Beep Test World Record: The Highest Scores, Verified

Search “beep test world record” and you’ll get a dozen confident answers, usually a different one each time. Level 17. Level 19. “Completed the whole test.” Most of these don’t survive a five-minute fact-check. We went looking for the actual evidence, official publications and verified test results, not repeated blog claims, and this is what we could and couldn’t confirm.

Is there an official beep test world record?

No. There’s no sporting federation, governing body, or Guinness title for the single highest beep test score. Guinness recognises only the most participants completing a bleep test together, a group record, not an individual one [7]. What exists instead is a handful of separate records kept by individual organisations.

That gap is exactly why the internet is full of confident-sounding “world records.” Without one official ledger, the same handful of claims get repeated from site to site, some real, some inflated, some measuring an entirely different test altogether.

What’s the highest verified beep test score?

Level 17.1 (level and shuttle notation), held jointly by two people: Marek Schirnack of the Royal New Zealand Navy, the first level-17 run in the service’s history [1], and José Romero, a former AFL player, documented on the Western Bulldogs’ own official club history page [6].

Neither is a governing-body “world record” in the athletics sense, they’re organisation-specific results, but both trace back to a source we could actually check rather than a number nobody can source. If the level/shuttle notation is new to you, our complete guide to running the beep test spells it out.

The AFL Draft Combine’s all-time record

The clearest sport-specific ledger is the AFL’s official Draft Combine, which ran the beep test as a standard prospect test for close to two decades. Billy Hartung set the all-time combine record in 2013 with 16.6, breaking the previous mark of 16.1 set by Bradley Hill in 2011 [2].

The AFL dropped the beep test from the combine altogether in 2017, replacing it with the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test [5]. Hartung’s 16.6 is now a frozen, permanent record, nobody coming through the combine pathway today can beat it on this specific test.

Why so many higher “records” don’t hold up

Once claims climb past level 17, the sourcing gets thin fast, and a lot of it comes down to test-version confusion. “Beep test” gets used loosely for several different, related tests. PACER, the American schools version, has both a 20 metre and a 15 metre variant; the 15m version needs more shuttles to hit the same speed, so raw lap counts from one don’t transfer to the other [10]. The Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test, popular with football and hockey squads, builds in a 10-second recovery jog between shuttles, a materially easier test than a continuous beep test at the same level. Numbers from one test get repeated as if they belong to another all the time, which is how a lot of the biggest “records” below happen.

In their own words

Two of the most repeated names in beep test folklore actually left their own account on record, which puts them in a different category from pure rumour.

Former England rugby flanker Neil Back wrote in his own autobiography, The Death of Rugby, that he reached level 17 [8]. Self-reported rather than independently tested, but it’s the man’s own word on his own result, not a secondhand claim.

Swedish footballer Håkan Mild is the subject of one of the most persistent “he completed the whole test” legends in Scandinavian sport. Mild himself has addressed it directly on Swedish radio: he did not complete the test, and has said he got to somewhere around level 19.20 at his best, decades ago, an account multiple independent Swedish sports outlets and fan sites report consistently. There’s a problem with that number on its own terms, though: under the standard level/shuttle notation, no level in the test ever reaches a 20th shuttle, the highest shuttle count anywhere is 16, at levels 20 and 21. So “19.20” isn’t a position that exists in this test at all, which points either to a different fitness test entirely (Scandinavian football squads lean on the Yo-Yo test far more than the beep test) or a rounded, decades-old memory rather than a literal score. Either way, the “completed the test” myth about him is one he’s personally shut down.

Rumours and Tall Tales

Every beep test community has these stories: the guy who supposedly ran through the wall, the pro athlete who “definitely” hit level 19. We went looking for the paper trail behind the most repeated ones. Here’s what we found: not much. Treat these as campfire stories, not results, nobody named here did anything wrong, the internet just likes a big number.

What does a score that high actually mean physiologically?

The beep test’s speed climbs 0.5 km/h every level from level 2 onward, regardless of which start-speed variant you run, a structure that traces back to Léger’s original 1982 design [9] (our full history of the test covers where it actually came from). Level 17 always means running at 16.5 km/h continuously for a full minute on a 20 metre shuttle that punishes every turn. Run through our VO2max conversion, that works out to a predicted VO2max in the mid-70s (ml/kg/min); level 20 sits closer to the mid-80s, territory shared with serious endurance athletes, not weekend runners. Our VO2max guide has the full level-by-level numbers and formula.

For nearly everyone reading this, the realistic goal isn’t level 17, it’s whatever your own pass mark or personal best actually is. When I went through this program myself, my own jump was Level 10 to Level 12.5 in six weeks, solid, real progress, nowhere near record territory, and that’s exactly the kind of number worth chasing. If that’s what brought you here, our guide to training for the beep test is the more useful next stop.

Sources

1. Royal New Zealand Navy, Navy Today, Issue 261 (December 2021). issuu.com/nzdefenceforce/docs/navytoday_issue261
2. AFL.com.au, “Billy Hartung smashes combine beep test record.” afl.com.au/news/452864/billy-hartung-smashes-combine-beep-test-record
3. AFL.com.au, “Schoenfeld boosts draft stocks with new 3km record.” afl.com.au/news/199186/schoenfeld-boosts-draft-stocks-with-new-3km-record
4. AFL.com.au, “Combine’s shortest player produces giant effort in beep test.” afl.com.au/news/96803/combines-shortest-player-produces-giant-effort-in-beep-test
5. AFL.com.au, “Beep test, 3km time trial dumped from Draft Combine.” afl.com.au/news/90567/beep-test-3km-time-trial-dumped-from-draft-combine
6. Western Bulldogs, “Best Bulldog Arrivals: No. 3.” westernbulldogs.com.au/news/22392/best-bulldog-arrivals-no-3
7. Guinness World Records, “Most participants in a bleep test.” guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/bleep-test-most-participants
8. Back, N. & Eldredge, D. The Death of Rugby (autobiography).
9. Léger, L.A. & Lambert, J. (1982). A maximal multistage 20-m shuttle run test to predict VO2 max. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 49, 1-12. link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00428958
10. The PACER Test. FitnessGram. fitnessgram.net/pacer-test