How Long Does It Take to Get a Black Belt in Karate?

In April 1924 Gichin Funakoshi, an Okinawan schoolteacher who had been in Tokyo for barely two years, tied black belts on a small group of students, Hironori Ōtsuka among them, and karate had its first dan grades. Nothing about the ceremony was Okinawan. The kyu grades counting down, the dan grades counting up, the belt itself: Funakoshi borrowed the whole apparatus from his friend Kanō Jigorō, who had invented it for judo forty years earlier. Karate had been taught on Okinawa for generations without a rank of any kind. A century later, the belt is the first thing most people ask about.

The short answer: three to five years to shodan for an adult who trains twice a week and grades when the club says they are ready, and shodan is the first black belt, not the last. What sits between white and black, and how long each step takes, depends on the style and the organisation. Here is how the system works, where the three-to-five figure comes from, and what the belt is actually telling you.

Key facts

Typical time to shodan

3–5 years at two sessions a week; longer in some full-contact styles

Grades

Kyu grades count down (usually from 10th or 9th to 1st), dan grades count up from shodan

Belt colours

Vary by style and organisation; only white and black are universal

What shodan means

“First degree”: the beginner's black belt, not mastery

Dan grades after

Nidan, sandan and upwards, with waiting periods that grow at each step

Children

Junior grades and junior black belts; full shodan often held until around 16

A ladder borrowed from judo

Kanō awarded the first judo shodan grades in 1883, to two students, and put them in black belts a few years later so that the seniors in a crowded hall could be spotted at a glance. That was the whole idea: a way of sorting a room. Coloured kyu belts came later still, spread through Europe in the 1930s by the judo teacher Mikinosuke Kawaishi in Paris, who found that Western students liked a visible step every few months. Funakoshi took the dan grades in 1924, and the coloured kyu belts followed as karate spread after the war. The belt you are asking about is a judo invention in karate colours. It works, and it has never pretended to be ancient.

Kyu grades: counting down to one

A beginner in most schools starts at 10th kyu, or 9th, or 8th, depending on the organisation, and counts down. Each grading tests three things: kihon, the basic techniques in lines; kata, the set forms; and kumite, some form of sparring or pre-arranged partner work. The colours attached to those numbers are where the styles part company. The four styles the World Karate Federation recognises for kata competition, Shotokan, Goju-ryu, Wado-ryu and Shito-ryu, each have several organisations, and each organisation chooses its own. The WKF itself governs competition and leaves grading to the styles and the national federations. Kyokushin, outside the WKF entirely, uses orange, blue, yellow, green and brown, two kyu grades to a colour. The table shows one ladder used by many Shotokan clubs in Britain. Treat it as an example, not a standard.

Grade	Belt (one typical Shotokan order)	Usual gap to the next test
10th kyu	White	3 months
9th kyu	Orange	3 months
8th kyu	Red	3 months
7th kyu	Yellow	3–4 months
6th kyu	Green	3–4 months
5th kyu	Purple	4–6 months
4th kyu	Purple, white stripe	4–6 months
3rd kyu	Brown	6 months
2nd kyu	Brown, white stripe	6 months
1st kyu	Brown, two white stripes	6–12 months
Shodan	Black	–

Walk into a Wado-ryu club and the same numbers wear different colours. Walk into a Kyokushin dojo and half the numbers are missing. The number is what travels; the colour is local dialect.

Where three to five years comes from

It is arithmetic before it is anything else. Ten grades at an average of four months is a little over three years; ten grades at six months is five, and a club that grades faster at the bottom than the top lands its steady students somewhere in between. Three sessions a week instead of two moves you towards the bottom of the range, because you arrive at each grading ready instead of nearly ready. Gaps move you the other way. So does the organisation: the Japan Karate Association, the oldest and largest Shotokan body, is known for failing people, and a fail costs you at least one grading cycle. Kyokushin dojos, whose shodan tests in many branches end with a line of ten fresh opponents in succession, tend to run longer, five years and upwards being ordinary. None of this is a race, whatever the clubs in the box below say.

Shodan: the first step

The word is worth taking seriously. Sho means first, or beginning; dan means step or degree. In Japan a shodan is someone who has finished the basics and can now start learning, and a Japanese instructor watching a new black belt sees a student whose stances no longer need correcting every minute, not a master. A typical shodan syllabus makes the point: in JKA Shotokan it is the five Heian kata and Tekki Shodan, a choice of one of the major kata, kihon combinations and kumite, and the examiner is looking for correct form under pressure, not flair. The belt is black because Kanō needed a colour, not because black was the end.

The dan grades after

Nidan, sandan, yondan, godan and upwards, ten in total, with the wait growing at each step. Most organisations require at least a year between shodan and nidan, two or so before sandan, and the interval keeps growing after that. From around fifth dan the test gives way to assessment: teaching record, years of service, contribution to the organisation. The highest grades are honours, awarded late in life and rarely, and anyone offering you an eighth dan by post is offering you a certificate, not a grade. The lower dan grades are what most karateka actually spend their lives in, and the difference between a good nidan and a good sandan is visible from the back of the hall.

Children and junior belts

Every organisation has had to decide what a child's black belt means. The common answer is a separate ladder: junior grades, in Britain often called mon grades, marked with coloured tags or stripes on a white belt, and a junior black belt or shodan-ho for a child who completes the syllabus. Full adult shodan is held back until a minimum age, often around 16, at which point the junior grade is converted or re-tested. The rule varies enough that the only sensible question for a parent is a direct one: which grade is this belt, on which register, and what happens at 16. A club that answers clearly is a club that has thought about it.

What the belt is worth outside karate

Not the same as the same colour elsewhere. A BJJ black belt takes eight to twelve years and marks a finished grappler; a taekwondo first dan takes about what a karate shodan takes and means about the same thing. The comparison people love to make between the three-year karate black belt and the ten-year jiu-jitsu one is not a comparison of difficulty. It is a comparison of definitions. Karate decided in 1924 that black meant the end of the beginning. It has been telling everyone so, patiently, ever since.

Sources

• Japan Karate Association. Grading and qualification system. https://www.jka.or.jp/en/
• World Karate Federation. Kata and Kumite Competition Rules (current edition). https://www.wkf.net
• International Karate Organization Kyokushinkaikan. Grading syllabus.
• Funakoshi, Gichin. Karate-Dō: My Way of Life. Kodansha International, 1975.
• Wikipedia. “Karate” and “Dan (rank)”.

Where to go next

• Where Funakoshi came from: History of Karate.
• The same question next door: BJJ and taekwondo.
• The two Olympic striking arts side by side: Karate vs Taekwondo.
• The Chinese arts karate grew out of: Kung Fu vs Karate.
• The karate hub.