They call The Flash the fastest man alive, but how fast can he really run? It turns out the answer is pretty hard to pin down.
Calculating the speed of DC’s The Flash is a lot like trying to sort out power levels in Dragon Ball Z. You can try to make sense of everyone’s numbers in one story, but they’re just going to keep going up in the next one.
A lot of this is thanks to the notion of the Flash Family. There have been four mainline characters called The Flash over the past 80 years: Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West, and Bart Allen. All four have varying and often inconsistent top speeds due to any number of circumstances.
At their slowest, The Flash can run around the world in the blink of an eye. At their fastest, they literally beat a speedster incarnation of death by outracing him to the end of the universe, where death as a concept no longer existed, and he faded to nothing.
How fast can The Flash run in DC Comics?
If you want to put a hard number on The Flash’s top speed, it’s a little tough. In the comics, The Flash regularly is able to surpass expectations and run beyond their limits. 1998’s The Flash Secret Files puts Wally West at just under the speed of light. He can potentially run faster than this but risks merging with the Speed Force.
The Speed Force itself is both the deciding and limiting factor for how fast any Flash runs. It’s the energy source all speedsters tap into, but it’s a living thing with ebbs and flows. A speedster in tune with it can theoretically run as fast as they need to but risks being trapped within it with no means of escape.
This does give us something of a pecking order. Wally, who has the strongest connection to the Speed Force, is able to mainline it in a way others can’t, making him the fastest Flash. Barry is canonically shown to be slightly slower than Wally (a point recently reinforced by the Knight Terrors event) but has better control over his speed. Bart, during his brief tenure as The Flash, was just a hair slower than Wally and Barry, as the Speed Force was unstable.
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Jay Garrick is regarded as the slowest due to the combination of his age and a weaker connection to the Speed Force. However, Jay is unique in that he’s the only Flash who can still use super speed without the Speed Force, as he originally got his powers from a metagene. However, an unaided Jay tops out at the speed of sound.
How fast can the Flash run in DC movies & TV?
The Flash of the DCEU never really got a concrete definition of speed. We know he uses the Speed Force, as he explained in Justice League. And we know it has some of the spectacular abilities of the comic book version, such as when he was able to time travel.
Based on what we see in the film, it’s safe to assume the DCEU Flash can hit the speed of light. However, he doesn’t seem to be able to consistently push himself to this top speed.
By comparison, the Flash of TV’s Arrowverse appeared to keep a much slower pace. Though his speed was constantly in flux due to personal limits or changes to the Speed Force, Barry’s top speed was still well below the speed of light by the end of the series. He’s still performed some incredible feats on the show, but he’s never shown to be quite as zippy as his comic counterpart.
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