Issues with my Apple Watch severely miscalculating flights climbed

My watch is calculating flights of stairs every day, I rarely go up and downstairs. I have had up 100 flights a day. How do I resolve this problem?

Mine has been inaccurate for years. Madly over counting. It said I did 276 flights of stairs one day when I’d say I went downstairs from my bed twice.

Randy, thanks for contributing here. I have a series 9. What is your source for the 10’? What is “a good clip”? I just did 10 circuits up and down my 3 story house, no stops, no pauses. Flight count when I started: 6. Flight count, when I finished: 6.

Message To Apple: if you can’t do it well, don’t do it at all.

Thank you for posting this. I feel exactly the same way. Unbelievable that the watch records steps and stairs so inaccurately. My apple watch logs steps while I’m driving and doing other non-active things making it impossible to accurately track how much I am actually exercising. It’s wild to me that a device whose primary use is as an exercise tracker can get this so, so wrong.

I would love to track my heart rate on my watch but I can’t without pairing my phone to the wacky step counter. So boils down to I literally paid $300 for the choice of being able to monitor my heart rate OR my steps accurately. And the issue is still not resolved!

Dear Apple Employee reading this: stop reading this, print it out, and take it to your supervisor.

Dear Apple Supervisor: make motion happen on this immediately. Fix this. Make or lives happier, easier, and healthier by addressing this. Make your life better by using your time to make our lives better. Appreciate the milky warmth of knowing your actions have purpose and bring joy.

To anyone else reading this: Get mad and demand satisfaction! This stuff only goes on because we let it! If you pay $1,500 for a phone and $600 for a watch between the two of them they should be able to track these metrics full stop.

i have the series 9 watch and counting stairs is completely inaccurate. Typically go up 2 flights of stairs a day. Sometimes will calculate and sometimes will not. But worse is when it give me MORE flights climbed randomly. I’ll be at work and it’s a flat surface but out of no where will say 4 flights climbed. At this point only 1 out of those 4 are accurate. I returned the watch and bought a new one thinking just a glitch with that one but nope same thing. It’s really frustrating

Whoever is responsible for coding this, given they’ve access to highly accurate metrics, especially on the Ultra, should be fired into the sun for gross incompetence.

If it can tell me exactly how many feet I’ve climbed, why not use that reading, convert it to meters, divide by 3 and provide an accurate floor count? Seriously, chimps could do a better job of coding than half the idiots working at Apple.

As a fitness watch, Apple can’t hold a candle to the Garmin Fēnix, which I now revert to whenever I go hiking.

Which is a ridiculous model. As all other fitness watches simple add up your daily climbing total, divide by 10 and give you the floors climbed.

When I’m hiking, I stop & start all the time, but I’ve still vertically climbed a 1000m at the end of walk.

my Garmin Fenix 6 works exactly as I’ve described. The floors match the total ascent I achieve in any given day.

Apple’s approach is entirely wrongheaded.

iPhone 13 pro max, with ios 17.5.1 has same problem with the health app: it does NOT accurately count uphill walking. Not even close. I just came back from a hike up an open mountainside. Clear day. Great cellular connectivity. Thus all of the built-in GPS, altitude, etc. etc. should have been working perfectly. Phone in pant's pocket. Walked on a trail where I know exactly how far I went, and how far up in elevation was gained. The walk was about 4 miles round trip, with a total elevation gain of 853 feet, which at 10 feet per stair flight, should have registered 85 flights. But The health app right now shows that I walked 1.6 miles today, and went up 4 flights. If Apple can't figure out, track, and display our elevation and mileage information at walking speed, should we really trust what they are trying to figure out as we drive around in cars at highway speed? Appple, please fix this NOW.

I experienced a similar issue with my Apple Watch Ultra. This morning, after waking up and walking downstairs, it mistakenly counted 6 flights of stairs. Upon reaching work and climbing the stairs, it registered 13 flights. Yesterday, it recorded an unusually high count of 114 flights.

I suspected there might be dust or lint in the measurement hole, so I activated water mode and thoroughly rinsed off my watch. I repeatedly took the watch out of water mode to blow out any debris. Thankfully, my watch seems to be functioning normally now.

Stair counting is a totally inaccurate metric.

Keep complaining at https://apple.com/feedback

Doing it here will not reach Apple's ears.

Flights to an Apple watch is 10 feet of vertical at a good clip.

If you are walking up slowly and or stopping part way. It will not count it as a flight

Same this for hiking up a hill.

I just started having this same problem. I don't have stairs in my house and live in a pretty flat area. It says I climbed 94 flights of stairs today, which is insane. This just started happening recently. There is a new software update that I need to do. Not sure if it addresses this though.

I have taken 15 flights of stairs today and it says I’ve taken 1 each flight is 16 steps up

Mine has severely undercounted for years. Multiple models. Currently using latest Ultra.

I wish I could remove it. It’s frustrating to see “2 flights climbed” when I finish walking a very hilly golf course.

Garmin recorded about 35 flights on the same course.

I have similar issue and this has happend somewhere after I upgraded to @Watch U2 and iPhone 15Pro. Before I did not see this issue and I have been using Apple Watch since 2015 and iPhone since 2009. And I only see this when I run. When I do walks I have not noticed this. If I look into the details in the Health app, it seems like both the watch and the phone adds landings in bulks and sometimes exaggerate a lot. When I look at the actual run details it looks all ok with the stats for elevation gain etc.