Walking roughly 7,000 steps a day was tied to a 47% reduction in death from any cause

A pooled analysis of 57 studies covering more than 160,000 adults found that people who averaged about 7,000 steps a day had a 47% lower rate of death from any cause than people who stayed closer to 2,000 steps. The same body of research tied that step count to a 25% reduction in cardiovascular disease, a 38% drop in dementia risk, and a 22% decline in depression. The researchers behind the work framed 7,000 as a more attainable target than the widely repeated, but never officially prescribed, goal of 10,000 daily steps.

The review was led by Melody Ding at the University of Sydney, working with Stuart Biddle at the University of Southern Queensland and collaborators elsewhere. Their team gathered data from 57 studies conducted across several continents, then ran a stricter dose-response meta-analysis on 31 of them where the evidence was consistent enough to chart how risk changed as daily steps rose from as few as 2,000 toward 7,000 and beyond.

Pooling Data From 57 Studies and 160,000 Adults

“Walking approximately 7,000 steps per day is associated with reductions in the risk of several serious health outcomes,” the research team said in a summary of the findings distributed through EurekAlert. Compared with adults who averaged closer to 2,000 steps a day, those reaching 7,000 saw all-cause mortality fall 47%, cardiovascular disease fall 25%, dementia fall 38%, and depression fall 22%. Two further outcomes moved by smaller but still measurable margins: cancer risk dropped 6% and type 2 diabetes risk fell 14%, figures the team called clinically meaningful even where the underlying evidence base was thinner.

Biddle said the point of anchoring the analysis to 7,000, rather than the rounder and more demanding 10,000, was to widen who can realistically benefit. “Although 10,000 steps a day is a popular benchmark, these results are encouraging for those who find that number unrealistic or hard to maintain,” he said in a statement carried by his university, adding that a lack of time is the reason more than half of Australians give for not getting enough physical activity.

Diminishing Returns Beyond 7,000 Steps

Independent physiologists who reviewed the analysis after publication cautioned against treating 7,000 steps as a hard ceiling. Steven Harridge of King’s College London, commenting through Britain’s Science Media Centre, said pushing further still pays off for the heart: “Increasing to 10,000 steps seems to confer no negative effects.” The pooled data backed that reading for cardiovascular disease specifically, where risk kept declining as step counts climbed past 7,000, even as the curve for most of the other outcomes began to flatten.

Falls risk dropped 28% at the same 7,000-step threshold, one of the outcomes the researchers rated as moderate-to-high certainty evidence, alongside the mortality and cardiovascular findings.

Gaps the Analysis Could Not Close

The study, published July 23, 2025, in The Lancet Public Health, rated the evidence behind the cancer and dementia figures as low certainty, mainly because so few of the 57 underlying studies had measured those outcomes against step counts specifically rather than against broader activity questionnaires. A number of the included studies also fell short of fully adjusting for confounding factors such as age or pre-existing frailty, which can inflate an apparent benefit if people who already walked more were also, for unrelated reasons, healthier to start with.

Most of the underlying data came from wearable trackers and accelerometers rather than self-reported step counts, which the authors treated as a strength; self-reporting tends to run higher than what devices actually record, a gap that has undercut earlier walking studies built on survey answers alone. The 31 studies used in the dose-response calculations also varied in how long they followed participants, from just a few years to over a decade, which is part of why the team described the cancer and dementia estimates as preliminary rather than settled.

Age range was another variable the analysis could not fully iron out. Several of the 57 studies skewed toward older adults already being monitored for cardiovascular risk, a group in which small increases in daily movement tend to show up as larger relative gains simply because their baseline risk starts higher. The researchers did not report separate step-count thresholds for younger adults, leaving open whether 7,000 carries the same weight for a 30-year-old as it does for someone in their 60s or 70s.

A More Realistic Target for a Largely Inactive Public

The push for an achievable number lands against a backdrop of widespread inactivity. The World Health Organization has estimated that nearly 1.8 billion adults worldwide are not active enough to protect their health, a shortfall the agency has tied to higher rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and several cancers.

Biddle’s own suggestion for closing that gap was deliberately mundane: taking the stairs instead of an elevator, or parking farther from a destination, small additions that add up from a low starting point without requiring a gym membership or a training plan. He argued those incremental changes matter more than chasing a round number, since most inactive adults are nowhere near 7,000 steps to begin with. Whether those small gains hold up over the decades it actually takes chronic disease to develop is a question the current studies, built mostly on a few years of follow-up, are not yet positioned to answer.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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