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Women · six levels · every bodyweight

Average Bench Press for Women: Standards by Age & Weight

Among women who compete, the average woman benches about 127 lb58 kg. A bodyweight bench is Advanced. Here is the whole scale, on its own table, for the reason below.

Women · 140 lb64 kg bodyweight

average woman · 127 lb58 kg
Beginner
from the bar
Novice
from 5525
Intermediate
from 7735
Advanced
from 11050
Elite
from 14365
World Class
from 17680

Find your rank

Where does your bench sit?

Against women your size. One rep is a one-rep max; a set of up to twelve gets estimated.

Sex

1 rep = your one-rep max. Enter a set of up to 12 reps and we estimate it (Epley).

Calculations run in your browser. We measure usage, including strength levels and broad bodyweight ranges.

Your bench

127lb

Advanced

at or above 55% of women competing in the data at your bodyweight

NOVINTADVELITEWC
127 lb58 kg

A 0.91× bodyweight bench is Advanced for a 140 lb64 kg woman. Elite starts at 143 lb65 kg, 16 lb7 kg away.

Standards by bodyweight

Bench press standards for women

Units
Women · six levels by bodyweight · one-rep max in lbkg, bodyweight in lbkg · small figure: share of women competing in our data who bench less than that floor
BodyweightBeginnerNoviceIntermediateAdvancedEliteWorld Class
under 1215545202%50232%66305%884025%1215570%1547092%
12155–14365avg woman45201%55251%77355%1105035%1436575%1768092%
14365–1657545201%66301%88407%1215535%1547070%1989093%
16575–1878545201%66301%994510%1326040%1657575%2099593%
18785–2099545201%77352%1105020%1436555%1768080%22010095%
20995–23110545201%77351%1105015%1436545%1878582%23110596%
231105+45201%88402%1215520%1547050%1989084%24311096%

Each cell is the floor of its level. A 140 lb64 kg woman who benches 110 lb50 kg is Advanced and stays Advanced until 143 lb65 kg. Beginner starts at the empty bar; for many women the bar itself is the first milestone, and a real one.

Distribution

How rare is a good bench for a woman?

Every tested one-rep max in the data, women, all bodyweights. 38% have benched their bodyweight; 43% have benched a plate a side.

NOVINTADVELITEWC

Milestones

The plates, for women

What each rung means for a 140 lb64 kg woman, and how many women in the data have reached it.

  1. 13561Advanced43% of women have lifted it · 1 in 2
  2. 18584World Class10% of women have lifted it · 1 in 10
  3. 225102World Class2% of women have lifted it · 1 in 41
  4. 275125World Class<1% of women have lifted it · 1 in 244
  5. 315143World Class<1% of women have lifted it · under 1 in 1,000
  6. 405184World Class0% of women have lifted it · under 1 in 1,000

By age

Average bench press for girls and women by age

Girls 13 to 18, each with a page of their own standards.

Every age, 13 to 70+
  1. 13121558338
  2. 14154709242
  3. 15187859945
  4. 162099510849
  5. 1723110511653
  6. 1824811212155

boys, median competitor girls, median competitorage · lbkg · among lifters of that age who compete in our data

Why a separate table

Why women's bench standards are their own scale

Of the three powerlifts, the bench shows the largest gap between men and women, because it depends most on upper-body muscle mass and least on the hips and legs. At the same bodyweight, the women's Intermediate line sits near the men's Novice line and the women's Elite near the men's Intermediate. Scoring a woman's bench against the men's table would call almost every woman a Beginner, which is both wrong and useless. So the women's standards are built from women's lifts, and Stronger scores them the same way.

What does not differ: the shape of progress. Women gain bench strength at the same relative rate as men, respond to the same programming, and plateau in the same places. The first year moves most women from the bar to Intermediate; Advanced takes years of pressing twice a week.

What a strong bench looks like. For a 140 lb64 kg woman: Novice from 55 lb25 kg, Intermediate from 77 lb35 kg, Advanced from 110 lb50 kg, Elite from 143 lb65 kg. A bodyweight bench is Advanced. Two plates a side is a competitive lift in most weight classes.

Where to start. The empty bar, then five-pound jumps, with the shoulder blades pinned and the feet planted. Most women stall not for lack of chest strength but for lack of triceps and shoulder work: close-grip pressing, dips and overhead pressing fix more benches than more benching does.

How we calculate

Where these numbers come from

Percentiles are built from 1,668,369 verified bench press attempts by 556,880 lifters, updated September 2026. We show the method so you can judge it.

The distribution. Our percentiles come from competition results in the OpenPowerlifting open dataset: each lifter's best successful raw bench, with sex, bodyweight and age recorded at the meet. These numbers describe competitive powerlifters, people who entered a sanctioned meet and trained for it. They are stronger than the general gym population, and far stronger than the general public. We say so wherever a percentile appears. Drug-tested divisions bench less at the median than untested ones (men: 276 lb vs 305 lb); the headline numbers pool both.

