Average 40-yard dash times by level and position

A typical high-school varsity 40 lands somewhere around 4.7 to 5.4 seconds hand-timed, with skill positions at the fast end and linemen at the slow end. Combine times are quicker for two reasons at once: the athletes are faster, and the timing method is different. Comparing a number across those lines is the most common mistake.

Typical ranges by position

These are approximate, widely-cited ranges rather than measured data, and the spread inside any one position is large. Treat them as a sanity check, not a scorecard.

Approximate typical ranges for context only. Individual players fall well outside them in both directions.

Hand-timed and electronic times are different numbers

A hand time is generally faster than a fully electronic time for the same run — the commonly used adjustment is somewhere in the region of two to three tenths of a second. It is not that the watch is wrong; it is that a human starts the clock late, on seeing movement, and stops it early, in anticipation of the finish. Both errors push in the same direction.

This is why a 4.5 at a summer camp and a 4.5 at the Combine are not the same performance, and why the first question about any 40 should be how it was timed. Combine timing also starts on the athlete's own first movement rather than on a gun, which removes reaction time from the result.

What counts as a good time

At most high schools the fastest players on the roster are skill-position athletes in the mid-4.5s to low-4.7s on a hand time, and anything under about 4.6 hand-timed is uncommon. But the number means little on its own. The same athlete will post different times on turf and on grass, in cleats and in trainers, at fifteen and at eighteen, and on two different stopwatches held by two different coaches.

Context beats precision here. A time is useful when you know the level, the surface, the timing method and the athlete's age, and close to useless when you know only the digits.

Why the 40 is only part of the picture

Very little football happens over forty straight yards. Most plays are decided inside the first ten, which is why the ten-yard split gets more attention than the full 40 for linemen and why acceleration matters more than top speed at most positions.

The things that separate players on film are usually not pure speed at all: how quickly they reach full stride, how hard they can stop, and what a hard cut costs them compared with running straight. A player who is a tenth slower over forty yards but reaches speed in two fewer steps is the better football player in most situations.

Reading a 40 estimated from film

An estimated 40 taken from video is a third category again — not a hand time, not an electronic time, but a figure derived from measured speed. Accuracy depends on camera angle, framing, visible field markings and video quality, and a film estimate should never be presented as a verified or combine-timed result.

What makes a film number useful is the same thing that makes any 40 useful: knowing what it is being compared against. A high-school sophomore measured against a current NFL roster learns nothing; measured against varsity players at the same position, the number starts to mean something.

Highlight Video Stats places every measurement in a band — Elite, Advanced, Good, Average, Below Average or Poor — against high-school varsity players at your position, with Elite calibrated to what a future Division-I player looked like in high school. It also reports how many plays each number came from, so you can see which figures are worth quoting.

See also: how to measure a 40-yard dash time from game film.