Military Push-Up Standards by Branch

The Army push-up standard is the hand-release push-up on the Army Fitness Test: as many correctly performed repetitions as possible in two minutes, scored from 0 to 100 points, with 60 points required to pass. The rep count needed for 60 points ranges from 15 down to 10 for men and from 11 down to 10 for women depending on age band.

The AFT is the Army's test of record and consists of five events: the three-repetition maximum deadlift, the hand-release push-up, the sprint-drag-carry, the plank, and the two-mile run. Each event is worth up to 100 points, for a maximum of 500. A soldier must score at least 60 points on every single event, and failing one event fails the whole test regardless of the total. Soldiers in combat-enabling specialties need 300 points overall; soldiers in the 21 designated combat specialties need 350 and are scored against a sex-neutral standard.

The scoring table below is taken directly from HQDA EXORD 218-25 (CC) Annex B, the Army Fitness Test Score Tables, approved 1 May 2025 and effective 1 June 2025. The column headed Male / Combat is the same column used for the sex-neutral combat-arms standard, which is how the Army publishes it.

Two details in the Army push-up standards are worth pointing out because they surprise people. First, the maximum-score requirement does not peak at the youngest age band: 62 reps at 27-31 is the hardest 100-point demand in the table, ahead of 58 at 17-21. Second, the pass mark is genuinely low, 10 to 15 hand-release push-ups, while the maximum is genuinely high. That is a deliberate design: a floor almost everyone can clear and a ceiling almost nobody does.

A hand-release push-up adds a dead stop and an arm extension to the bottom of every repetition. Instead of touching the chest and reversing, the soldier lowers until chest, hips and thighs are flat on the ground, lifts both hands and extends the arms straight out to the sides into a T, returns the hands to the ground, and only then presses back up. The Army test allows two minutes for maximum repetitions.

The official Army form standard starts prone with hands flat on the ground and index fingers inside the outer edges of the shoulders, feet together or up to one boot-width apart. The body is pushed up as a single unit to full elbow extension in the front leaning rest, and generally straight alignment from the top of the head to the ankles must be maintained throughout. Bending the knees, hips, trunk or neck in the rest position is not permitted.

That changes the exercise in three specific ways. Chest and thighs on the floor makes full depth non-negotiable: no partial reps, and no judgment call from the grader. The dead stop kills the stretch reflex, so every rep restarts from zero rather than bouncing out of the bottom. And the T-extension recruits the posterior shoulder and mid-back and costs time, which matters on a two-minute clock. Compared like for like, most people do noticeably fewer hand-release push-ups than standard ones. Our push-up form guide covers the standard version in detail.

Training for the hand-release push-up means training the three things the movement adds: a dead-stop press with no rebound, the T-extension under fatigue, and pacing across a two-minute clock. Ordinary push-up volume alone tends to leave soldiers strong at the movement but slow at the test.

1. 1

   Train the dead stop specifically

   Do sets of push-ups where you lower fully to the floor, relax for a beat, then press. Removing the stretch reflex is most of what makes the hand-release version harder, and it is the part that responds fastest to practice.

2. 2

   Add the T-extension every rep

   Do not practise the press and the hand release separately. The arm extension is where the rhythm breaks down at rep 30, and the only way to make it automatic is to include it from the first training rep.

3. 3

   Practise pacing, not just maxing

   Two minutes is long enough that going out too fast costs you reps. Set a steady cadence you can hold for the full window rather than sprinting the first 30 seconds. Metronome work, or an app that calls the count aloud, makes the pace concrete.

4. 4

   Build the base with submaximal volume

   Frequent submaximal sets across the week move a max further than a few sets to failure. The methods in how to increase push-ups and grease the groove apply directly.

5. 5

   Rehearse the full event, sparingly

   Run a real two-minute timed max every two to four weeks, not weekly. Test days are training days you do not get much adaptation from, and the honest number matters more than a frequent one.

If you want a progression built around your current maximum rather than a generic plan, the push-up program generator will lay one out, and the push-up test gives you the honest starting number to build it from.

The Navy push-up standard is a standard push-up performed for maximum repetitions in two minutes, scored across categories from Probationary at the bottom to Outstanding at the top. A sailor passes the Physical Readiness Test by scoring Probationary or higher on every event: push-ups, forearm plank, and a cardio event.

