Enter your bench press — or a set, like 185 lb × 5 — and your bodyweight. You get your level among everyday lifters, from Beginner to Elite, and where your bench press ranks among the 222,703 men and 100,824 women who have done it in raw powerlifting meets since 2020.

What do Beginner, Novice, Intermediate, Advanced and Elite mean?

They are Strength Level's strength standards, built from the lifts its users log — 48.7 million bench presses alone, of which 10.9 million passed its checks for implausible and duplicate entries. Each level is the weight that beats a set share of those lifters of your sex and bodyweight: Beginner 5%, Novice 20%, Intermediate 50%, Advanced 80% and Elite 95%. Strength Level describes a beginner as someone who has practised the lift for about a month, a novice as six months of regular training, an intermediate as two years and an advanced lifter as more than five; elite lifters have spent over five years becoming competitive in strength sports.

We show the five levels for your bodyweight from curves fitted to Strength Level's published tables, which match them to within 2% (retrieved September 23, 2026). People who log every lift in an app are keener than the average gym member, so read a level as a comparison with committed lifters. Competitors are a higher bar still: they trained for a one-rep max and tested it on a platform, which is why the same lift ranks lower against them. What percentage of gym-goers can bench 225? puts the two side by side.

How is the competitor percentile calculated?

From the OpenPowerlifting archive of sanctioned meet results (public domain; snapshot of September 26, 2026). We keep raw (unequipped), sanctioned, non-disqualified results from meets dated 2020 or later, take each lifter's best successful attempt on each lift, and place them in the IPF weight class of the bodyweight they weighed in at for that result. Totals come from full-power meets only. Enter your age and the lift is also ranked against competitors your age — single years from 13 to 19, then by decade — counting each lifter's best result at that age, at any bodyweight. Your percentile is interpolated between the 1st and 99th percentiles of your class. If you enter more than one rep, we estimate your one-rep max with the Epley formula — weight × (1 + reps ÷ 30) — and rank that; prediction equations are most accurate at low reps (Whisenant et al., Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2003), so the calculator takes 1 to 12.

What is a good bench press for your weight?

Best bench in lb of raw competitors since 2020, by weight class. "Top 10%" is the weight that beats 90% of the class.

Men

Weight class	Median	Top 25%	Top 10%	Top 1%	Lifters
up to 130 lb	160	204	243	331	8,203
130–146 lb	209	243	281	344	13,074
146–163 lb	237	276	309	375	29,187
163–183 lb	265	303	336	402	46,328
183–205 lb	287	325	364	435	45,883
205–231 lb	309	353	397	468	39,022
231–265 lb	331	386	430	507	24,578
over 265 lb	358	419	474	562	16,428
All bodyweights	276	331	380	485	222,703

Women

Weight class	Median	Top 25%	Top 10%	Top 1%	Lifters
up to 104 lb	88	116	138	196	3,265
104–115 lb	110	132	154	205	6,967
115–126 lb	121	143	165	215	11,072
126–139 lb	127	149	176	226	16,535
139–152 lb	133	160	187	243	18,103
152–168 lb	143	165	198	259	15,965
168–185 lb	143	171	198	270	11,428
over 185 lb	149	182	209	287	17,489
All bodyweights	132	160	187	254	100,824

By age

Best bench in lb by age at the meet, at any bodyweight.

Age	Men: median	Men: top 10%	Women: median	Women: top 10%
13	132	198	88	132
14	165	237	99	142
15	198	270	110	154
16	226	292	116	165
17	243	314	127	176
18	254	331	132	182
19	270	347	138	187
20–29	298	386	143	198
30–39	320	424	143	204
40–49	314	419	138	198
50–59	287	391	127	182
60–69	251	342	110	154
70 and over	198	282	94	128

What is the average bench press?

The medians by age, weight class and sex, in pounds and kilograms, with what they mean for a teenager or for a lifter past 50, are in what is the average bench press by age and weight? The tables on this page are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; the full dataset is on the strength percentile calculator.

Other calculators

Sources

OpenPowerlifting, bulk data (public domain) and the project site
Strength Level, bench press strength standards, from lifts logged by its users (retrieved September 23, 2026)
International Powerlifting Federation, technical rules (weight classes)
Whisenant, M. J. et al., Validation of submaximal prediction equations for the 1 repetition maximum bench press test on a group of collegiate football players, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2003

How good is your bench press?