Recovery calculator

Blood pressure calculator — the US and European categories side by side

Enter one reading and see how both major guidelines classify it, plus the pulse pressure and mean arterial pressure the category throws away. Free, instant, no sign-up.

Two guidelines, one reading

ACC/AHA moved the hypertension threshold to 130/80 in 2017, reclassifying roughly a third of American adults overnight without anyone's blood pressure changing. ESC/ESH kept it at 140/90 and calls 130-139 over 85-89 "high-normal" instead. So a reading of 135/85 is stage 1 hypertension in the United States and high-normal in Europe — same person, same cuff, different label. Showing one without the other would be picking a side silently, so this page shows both.

How this calculator works

Both guidelines are applied to the same pair of numbers, and the connectives matter more than the thresholds do. Under ACC/AHA, "elevated" requires the systolic to be in band AND the diastolic to be under 80, while the two stages trigger on EITHER number. Getting those the wrong way round is the classic implementation bug, and it under-reports every reading with one high number. Under ESC/ESH every band is and/or, so the worse of your two numbers decides the category.

Pulse pressure and mean arterial pressure

Both come along because they carry information the category drops. Pulse pressure is systolic minus diastolic, and a pulse pressure that widens with age tracks arterial stiffening. Mean arterial pressure is the diastolic plus a third of the pulse pressure. The pattern worth naming separately is a high systolic with a normal diastolic — the commonest pattern after 60, and one that reads as merely "stage 2" on a combined scale.

This is a categorisation, not a diagnosis

You measured the number; this page only tells you which box it falls in. Hypertension is diagnosed on repeated readings across separate occasions, usually with home or ambulatory monitoring, because a single clinic measurement is confounded by white-coat effect in a large minority of people. One high reading is a reason to measure again properly, not a condition.

The one reading that is not for later

At or above 180/120 the guidelines both call it a hypertensive crisis. Everything else on this page is context for a conversation with a clinician at some point; that one is not. The calculator flags it and stops, because triage is not something a web page does.