What BPM Is House Music? Club Tempos Measured From 12,266 Released Tracks

House is 126 BPM. Not "around 120 to 130," not whatever the sample pack said: across 7,832 released house tracks, the median is 126 and half of all records sit between 120 and 129. Tech house is the tightest lane we measured, 72% of records within 5 BPM of 126. Afro house and melodic techno sit at 123, amapiano at 112, psytrance at 140. These are the tempos of records people actually released, read from the audio, not from a producer forum.

I mix and produce in Brooklyn and a lot of what comes through the studio is club music, so the tempo question comes up at the start of nearly every one of those records: where does this lane sit, and how much room is there to move. Here is the answer for the lanes we can measure honestly. Why only these lanes is further down, and it matters.

The Table

12,266 tracks. Readings resolve in steps of roughly 3 BPM, so treat 126 as 125 to 128 and 123 as 122 to 124.

The last column is the one I would read first. It says how much of a lane sits in a 10 BPM window around its center, which is the same thing as how much a DJ can expect records in that lane to mix into each other without pitching. Tech house and afro house at 72% are genres with a tempo convention that producers actually keep. House at 51% is a bigger, older, looser lane: a quarter of house records sit under 120, the deep and soulful end, and a quarter sit over 129, the harder end, and both are still called house.

What the Spread Means

Afro house is the narrowest lane in the set. A middle half of 120 to 123 is three BPM wide. There is a convention here and nearly everyone follows it, which also means a record at 118 or 127 reads as a different genre to that audience before they have heard a chord.

Amapiano is its own tempo, not slow house. 112 against house's 126 is a 14 BPM gap, the widest between any two neighboring lanes in the table. The log drums, the long builds and the way the floor moves to it come from that tempo, and a producer who approaches it as house slowed down is usually the one asking why it does not swing.

Psytrance is the outlier at the top. 140, with a middle half of 129 to 144. The 129 end is the progressive side blurring into melodic techno; the 144 end is full-on. It is the only lane in this set that routinely crosses 140.

Tropical house is the loosest of the house lanes. 115 to 126 is a wide middle half for a genre with "house" in its name, and it matches what the lane actually is, a pop format that borrows the kick more than the tempo.

Why Hip-Hop, Reggaeton and Drum & Bass Are Not Here

Because the numbers for those genres would be wrong, and we checked before publishing. The tempo in our database comes from a beat tracker, and a beat tracker is only as good as the kick pattern it is tracking. On music with a kick on every beat it agrees with itself: 72% of tech house inside a 10 BPM window. On syncopated or half-time grooves it lands on a multiple of the real tempo often enough that the genre median turns to mush. When we ran hip-hop, metal, jazz, country and film score through the same query, every one of them came back with the same flat spread and a median within 3 BPM of 120. Metal and jazz do not live at the same tempos. When every lane returns the same histogram, the column is measuring the detector, not the music.

So this post covers the nine lanes where the detector agreed with itself more than half the time, and nothing else. When the tempo column has been corrected for octave errors, the rest of the genres get their own table. I would rather publish nine true numbers than twenty that look complete.

What I Do With It

The table is the first thing I check when a club record comes in, and the question is never "is the tempo right." It is "where in the lane does this one sit, and does the producer know." A house record at 118 is a deep record, and the mix should let it be one: wider, warmer, less transient. A house record at 130 is competing with the tech house and bass house end of the floor, and the kick and the sub need to be cut for that. A record at 126 is in the thick of it, which is where most of the lane is, so the mix is what separates it, not the tempo. The loudness side of that argument is in average LUFS by genre, and the ceiling side in true peak by genre.

If you want to see where your own record sits, the Sonic Analyzer reads the tempo along with the loudness and tonal balance and puts it against these lanes. And when it is time to make the record hit the way the lane expects, mixing is where that happens.

How This Was Measured

The source. Tempo readings from the Sonic Analyzer pipeline at Freshly Baked Studios, which analyzes released tracks from Spotify. Readings resolve in steps of roughly 3 BPM.

The set. 12,266 released tracks scanned between March 20 and October 18, 2026, with the weeks the rig was known to misread excluded in full and quarantined scans excluded. Each lane is the track's primary genre label; lanes with fewer than 300 tracks are not shown.

The cut. A lane is included only when more than half of its tracks sit within 5 BPM of the lane's median. Nine lanes passed. Lanes that did not, including the broad "dance" and "electronic" labels, EDM, trance, hardstyle and everything outside four-on-the-floor music, are left out rather than published with a number we could not stand behind.

What it isn't. A release-year view; the scan date is when the rig read the track. Nothing is estimated.

Where the numbers come from: every figure above was computed by direct SQL against the Freshly Baked Studios analysis database on October 18, 2026.