The Navy numbers are far higher than the Army's, because the Navy scores a standard push-up rather than a hand-release, and because its lowest passing category still sits above the bottom of the population. The table below gives the Probationary threshold, which is the lowest passing score, and the number required for the top 100-point Outstanding High rating, at altitudes below 5,000 feet.

The Navy push-up protocol is precise: the sailor starts in the leaning-rest position with the body in a straight line, lowers until the arms bend to at least 90 degrees, and presses back to full extension without locking the elbows. Rest is permitted only in the up position. The event ends if any part of the body other than hands and feet touches the deck, if a hand or foot lifts, or if body alignment is lost. Separate, slightly easier tables apply above 5,000 feet.

In the Marine Corps, push-ups are not the primary upper-body event. The Physical Fitness Test lets a Marine choose pull-ups or push-ups, and choosing push-ups caps that event at 70 points instead of the 100 available for pull-ups. Since the PFT is scored out of 300, a Marine who elects push-ups cannot score a perfect PFT, no matter how many they do.

That cap is the whole story of the Marine Corps push-up standard, and it is deliberate. The Corps treats the pull-up as the better measure of functional upper-body strength and prices the alternative accordingly. Push-up minimums and maximums are still published by age band and sex in the scoring tables of Marine Corps Order 6100.13A, and they decline with age in the same way every other branch's do.

The practical guidance for Marines is unaffected by the missing table: if you are able to train pull-ups, train pull-ups, because the scoring makes push-ups a strictly worse deal at every level of performance. Push-ups remain excellent general training and the best way to build the pressing endurance that carries over to everything else, which is what our guide to increasing push-ups is for.

The Air Force strength component offers a choice: one minute of push-ups, or two minutes of hand-release push-ups. As of 2026 the service is mid-transition to a revised Physical Fitness Assessment, and the specific rep-to-point charts should be taken from the current official source rather than any third-party page.

In a release published 6 January 2026, Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs set out the components of the updated bi-annual PFA: a two-mile run or the 20-metre High Aerobic Multi-shuttle Run for cardiovascular; one minute of push-ups or two minutes of hand-release push-ups for strength; one minute of sit-ups, two minutes of cross-leg reverse crunches, or a timed forearm plank for core; and a waist-to-height ratio measurement for body composition. All tests from 1 March to 30 June 2026 were diagnostic, with official testing under the new standards resuming 1 July 2026.

That same release stated that updated fitness score charts and an updated AFMAN 36-2905 would be published subsequently. Because the charts were still pending at the time of that announcement and we could not retrieve the released version from an official source, we are not reproducing Air Force rep numbers here. Airmen should take the current tables from the Air Force Personnel Center and their unit fitness programme manager.

The Coast Guard push-up event sits inside a new mandatory Physical Fitness Test that replaced the older Physical Fitness Assessment on 1 July 2026. The PFT has three components, the push-up, the plank and a cardio event of a run, row or swim, and a member must score at least 45 points on each; failing any single event fails the test overall.

Those details come from ALCOAST 082/26, the Physical Readiness Program Update dated 30 March 2026, which also specifies that raw scores are converted into an overall score from 1 to 7 using age- and sex-normed scoring tables. Those tables are distributed through the Coast Guard's internal Physical Readiness Program pages rather than published openly, so this page does not reproduce Coast Guard rep counts. Members should take them from the official PFT Guide.

On raw reps, the Navy has by far the hardest push-up standard of the branches we could verify. A male sailor aged 20-24 needs 37 standard push-ups in two minutes merely to reach the lowest passing category. A male soldier aged 22-26 needs 14 hand-release push-ups to pass the Army Fitness Test. Even allowing for the hand-release variant being the harder movement, that is not a close comparison.

The comparison is less unfair than it looks, because the two tests are doing different jobs. The Army spreads difficulty across five events and uses the push-up minimum as a low floor with a very high ceiling, 61 reps for full marks at 22-26. The Navy runs three events and sets a higher floor on each. A soldier who could pass the Army push-up event comfortably could still fail the Navy one. If you want to see how any of these numbers compare to ordinary civilian norms, our push-ups by age guide has the published tables.