The levels. Six bands, the same six Stronger uses to score every lift in the app, and read the same way. Each cutoff is the floor of its band for that bodyweight, and crossing it puts you in. We do not redraw the scale from the competition data; we put the competition percentile beside every floor so you can see how rare each level is among people who compete.

Testing a one-rep max. Warm up to it in jumps that get smaller as the bar gets heavier, take three to five minutes between the last attempts, and use a spotter or safeties. If you would rather not max out, take a set of two to six clean reps and let the calculator estimate it; the Epley formula we use is accurate to within a few percent under ten reps.

Beginner
Can perform the movement with the empty bar or light weight; strength is still mostly a skill and nervous-system story.
Novice
Ahead of most people who do not train. Typically a few months of consistent, progressive work.
Intermediate
Ahead of the majority of regular gym-goers. Usually one to two years of structured training.
Advanced
Rare in a commercial gym. Years of programming, technique and bodyweight management.
Elite
The second-highest band on Stronger’s scale. Competition rankings are shown separately.
World Class
The highest band on Stronger’s scale, not a claim of a federation record or qualification.

Sources

All 196 cited sources

How our scale compares

Our six levels are Stronger's own scale, and the percentages beside them come from competition results. The published tables below are the ones people actually copy; we keep them here word for word, and say whose numbers they are, so you can see how a “good” bench on this page compares to what other sources call good. None of them measures the general population either.

  • Strength Level Limited · 18 tables (lb, ratio, kg)Male and female Strength Level usersOriginally based on fixed Kilgore/ExRx tables in 2007. Publisher says July 2015 replaced that model with community-data regressions; May 2016 incorporated joint lift/bodyweight modelling. Current table belongs to the 2026 refresh. These are not independent probability estimates for all adults.
  • StrengthLog · 12 tables (kg, lb)Men and women who use StrengthLogStrengthLog says the standards are calculated from user training logs; no Kilgore derivation is claimed. Sample date, age distribution, lift-verification protocol and detailed statistical construction are not supplied on the inspected page.
  • Lon Kilgore / Kilgore Academy · 1 table (kg)Men and women, ages 15–89Author combines scientific literature, published drug-tested classic/raw lifting results and coaching observation. The author resource page explicitly says the 2023 revision supersedes prior tables. No cell-level dataset or reproducible estimation code is provided.
  • The Aasgaard Company · 2 tables (lb)Adult Men / Adult WomenSource specifies Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, 3rd edition techniques. Every bench numeric cell matches the inspected 2007 ExRx table, but level names differ. This is documented numerical identity, not proof of an unpublished licensing or authorship history.
  • ExRx.net · 1 table (lb)Adult men and womenExplanatory source credits Dr. Lon Kilgore, the training definitions in Practical Programming (Kilgore, Rippetoe, Pendlay), Starting Strength exercise technique and published lifting-performance standards. Numeric identity with the publisher-hosted 2012 Starting Strength sheet is directly established. Kilgore now says…
  • Gravitus, Inc. · 5 tables (lb)Male / Female Gravitus usersPublisher-owned app logs; best estimated 1RM per lifter, Brzycki formula, extreme outliers excluded. Asterisks designate weight points with fewer than 50 lifters, estimated by the publisher through allometric scaling. These estimated rows are retained as explicitly modelled published standards, not recomputed or repre…
  • Strength Origins · 2 tables (lb)Men / Women; raw, drug-tested, sanctioned full-power competitors, ages 16–65Publisher, not this inventory, processed OpenPowerlifting using Power Query; best-total performance per lifter-year, valid nonzero full SBD results, raw and drug-tested, weight classes rebinned to IPF style. No underlying data were downloaded or recomputed for this job.
  • BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation / Springer Nature · 2 tables (kg, ratio)47 male Australian elite police officersPrimary retrospective cohort measurements; barbell touches chest, full extension, bench contact maintained. Same lead coach across tests.
  • Quincy Police Department / Board of Fire and Police Commission · 2 tables (ratio)MALE / FEMALE police-officer applicantsOfficial agency publication attributes POWER minimums to national norms and an approximately equivalent percentile standard across age/sex groups; underlying normative dataset and edition are not named.
  • BrianMac Sports Coach · 1 table (ratio)men / womenAuthor-published coaching judgment; no cell-level dataset or derivation is given. A separate McArdle citation is used by the page’s assessment machinery, but the source does not prove these two good thresholds are that table.
  • Topend Sports / Robert Wood · 1 table (ratio)adults; both sexes as stated by the publisherThe author explicitly attributes the scores to personal experience, not a federation, research sample or ACSM norm.
  • Healthline · 1 table (lb)Men / Women, ages 18–59; page explains sex as assigned at birthThe page links ExRx for these standards. Unlike the fixed numerical 2007 ExRx/2012 Starting Strength cells, this page prints ranges. No inspected evidence establishes how those range endpoints were constructed.
  • 100% RAW Powerlifting Federation · 1 table (lb)Women competing in 100% RAW; ranking-informed performance classes, not population normsFAQ identifies PowerliftingWatch rankings, primarily 2008–2010, as the backbone of Elite standards, with formulas, federation input and judgment. Other classes are related to Elite. The female FAQ explicitly discusses limited participation and hypothetical stronger fields. No uniform male×factor derivation is stated.
  • TriageMethod · 1 table (ratio)Women using the publisher’s health-targets assessment; no sampled population disclosedPublisher explicitly sets female standards at approximately 60–75% of male standards, varying by movement. This is a stated coaching method; no fixed 0.6 factor is applied or inferred here.

