Walking Speed: A Useful Window Into Longevity

By Jean-Luc Bourdon

Financial planning involves many uncertainties, but perhaps the most personal one is how long you'll live. Market returns, inflation, and tax policies are shaped by broad forces outside any individual's control. In contrast, longevity depends on your own health journey. That's why planners often use tools to estimate lifespan. Actuarial tables from Social Security or insurers give population averages. Questionnaires like livingto100.com consider lifestyle and family history. Newer biological age tests try to measure how quickly the body is aging. Each provides a different perspective, but recent research highlights something quite simple: the speed at which you walk.

What the Research Shows

A large pooled analysis published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in 2011 examined 34,485 adults aged 65 and older and found that each 0.1 meter-per-second increase in walking speed was linked to roughly a 12% decrease in mortality risk. Ten-year survival at age 75 ranged from 19% for the slowest men to 87% for the fastest, and from 35% to 91% for women. Data from the UK Biobank, one of the largest population studies in the United Kingdom, shows that brisk walkers tend to live longer—sometimes by as much as 10 to 15 years in extreme cases—though typical differences for older adults are closer to one year of extra healthy life.

Beyond raw speed, gait variability and dual-task performance (walking while multitasking) consistently relate to the risk of cognitive and physical decline. Walking thus serves as a test of cardiovascular, respiratory, musculoskeletal, and neurological integration, making gait speed a particularly strong “summary measure” of overall health.

How It Compares to Other Risk Factors

Traditional risk factors like smoking, high blood pressure, and cholesterol assess the health of specific organ systems. In contrast, walking speed reflects the combined performance of many systems at once. Studies repeatedly show that gait speed can predict survival in older adults as well as or better than many traditional risk factors. For example, research published alongside the JAMA meta-analysis found that gait speed predicts 10-year survival as accurately as a combination of age, sex, smoking history, blood pressure, body mass index, and chronic conditions. Walking speed is now sometimes called a “functional vital sign” for aging adults, with clinical thresholds used in geriatrics, such as speeds below 0.6 meters per second indicating higher risk and speeds above 1.0 meter per second suggesting better-than-average survival.

Why This Matters for Planning

Longevity projections shape nearly every aspect of a financial plan:

Retirement income: Longer expected lifespans might call for prudent withdrawal rates and growth-focused investing strategies.
Social Security timing: Robust health indicators, such as brisk walking speed, might support delaying benefits to maximize payouts.
Healthcare and long-term care: Lagging or declining gait speed might signal higher future care needs, potentially justifying the purchase of long-term care insurance or larger care reserves.
Estate and legacy goals: Planning horizons might shift considerably when personal health indicators point to longer or shorter life expectancy, influencing trust structures and charitable giving timelines.

By blending actuarial averages, biological markers, lifestyle factors, and functional indicators like gait speed, financial advisors can contextualize scenario planning and better calibrate assumptions behind longevity risk.

The Real Value: Health Awareness, Not Precise Prediction

Walking speed’s greatest power lies in its ability to drive self-awareness and prompt proactive conversations with healthcare providers. Consistently slow gait may serve as an early warning sign, motivating lifestyle changes that improve both lifespan and quality of life.

However, it’s essential to recognize the limits of any health marker. No amount of analysis—be it based on walking speed, cholesterol, or family history—can definitively predict individual life expectancy. Genetics, accidents, and chance play unpredictable roles.

A Better Planning Approach: Scenario-Based Thinking

Rather than betting on a single lifespan prediction, robust financial plans use scenario analysis to manage longevity uncertainty:

Shorter lifespan scenario: For couples, this preparation is particularly important because the surviving spouse might lose benefits, including a favorable tax bracket, one Social Security check, and possibly partial or complete pension income.
Expected lifespan scenario: The base case uses actuarial averages, adjusted for personal markers such as walking speed.
Longer lifespan scenario: The possibility of living much longer than expected makes the following strategies worth evaluating: lower spending, guaranteed income (e.g., annuity), delaying Social Security and/or pension benefits, working longer, and long-term care planning.

Planning for multiple scenarios removes the need to predict exact longevity. Instead, it prepares the plan to work well across different possible lifespans, making it more likely that the financial outcome will be comfortable regardless of what happens.

Bringing It Together

Economic drivers such as inflation and tax policy impact everyone, but longevity remains a deeply personal matter. Walking speed and related health indicators serve as helpful tools for health awareness and financial planning, even though they are not exact prediction tools. Sometimes, simple measures provide meaningful insights into overall health, but being prepared for a full range of possibilities is still the key to smart financial planning.

For clients and advisors, indicators like walking pace should promote health awareness and practical scenarios that recognize what can be measured while preparing for the unpredictable.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any firm or organization. This content is provided for general informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as personalized financial, tax, accounting, or investment advice. Although the author is a CPA and holds the PFS credential, no professional services are being offered through this article. Readers should consult their own qualified advisors before making decisions based on this information. The content may include information from sources believed to be reliable but is not guaranteed and may be subject to change without notice.

Copyright: © 2025 Jean-Luc Bourdon, Original text, structure, organization, and editorial revisions created by the human author. The author used AI as a drafting tool, but exercised creative control by rewriting, restructuring, and contributing original analysis, tone, and expression. Disclosure in accordance with U.S. Copyright Office guidance on AI-assisted works.