How Fast Is Fingernail Growth?

Your fingernails grow at about 3.5 mm per month — keratin cells pushing continuously outward from the matrix at the nail's base. The motion is so slow as to be utterly invisible in real time, yet it adds up to nearly a kilometre over a lifetime.

A typical human grows roughly 965 km of fingernail and toenail in a lifetime.

• Same pace as a tectonic plate drifting
• 4× slower than scalp hair grows