It’s hard to determine the life of a climbing rope since it is subject to so many influences and variables, including how often it’s used, how it’s stored, what climate it’s used in, and what kind of climbing it’s used for.

How Does Your Rope Feel and Look?

The best guidelines to check out your climbing rope are:

• How does your rope feel and look? 
• How often do you use your rope?

Less than One-Year Ropes

Ropes wear out fast if you use them all the time.

In the summer when we guide at Front Range Climbing Company, we often log 400 client pitches on a rope in a month. Those ropes get trashed fast, and retired right away. They’re not subjected to a lot of falls since they’re usually used for top-roping, but all the lowering off of routes tends to wear the ropes quickly.

One-Year Ropes

If you climb a lot, even just a day a week, you can easily wear a rope out in a year. This is especially true if you do a lot of sport climbing with repeated falls and lots of lowering, both of which take a lot of the stretch out of a rope, or regular weekend climbs and the occasional long multipitch route with rappels off.

Three- to Five-Year Ropes

Your climbing rope will last from three to five years if you climb one to four or five times a month; don’t log much air time, lower-offs, or rappels; usually top-rope with loads on your rope of only body weight; and with climbing sessions of only short periods of time.

Using Old Ropes

You can keep ropes longer than five years, but it’s usually not advisable to use them for climbing.

Old ropes age by getting stiffer as the nylon degrades over time. If you only use your rope once or twice a year, then you can probably use it for top-roping. But first do visual and manual checks of the rope and verify that it’s been stored properly in a cool dry environment and away from household chemicals and auto supplies and oil, like in your garage.