Pulse Pressure Calculator

Pulse pressure is the difference between your systolic (top number) and diastolic (bottom number) blood pressure. It reflects the force your heart generates with each beat relative to the pressure in your arteries at rest.

What Pulse Pressure Measures

Pulse pressure isn't a measurement on its own, like systolic or diastolic pressure are, it's a calculated gap between the two that researchers have studied as a separate marker of arterial health, particularly in older adults.

The Formula

Pulse Pressure = Systolic Blood Pressure - Diastolic Blood Pressure

How This Calculator Computes Your Result

Enter your systolic and diastolic blood pressure readings. We subtract diastolic from systolic and show where your result falls relative to typical and elevated ranges.

What Your Result Means

A pulse pressure of roughly 30 to 50 mmHg is typical. In the Framingham Heart Study, among adults aged 50 to 79, higher pulse pressure was associated with greater coronary heart disease risk over 20 years of follow-up, and neither systolic nor diastolic pressure predicted risk better than pulse pressure did¹. Clinical summaries commonly treat a pulse pressure above about 60 mmHg as elevated.

Why Pulse Pressure Matters Beyond Systolic and Diastolic Alone

As arteries stiffen with age, they lose some ability to cushion the pressure surge from each heartbeat, which tends to raise systolic pressure while diastolic pressure stays flat or even falls, widening the gap between them. The Framingham researchers found this widening gap itself carried independent predictive information about coronary heart disease risk in older adults, beyond what systolic or diastolic pressure alone explained¹, which is why pulse pressure gets tracked as its own number rather than only as a byproduct of the other two.

The Arterial Stiffness Connection

A young, elastic artery stretches to absorb the surge of pressure each time the heart contracts, then recoils to keep blood moving forward during the resting phase between beats, which smooths out the difference between systolic and diastolic pressure. As arteries stiffen, more of that pressure surge reaches the periphery instead of being absorbed, pushing systolic pressure up without a matching rise in diastolic pressure². A wide pulse pressure is, in effect, an indirect signal of how stiff the arterial system has become, which is why it tends to rise with age even when average blood pressure looks otherwise normal.