Pick the line that best matches your fitness right now, whether from walking or another sport: the tool works out the ascent you can hold day after day, places your nights at the tour's real accommodation, and balances the days out. Shortcuts by tramway, bus and cable car change everything: that's the lever unique to Mont Blanc, covered in the full article.
Your fitness today
not your best-ever form, what you're managing this year
Transport shortcuts
tramway, postal bus and cable car: the lever unique to the TMB
Advanced settings
Daily elevation budget
adjustable by hand if your profile doesn't quite fit
Starting point
Alpine club method, the same one our walking-time calculator uses: the longer of horizontal time and vertical time, plus half of the other. Leave them alone and these settings simply follow your profile.
Tour duration
Distances and ascent measured across the tour's 11 GPX tracks (158.5 km, 9,089 m D+, 7-point smoothing, identical to the profiles on the stage pages). The commonly quoted figures of 170 km and 10,300 m: the gap is explained further down. Accommodation locations sourced from our TMB hut listing. Times exclude breaks.
Elevation profile, one band per day
Your plan is ready. How would you like to go about it?
Good decision!
Organising it yourself remains the best way to make the tour your own, and the breakdown above is a solid starting point. On the TMB, the main constraint isn't your fitness, it's booking: July and August huts fill up as early as January. Contact details and booking methods for the tour's fifty-odd places to stay are on our dedicated page. Enjoy the loop!
To receive our on-the-ground updates (pass conditions, hut opening dates, itinerary ideas), leave us your email address:
Turnkey logistics
You walk to your plan, we sort out the rest: booking accommodation around your breakdown (adjusted to what's available), booking transfers, planning advice and support throughout your trip. Leave your details and we'll come back to you with a proposal.
Go with a guide
Our guides take small groups around Mont Blanc every summer, in comfort format with luggage transport. Leave your details and we'll send you our upcoming departures.
One July evening at the Refuge Bonatti, two tables compare notes. On the left, a group is finishing the tour in 7 days: they left Chamonix by cable car, took two buses on the Swiss side, and are staying in hotels. On the right, another group is on day nine of twelve, carrying a 12 kg pack, on foot the whole way from Les Houches. Both are doing "the Tour du Mont-Blanc." It isn't quite the same trek.
How many days, or how much time, does the Tour du Mont-Blanc take? The short answer doing the rounds is 7 to 10 days. It isn't wrong, just incomplete, because it lumps together two rather different things: the number of days spent walking, and the number of days of tour. Between the two sit transport and variants.
Here are the main duration benchmarks, and the tool at the top of the page works out yours by placing your nights at real accommodation:
10 to 12 days for the full loop on foot, with no transfers at all
10 days at the classic pace, the most comfortable format
7 to 9 days using tramway, bus and cable car shortcuts
5 days in condensed form, for very well-trained walkers
3 to 5 days if you're after half the tour rather than the full loop (or running it)
These five benchmarks are only starting points: combining variants, shortcuts, direction of travel and starting point, the tool produces 6,453 distinct breakdowns, 811 of them without using a single form of transport.
At Altimood, we lead Tour du Mont-Blanc trips every summer, and this question opens every single project. It deserves better than a round number.
The TMB is the most popular trek for a first big trip on foot, and that's exactly where things get tricky
The Tour du Mont-Blanc is by some distance the most walked trek in the Alps. Plenty of people who set out on it have never done a multi-day walk longer than two or three days. That's perfectly doable, but it shifts the real question.
For an experienced walker, the question comes down to "how much ascent can you manage per day?" When you're preparing your first big walk, you simply have no way of knowing, and if you're coming from running or cycling rather than the hills, even less so. That's why the tool at the top of the page doesn't lead with that question: it asks what you're doing today, whatever the sport, and works out the rest from there. By contrast, our GR54 calculator starts directly with the ascent you can manage per day: you don't stumble onto the Tour des Écrins by chance, and anyone taking it on generally already has a feel for elevation gain.
