Hearing Frequency Range Calculator

Hearing frequency range naturally decreases with age, a condition known as presbycusis. Healthy young adults can typically hear frequencies between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz (20 kHz). As we age, the upper limit of audible frequencies gradually declines.

How age affects hearing:

The tiny hair cells in the inner ear (cochlea) that detect high-frequency sounds are the most vulnerable to damage and aging. These cells do not regenerate once lost. By age 25, most people have already lost some ability to hear the highest frequencies.

Typical upper frequency limits by age:

These are the figures the calculator itself produces, not a separate table borrowed from somewhere else. If you enter an age and the answer falls outside its own band here, that is a bug worth reporting.

Noise exposure accelerates hearing loss:

Loud noise is the most common preventable cause of hearing loss. Sustained levels above 85 dB, roughly heavy city traffic, do damage over time. Concerts, headphones held at high volume, power tools and industrial machinery all count.
The damage is cumulative and permanent, which is why the model adds noise loss on top of the age curve rather than treating it as something you recover from.

The calculation model:

The age curve is piecewise linear through anchor points fitted to the band table above, falling roughly 150 Hz a year through the teens and about 200 to 250 Hz a year after that.
Noise history then subtracts a further 40 Hz per year (moderate) or 90 Hz per year (high) for every year past 20, and consistent hearing protection cuts that penalty to about a third.

Be clear about which parts are measured. The age anchors are a rough consensus: careful tests from 9,000 to 20,000 Hz, such as Rodríguez Valiente’s 2014 study of 645 healthy people, show the same decade-by-decade slide with a wide spread at every age. The noise penalties are this page’s own assumption, sized so that a loud working life adds roughly a decade by middle age. No study hands you a figure in hertz per year, partly because noise does its first damage lower down, in a notch near 4,000 Hz, rather than at the top of the range.

A note on the protection input: if you answer “low” to noise exposure, the protection answer makes no difference to the result. That is deliberate rather than broken. Protection can only prevent damage that something loud was going to cause.

Important limitations:

This is an estimate only. Actual hearing ability varies greatly between individuals due to genetics, health conditions, medications, and specific noise exposure patterns. Conditions like ear infections, Meniere’s disease, or ototoxic medications can cause hearing loss beyond what age alone would predict.

For accurate results: A proper audiometric test conducted by an audiologist is the only reliable way to measure your actual hearing range. This calculator provides a general estimate for educational purposes only.