What BPM Is Chill House?

The short answer

Chill house mostly runs between 118 and 126 BPM. The median is 122 BPM, which places the typical track inside house tempo. BPM means beats per minute, the number of beats that occur in sixty seconds, so 122 BPM is a little over two beats every second.

What published sources say

Wikipedia gives house music a typical tempo of 115 to 130 BPM, with the bass drum on beats one, two, three and four. Chill house has no genre of its own at Beatport, which is why this sample is defined by playlist names (see the method below). One publisher, Melodigging, describes chill house as house with a steady four-on-the-floor pulse, warm pads and gentle basslines, at roughly 110 to 124 BPM. The measured median of 122 BPM falls inside that span and well inside the general house range.

The related term chill-out was originally conflated with ambient house. The term came from the White Room at the Heaven nightclub in London in 1989, and ambient house developed in the chill-out rooms of the late 1980s, using midtempo four-on-the-floor beats. Rick Snoman, in Dance Music Manual (2013), writes that a track with a laid-back groove below 120 BPM could be classed as chill out. In the measured sample about one in five tracks runs at or below 118 BPM, so most chill house tracks sit above that line.

How it was measured

The numbers come from the Playlists for Life database as of 7 November 2026. Chill house is defined here by playlist title, not by a genre tag: the sample is every track our database holds for the 9 external Spotify playlists whose name contains chill house. Our own playlists are left out. Tempo and key were read from Beatport data matched to each track by its ISRC code, so a search-based guess never supplies a tempo, and only tracks with such a match are measured.

• 751 tracks went into the BPM statistics.
• 52 further readings were excluded as outliers because they fell outside 0.8 to 1.25 times the median of all measured tracks. These are readings far from the typical tempo, for example half-time tags.
• Percentiles describe the spread: 10 percent of tracks run at or below 114 BPM, 20 percent at or below 118, half at or below 122, 80 percent at or below 126 and 90 percent at or below 128.

How we collect playlist data in general is described on the data methodology page.

What the spread shows

The middle 60 percent of tracks, from the 20th to the 80th percentile, covers 118 to 126 BPM, a window of eight BPM. The wider 80 percent range runs from 114 to 128 BPM, a window of 14 BPM. The typical track therefore sits within four BPM of the median, which marks chill house as a tightly clustered tempo group. The slowest tenth runs at 114 BPM or below, and the fastest tenth runs above 128 BPM.

Keys and artists in the same sample

The data block above lists the most common Camelot keys of the measured tracks. In Camelot notation the number places a key on a wheel from 1 to 12, the letter A marks a minor key and B a major key. In the November 2026 sample the five most common keys were all minor and none reached 8 percent, so chill house is spread across many keys.

The data block also lists the artists that external playlists added most often in the last 28 days, counted from tracks in this sample. That list changes every week. It describes what curators added, not a ranking of quality, and its 28-day window does not apply to the BPM figures.

Where to hear it

To hear the range in practice, the Best Chill & Deep House Vibes playlist collects chill house, deep house and melodic house tracks. The BPM page has a tap-tempo tool and typical tempo ranges for activities such as running or studying.