One useful nuance if you're coming from another sport rather than walking: the engine transfers, the rest much less so. A regular runner or cyclist has the lungs to get up a pass, but not necessarily the thighs or the posture for a three-hour descent, nor the shoulders for an eight-kilogram pack. Yet it's the descents and the carrying that produce the third-morning stiffness, not the climbing. Hence the "I'm active, but rarely in the hills" line in the tool: it counts for noticeably more than "I do a bit of walking, nothing more," without being worth as much as "I walk every week." The detail of what transfers and what doesn't is in our article on the daily ascent to aim for when you're starting out.
The order of magnitude worth keeping in mind: the TMB means 9,000 m of cumulative ascent. Spread across 12 days, that's 750 m a day, a manageable figure for a regular walker. Spread across 7 days, that's 1,300 m a day for a full week, pack on your back, which is an altogether different undertaking.
What the TMB actually measures: 158 or 170 km?
Across our eleven GPX tracks, joined end to end: 158.5 km and 9,089 m of ascent. Other tracks available online also come out around 160 km. Depending on the walker, an iPhone or a GPS watch will show a higher or lower figure.
Where does the gap come from? Two different places, and it matters not to muddle them:
On distance, track sampling slightly cuts corners on switchbacks, shaving off a few hundred metres per stage. The rest comes from breakdowns that add up stages rounded upwards and fold in variants.
On ascent, it all depends on smoothing. The same track gives 11,151 m unsmoothed (GPS noise inflates every micro-bump) and 9,089 m smoothed. The 10,300 m figure sits between the two. None of these figures is dishonest, they simply aren't measuring the same thing.
These gaps aren't trivial: 12 km is half a day's walking, and 1,200 m of ascent is a full day. On a 7-day schedule, that matters. The tool calculates from the measured values, and you'll know where they come from and how to read the difference once you're on the ground.
Shortcuts: the lever other treks don't have
This is what really sets the TMB apart from the GR54 or the traverse of the Vercors Hauts-Plateaux. On those routes, if the days are too tough, the only lever is to walk more or wild camp. Around Mont Blanc, the tour crosses three well-equipped countries: a tramway, Swiss postal buses every quarter of an hour, cable cars. Skipping a section isn't cheating, it's standard practice, including on organised trips.
The four shortcuts offered in the tool correspond to real, bookable services:
Shortcut
What it skips
Saving
Tramway du Mont-Blanc
the climb from Les Houches to Col de Voza, up the ski runs
−6.8 km, −708 m
Postal bus La Fouly → Champex
the flat floor of the Swiss Val Ferret, easy going and undemanding
−15.4 km, −443 m
Postal bus Champex → Trient
the Bovine alpine pasture and the Col de la Forclaz
−15.2 km, −726 m
Flégère cable car
the long final descent to Chamonix
−15.5 km, −660 m
Together, the four remove 53 km and 2,500 m of ascent, roughly three to four days. That's precisely what lets a regular walker complete "the Tour du Mont-Blanc" in a single week's leave.
A point of honesty: our own 7-day trip works the same way, but it leans on private transfers. Stages of 4 to 6 hours, ascents of 600 to 1,200 m, hotel nights, luggage carried for you, and four transfers. A 7-day TMB with no transfers at all takes around 1,300 m of ascent a day, pack on your back: that's an altogether different exercise.
The corollary is worth spelling out: if you see "TMB in 7 days" advertised somewhere with no mention of transfers, ask for the stage-by-stage detail before you book.
Which shortcuts should you choose? The ones that cut the least varied or most developed sections, not the high balcony paths. The first three in the table replace a climb up ski runs, flat valley floor, and the Bovine pasture. The balcony route between Refuge Bertone and Refuge Bonatti, facing the Grandes Jorasses, or the climb to the Grand Col Ferret: those are the reasons you came in the first place. Don't skip them, unless you're genuinely short on time (and if you are, why not spread it over two years instead?).
