Treadmills
Written by Jamie Miller, Founder & EditorLast checked
Most treadmill buying advice starts with a list of products. This starts with the five specifications that actually decide whether a machine will suit you, because once you know those the shortlist mostly picks itself, and because a list of products you cannot evaluate is not advice.
The five things that decide it
Deck length decides whether you can run on it
This is the specification that most often makes a machine unusable, and the one buyers check last. A longer stride needs a longer belt, and running on a deck that is too short makes you shorten your stride to avoid the motor cover. As a rough guide, walking is comfortable on most decks, jogging wants meaningfully more, and running at pace for a taller person wants the longest decks on the market. Check the belt length, not the machine length.
Motor ratings are quoted two ways and brands do not say which
Peak horsepower is a brief maximum. Continuous horsepower is what the motor sustains, and it is the number that matters for running. They can differ by a factor of two. Where a manufacturer does not state which it is quoting, we record the figure as unverified rather than converting it, because converting it would mean inventing an efficiency assumption nobody published.
Maximum user weight is a structural limit, not a suggestion
It is set by the frame, the deck and the motor together, and exceeding it wears all three faster. If you are near a machine’s limit, the next size up is usually a better machine in every other respect too, not just a stronger one.
Folded footprint is not the same as small
A machine that folds is still a large, heavy object when folded. The number worth knowing is the folded depth and whether you can actually move it on your floor, not whether the brochure says it folds. If it has to be unfolded and set up each time, it will be used less.
Incline is the feature most worth paying for
Motorised incline raises effort substantially at walking speeds, which is why incline walking has become the standard recommendation for people who do not want to run. Manual incline, adjusted by stopping and moving a pin, is used approximately once.
What we are not going to tell you
That there is a best treadmill. The machine that suits a 55kg walker in a first-floor flat and the machine that suits an 95kg marathon trainee with a garage are not the same object, and any page claiming a single winner is telling you about its own affiliate arrangements rather than about treadmills.
We also will not tell you a machine is quiet, smooth or well built on our own authority. We have tested nothing. Where owners report on those things at volume we say so and give the number of reports; where nobody has established it, the specification is markedNot established, checked 18 Sept 2026 and left that way. How we review.
Start from how you will use it
The fastest way to a shortlist is to answer one question honestly: what will you actually do on it, most weeks, in the space you actually have?
- Walking at a desk — you probably want a walking pad, not a treadmill. Different product, different page.
- Space is the constraint — folding and compact machines, and what folding really means.
- Starting out, or over the usual weight limits — where maximum user weight and deck width matter most.
- No socket, or the fewest parts that can fail — manual machines, flat and curved.
- Not sure which type at all — the comparison, start there.
On price
We do not run separate pages for under £300, under £500 and under £1,000, because Google resolves all of those with one result set and splitting them would mean three thin pages competing with each other. Price is a filter on a shortlist, not a category of machine.
What price does change is where the compromises fall. At the bottom the deck is short and the motor is modest, which is fine for walking and frustrating for running. In the middle you get deck length and motorised incline. Above that you are mostly buying build quality, warranty and a better console, and the gap between a good mid-range machine and an expensive one is smaller than the gap between a cheap one and a good mid-range one.
Running costs and the arithmetic
Cheaper than people expect. Half an hour a day on a typical machine is usually under £20 a year in electricity. The full method, and a calculator that takes your own tariff, is onwhat a treadmill costs to run.
Product shortlists for this page are being built from sourced manufacturer specifications. They will appear here with each figure carrying its source and the date it was checked, as everything on this site does. Until they are ready this page carries the guidance and not a placeholder.