What apps publish about their own users

  • Strength Level: average bench of 212 lb among male Strength Level cohort; no fixed bodyweightMethod: Self-submitted lifts feed fitted strength/bodyweight distributions. Rep sets can be converted to estimated 1RM. FAQ describes removal of implausible, duplicate, bot-like and unusually frequent entrie…. Not a general-population figure.
  • Strength Level: average bench of 112 lb among female Strength Level cohort; no fixed bodyweightMethod: Self-submitted lifts feed fitted strength/bodyweight distributions. Rep sets can be converted to estimated 1RM. FAQ describes removal of implausible, duplicate, bot-like and unusually frequent entrie…. Not a general-population figure.
  • StrengthLog / Styrkelabbet: median bench of 100 kg among male users in the 24,408-user bench standards cohortMethod: Public standards cite users’ training logs, but do not fully disclose selection, deduplication or fitting. The separate 2019 Swedish report analyzes logged single repetitions, not a stated rep-max co…. Not a general-population figure.
  • StrengthLog / Styrkelabbet: median bench of 47 kg among female users in the 24,408-user bench standards cohortMethod: Public standards cite users’ training logs, but do not fully disclose selection, deduplication or fitting. The separate 2019 Swedish report analyzes logged single repetitions, not a stated rep-max co…. Not a general-population figure.

Our own figure, for comparison: the median competitor in the data benches 281 lb127 kg (men) and 127 lb58 kg (women).

Questions people ask

Bench press for women, answered

How much can the average woman bench press?

In our data the average woman benches about 127 lb58 kg for one rep, which is Advanced for a 140 lb64 kg woman. That is among women who train and test the lift; the general-population figure is lower.

What is a good bench press for a woman?

For a 140 lb64 kg woman, Intermediate starts at 77 lb35 kg and Advanced at 110 lb50 kg. Intermediate is stronger than most women who lift; Advanced is rare in any gym.

Should a woman be able to bench her bodyweight?

A bodyweight bench is Advanced for a 140 lb64 kg woman in our standards, and 38% of women in the data have done it. It is a serious milestone, not a baseline.

How many women can bench 135?

43% of women in our data have benched 135 lb, about 1 in 2. For a 140 lb64 kg woman it is Advanced.

How does the average woman's bench compare to the average man's?

Among people who compete in our data, the median woman benches 127 lb58 kg and the median man 281 lb127 kg, so the median woman lifts about 45% of what the median man does. The gap is wider on the bench than on the squat or deadlift because it is an upper-body lift, and it is why women get their own table rather than the men's numbers discounted.

Sources: Association of Strength Performance in Bench Press and Squat with Anthropometric Variables between Resistance-Trained Males and Females (Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, 2023)

Why are women's bench press standards lower than men's?

Upper-body muscle mass, mostly. In a 2023 study of trained adults, women's bench one-rep max averaged 54.6 kg against 110.7 kg for men, a 51% gap, while the squat gap was 39%; a classic 1993 comparison put women's upper-body strength at about 52% of men's and lower-body strength at 66%. Strength per unit of muscle is much closer than those numbers suggest; women simply carry less of it above the waist. None of that changes what a level means: Intermediate on the women's table is stronger than most women who lift, full stop.

Sources: Association of Strength Performance in Bench Press and Squat with Anthropometric Variables between Resistance-Trained Males and Females (Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, 2023) · Gender differences in strength and muscle fiber characteristics (European Journal of Applied Physiology and Occupational Physiology, 1993)

Do women's strength standards underestimate women?

A percentile only ever describes the women in the dataset behind it, and every dataset is self-selected: fewer women compete or log their lifts, and the ones who do are the keen end. Ours comes from women who entered a powerlifting meet, which is the strong end of the strong end, so if anything the percentiles on this page make a given number look more common than it is among women in general. The six levels are a separate thing: Stronger's scale, not a percentile, so a level means what it means whoever else logs.

How much should a woman bench in kg?

The same scale, in kilograms. For a 64 kg woman, Novice starts at 25 kg, Intermediate at 35 kg, Advanced at 50 kg and Elite at 65 kg. The lb/kg toggle at the top of the page switches every number, including the table.

Stronger · Strength Score

Scored against women, every set, automatically.

Stronger uses the women's standards for women, adjusted for bodyweight, so the Strength Score means what it should. It shows the muscle that is lagging and keeps the log as the number climbs.

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