The full TMB on foot: 10 to 12 days
The entire loop, on foot, without setting foot in a single vehicle: that's what the tool calculates first. For a regular walker who can manage 1,100 m of ascent a day, that works out at 12 days with days of 4 to 6 hours. For someone who has already strung together several trek days and can absorb 1,400 m, that tightens to 10 days, but the days stretch to 7 hours of walking.
Where does the gap with the eleven stages everyone quotes come from? From the fact that those eleven stages aren't days. It's a descriptive grid, built around the accommodation, and its days are very uneven: from 3 hours to more than 8. Almost nobody walks it exactly as laid out, and mixing up the two leads to missed bookings.
The other reason for the gap comes down to how you count. Ascent alone is misleading: 1,350 m of pure climbing tires you less than a day of 1,100 m up followed by 1,100 m down, where your thighs pay twice over. So the tool calculates a walking time, with climbing and descending counted at different speeds, then looks for the breakdown that best balances the days between accommodation that actually exists. The stages we detail one by one in the full article on the tour follow the classic grid. The tool, meanwhile, rebuilds yours, and it factors in the eleven TMB variants if you'd like to see what they do to your breakdown.
One constraint nothing can smooth over: bed availability. The loop counts around fifty places to stay, and the most sought-after fill up as soon as booking opens, often six months ahead. So you don't build your ideal breakdown, you build with what's left. One day lengthens because the halfway hut is full, the next shortens because the following one is too, a variant drops out because it passes well away from the only place you had a bed. Book first the nights where only one or two places exist: those are what lock everything else into place. Our roundup of the Tour du Mont-Blanc mountain huts maps them out with altitude, comfort level and opening dates, so you can spot the tight sectors straight away.
One last piece of advice, and it's the one we give most often: plan for less than you think you can manage. A comfortable day can always be stretched on the spot, just add a high-altitude variant when the weather and your legs allow it. The reverse can't be undone. A breakdown built around your best day leaves no room for a storm rolling in at 2pm, a knee that starts complaining, or the third day in a row catching up with you. All that's left then is the transport shortcut, and it's rather better if that's a treat you allow yourself than an emergency exit.
Finally, it's the most demanding format in terms of leave: allow two full weeks including travel from home to the Arve valley.
The TMB in 10 days: the classic pace
At 15 km and 900 m of ascent a day on average, days last 5 to 7 hours. You reach the hut in mid-afternoon, there's slack left on mornings when a storm forces an early start, and you can afford variants such as the Lac Blanc without watching the clock.
It's the format we recommend most often to regular walkers who want to see the tour, not simply cross it. We've set it out stage by stage, along with the variants this pace makes possible, in our article on the Tour du Mont-Blanc in 10 days.
One or two shortcuts are then enough to bring the trip down to 8 or 9 days if your leave is limited.
The TMB in 5 days: the condensed version
25 to 30 km a day, transfers to skip whole sections, and days that run past 8 hours. This format exists, it works, but it's for very well-trained walkers who know exactly how their body copes with four big consecutive days.
We've set out what it really costs, and what it makes you miss of the tour, in our article on the Tour du Mont-Blanc in 5 days.
Short on leave? Do half the tour
It's the advice we give most often, and the one people follow least. If you have four or five days and don't walk much otherwise, a half-loop taken at an easy pace will leave you with a far better memory than the full loop rushed through.
The tour splits naturally in two at Courmayeur and Chamonix, both well served and linked by the tunnel:
French and Italian side (Les Houches → Courmayeur): the Col du Bonhomme and Col de la Seigne, the Val Veny, the south face of Mont Blanc. Four to five days.
Italian and Swiss side (Courmayeur → Chamonix): the Grandes Jorasses balcony route, the Grand Col Ferret, the Swiss alpine pastures, Col de Balme. Four to five days.
One summer for each, and you'll have done the full tour without ever taking two weeks off in one go. It's also the best way to gauge yourself before committing to the full loop.
