not to fold you, repeatedly, two hundred times. A plank tests the thing the muscle does. A sit-up tests something the muscle is not really for, while grinding your discs.

The age bands here run to 65 and over, further than the Army's, which stop at 62. That is not an inconsistency between our tools, it is a difference between the services.

Questions people ask

Does altitude change my score?

In the Navy's rules, yes. In this calculator, no. Air pressure falls with elevation, so each breath delivers less oxygen and aerobic capacity drops measurably above roughly 5,000 feet, and the Navy adjusts run times so a sailor tested in the mountains is not penalised for the mountains. We do not reproduce those adjusted tables here, so if you test at altitude the score on this page will read lower than what you will actually be credited with.

Does altitude affect the swim?

Where altitude adjustments apply, they are aimed at the run, which is where the effect is clearest and the event most universally run at maximum effort. Either way, this calculator does not apply them to any event.

Which cardio event should I pick?

Whichever reflects your fitness rather than your technique. Running is close to technique-free, so it measures fitness cleanly. Swimming rewards stroke mechanics heavily, which flatters trained swimmers and punishes everyone else.

What is a good score?

The bands are Outstanding at 90 and above, Excellent from 75, Good from 60, and Satisfactory from 50. Unlike the Army tests, this one describes a range rather than drawing a single line.

What happened to curl-ups?

Replaced by the plank around 2020, on the same evidence that led every other US service to drop sit-ups: spinal flexion under load is associated with back injury, and the movement does not isolate the core well.

References

A note on sources. The scoring bands, age groups, event options and the altitude adjustment described here are read from the standards this tool implements. Navy physical readiness standards, the rules governing failures and their consequences, and the instructions that define them are set by the Navy and are revised periodically, so your command remains the authority on what applies to you. The move away from sit-ups and curl-ups toward isometric core holds is common across the US services: the Army's replacement of the leg tuck with the plank, and its reasoning, is documented in the Army's own announcement of the revised Army Combat Fitness Test, and was examined in RAND's congressionally mandated independent review.

1. 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
2. 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