How Much Should You Deadlift? Deadlift Standards by Bodyweight

A deadlift standard is only as good as the people behind it. The tables on this page were built from OpenPowerlifting, an open archive of meet results, and each row lists exactly how many lifters it summarises.

Keep one thing in mind while reading: everyone counted here chose to compete. They trained toward a meet, made weight and pulled in front of judges. Comparing yourself with them is comparing yourself with a strong, motivated crowd, so a result under their median is no sign that something is wrong.

How was the deadlift data filtered?

Only full-power meets in the raw division were used. Raw permits a belt and knee sleeves; straps, deadlift suits and wraps are not part of it. From there:

1. Meet dates from 1 January 2015 through mid-October 2026.
2. Lifters aged 18 or over by recorded age. When the exact age was missing, the age class had to begin at 18 or higher; entries with no age data were excluded.
3. A completed total was required, so disqualified lifters, doping disqualifications and no-shows are gone.
4. Every lifter appears once. Their single heaviest successful deadlift in the window is the value used, which stops regular competitors from counting several times.
5. The weight class comes from the bodyweight logged at the meet where that heaviest pull happened, sorted into current IPF classes.

The result covers 198,913 men and 99,092 women. Pounds are rounded to the nearest 5 and kilograms to the nearest 2.5. In the tables, p10 means the 10th percentile, p50 is the median, and so on.

Deadlift standards for men

Those pulls are in pounds. Here they are in kilograms:

Deadlift standards for women

Pounds above; kilograms below:

What does p50 mean in a deadlift table?

Each column is a cut point. Take the 93 kg men: p25 is 450 lb, so one competitor in four in that class never pulled more than 450 at a meet. The p50 figure, 505 lb, is the middle lifter. p90 is 610 lb, a pull that only one in ten reached.

You will not find "beginner" or "elite" tags on this page. Nothing in meet results says how long someone had been training, so a level name would be invented. Talk about bands instead: under p25 is the bottom quarter of meet lifters, p25 to p75 is the middle half, and over p90 is the top tenth.

What is a good deadlift for a 200 lb man?

At 200 lb you belong in the 93 kg class (up to 205 lb). Half of the raw men there pulled between roughly 450 and 560 lb, and the median sat at 505 lb (230 kg). Even p10 for that class is 400 lb, which shows how selective a meet entry list is.

What is a good deadlift for a 135 lb woman?

A 135 lb woman competes in the 63 kg class (up to 139 lb). The median woman there deadlifted about 285 lb (130 kg), and the middle half ranged from about 250 to 325 lb. A double-bodyweight pull at 135 lb is 270 lb, between that class's p25 and median.

How does the deadlift compare with the squat?

Competitors pull more than they squat. In the 83 kg men's class the median deadlift, 485 lb, is about 18 percent above the median squat of 410 lb. In the 63 kg women's class the gap is wider: 285 lb against 230 lb, roughly 24 percent. The full squat tables, built the same way, are in squat strength standards.

How do I get a deadlift max to compare?

Testing a true single is optional. Pull a hard set of 3 to 5 with clean form and estimate from it using the formulas in how to calculate your one-rep max, or type the set into the 1RM calculator. If you lift in a gym and not on a platform, the strength standards calculator shows where a pull like that lands at your age and weight, judged strapless from the floor. Once you have a number, one-rep max percentages explained shows how to turn it into training weights.

Compare like with like. A meet deadlift must be locked out with knees and hips straight and shoulders back, and the lifter has to wait for the down signal. Pulling with straps, or lowering the bar before reaching full lockout, gives a number these tables were never built for.

Where these deadlift standards fall short

• This is a competitor sample. The people in it trained for a meet. Lifters who never compete would likely sit lower, but there is no public dataset that measures them in the same way, so the size of that gap is unknown.
• Career bests, not typical days. Using each lifter's heaviest pull since 2015 lifts the percentiles a little.
• Stance is not recorded. Sumo and conventional pulls are both legal at meets and the data does not separate them.
• The deadlift comes last. At a full-power meet it follows the squat and bench, so some lifters pull less than they would fresh.
• Bodyweight can be understated. With weigh-ins up to 24 hours before lifting in some federations, lifters often weigh more on the platform than their class.
• Drug-tested and untested results are pooled, and so are all adult ages.

To keep your own pull climbing, progressive overload explained lays out the basic rules.

Sources

• OpenPowerlifting, data release dated 2026-10-24 (meet results through 2026-10-18). Public domain: "OpenPowerlifting data is contributed to the public domain." This page uses data from the OpenPowerlifting project, openpowerlifting.org. You may download a copy of the data at gitlab.com/openpowerlifting/opl-data.
• OpenPowerlifting CSV download used for this analysis: openpowerlifting-latest.zip