If your main aim is to prepare, a shorter multi-day walk remains the best test run, and it's day 3 that tells you the most. Our article on the daily ascent to aim for gives ranges by profile, and a 3-day walk with hut stays is enough to place yourself.
What can derail your schedule
Fully booked huts. By some distance the leading cause of a derailed schedule on the TMB, ahead of fitness. In high season, the tour's huts show full from early in the year. Book before you fix your stages, not the other way round. The full accommodation list gives contact details and booking methods.
Early-season snow patches. In late June and early July, the Col des Fours and the Fenêtre d'Arpette can still be under snow. Our page on when to do the TMB breaks down the windows month by month.
Summer storms. The rule of crossing passes before 1pm can shorten a stage planned as a double day. A spare day in the schedule isn't a luxury in July and August.
Pack weight. Self-sufficient with tent and stove, progress slows noticeably, especially on the way down. Note that wild camping is regulated across a large part of the route: see our page on bivouacking around Mont Blanc before building a schedule around it.
Three currencies. France, Italy, Switzerland. Swiss huts cost noticeably more, and not all of them take cards.
Doing the tour with a guide
The number of days also depends on who's handling the logistics. On a guided trip, the stages are calibrated, huts and transfers booked before departure, and luggage follows by road. A few variants get added in to take in an edelweiss patch or a spot where chamois can regularly be seen.
Private, tailor-made TMB: a dedicated guide and an itinerary built around your profile. Contact Robin directly by email at bonjouraltimood.comobawbhe@nygvzbbq.pbz or by phone on 33769447866.
A 5-day loop through the largest natural reserve in the Alps, accessible by train.
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Frequently asked questions
How many kilometres a day on the Tour du Mont-Blanc?
On a full 12-day tour, the average works out at around 13 km and 750 m of ascent per day. Over 10 days, it rises to around 16 km and 900 m. Over 7 days with transfers, stages run around 15 to 18 km for 600 to 1,200 m. Distance alone is misleading: an 11 km stage crossing a pass demands more than an 18 km stage along a valley floor.
Does the Tour du Mont-Blanc really cover 170 km?
Our eleven tracks joined end to end give 158.5 km for 9,089 m of ascent. The 170 km figure often quoted comes down to three things: stage rounding, variants folded into the breakdown, and above all elevation smoothing. The same track gives 11,151 m unsmoothed and 9,089 m with standard 7-point smoothing.
Can you do the Tour du Mont-Blanc in 7 days without transfers?
It's possible but very demanding: you need to hold around 1,300 m of ascent and 23 km a day for a full week, pack on your back, meaning days of 8 to 9 hours. Almost every 7-day package on the market, including ours, actually uses bus or cable car transfers to skip sections. If a 7-day offer doesn't detail its transfers, ask for the stage-by-stage programme.
Does the TMB take more days than the GR54?
No, fewer. The TMB can be completed in 10 to 12 days on foot, while the GR54 takes 12 to 13 days: the Écrins loop is longer (188 km) and climbs 11,000 m over more technical terrain, with fewer resupply points. The TMB does have one thing the GR54 doesn't: public transport all along the route, which lets you tighten the trip without lengthening the days.
Should you plan a rest day on the Tour du Mont-Blanc?
On formats of 10 days or more, a half-day break at Courmayeur or Champex-Lac often changes the second half of the tour for the better. Both villages let you restock, sleep down in the valley and get some washing done. If your schedule is tight, plan at least one short stage midway rather than a non-stop run.
Which direction should you walk the Tour du Mont-Blanc?
The tour is very predominantly walked anticlockwise, the direction used in guidebooks: it's the smoother waymarked direction, and the one where you climb the Trè-le-Champ ladders rather than descend them. Going clockwise, you meet the crowds head-on rather than following them, which has its charm if you're after some peace and quiet, but you descend the equipped sections, which is less comfortable if exposure bothers you. The number of days doesn't change either way. The detail of exposed sections by direction is in our article on the TMB for those afraid of heights.
