Short answer: the most common tinnitus frequencies are between about 4,000 and 12,000 Hz, centered near 8,000 Hz. Across 60,835 AudioNotch accounts that matched their tinnitus from April 2012 to October 2026, the median was 8,039 Hz, half fell between 4,784 and 11,430 Hz, and 51.9% were at 8,000 Hz or higher. The single most common band was 8,000 to 8,999 Hz.
I've been reading the literature on tinnitus for several years, and I have yet to come across a paper that provided data on what the distribution of tinnitus frequencies was among people who have tinnitus. Obviously there's not a lot of money available to ask a question like this (since there's no drug for tinnitus). So I spoke to our CTO, Adrian Green, and we decided to mine the AudioNotch tinnitus treatment database to see if we could get an estimate of this data.
When people sign up for AudioNotch, their sound therapy is customized for their unique tinnitus frequency. They use our tinnitus tuner to match a computer generated tinnitus frequency with the tinnitus frequency that they hear inside of their head. Although it's not perfect, and up to 50% of people can have a very difficult time determining their tinnitus frequency, it's still a useful measure in the aggregate sense.
We took the information from every account that has saved a tinnitus tone since 2012, and then we took their most recently found tinnitus tone. We also cut out tones below 20 Hz and above 20,000 Hz (since that's effectively the limit of human hearing). The data we got was as follows:
The total sample size was 60,835 accounts. When we first ran this analysis in 2015 it was about 1,300. You can download the data as a CSV file.
Some insights into the data:
- The tones are distributed roughly in a normal curve distribution, peaking at 8,000 to 8,999 Hz with 10.0% of accounts. This is a bit unexpected since we'd think that the tinnitus tones would be clustered in higher frequency distributions, since most hearing loss is high frequency, and tinnitus tones seem to map onto regions of hearing loss. Then again, a lot of natural phenomena seem to follow a normal distribution, so it's not altogether that surprising.
- The sound energy of most environmental music (a huge driver of hearing loss) drops off rapidly around 8,000 Hz, so it's interesting that so many tinnitus tones (51.9%) are still in the greater than 8,000 Hz region. That said, there's a huge amount of tinnitus around that frequency range, which seems to match our expectations since there's so much music in that region of sound.
- Limitations of the data were several: the tuning process is often inaccurate, the sample of people who matched their frequency was self-selected by individuals looking to pay for a treatment service and who were computer literate, and it doesn't include the initial tinnitus tones from people whose tinnitus frequencies shifted. Still, I suspect the approximate normal distribution roughly tracks along the actual real-world population data.
- In 2015 there was a little uptick in tinnitus frequencies around the 20,000 Hz region, which made us wonder if people were hearing frequency tones beyond the range of perceptible hearing. With 60,835 accounts the uptick is gone, so it was most likely noise in a small sample.
This data can also be compared to our internal success rate data that we got from e-mail surveys.
In conclusion, it seems like tinnitus frequencies appear to track a normal distribution centered around approximately 8,000 Hz. Eleven years and 59,000 more accounts later, that still holds: the median is 8,039 Hz.
Hear each tinnitus frequency band
Turn your volume down before you press play, then raise it slowly. Each sample is a two-second pure tone near the middle of the band. A lot of people hear their tinnitus as a hiss, a buzz or a cluster of tones rather than one clean pitch, so treat these as a rough guide. Headphones work best: many phone and laptop speakers can't play the highest bands, and hearing above about 16,000 Hz fades with age, so you may not hear the last sample at all.
| Band | Share of accounts | Listen |
|---|---|---|
| Below 1,000 Hz (500 Hz tone) | 5.8% | |
| 1,000 to 1,999 Hz (1,500 Hz tone) | 4.9% | |
| 2,000 to 3,999 Hz (3,000 Hz tone) | 9.0% | |
| 4,000 to 7,999 Hz (6,000 Hz tone) | 28.5% | |
| 8,000 to 11,999 Hz (10,000 Hz tone) | 30.2% | |
| 12,000 to 15,999 Hz (14,000 Hz tone) | 17.1% | |
| 16,000 to 20,000 Hz (18,000 Hz tone) | 4.6% |
Has the most common tinnitus frequency changed over time?
Very little. The yearly median has stayed between 7,600 and 8,599 Hz in every year since 2012, and between 7,970 and 8,270 Hz in every year from 2013 to 2025.
| Year | Accounts | Median tinnitus match |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 (from April 21) | 1,056 | 8,599 Hz |
| 2013 | 2,432 | 8,194 Hz |
| 2014 | 3,825 | 8,128 Hz |
| 2015 | 4,612 | 8,072 Hz |
| 2016 | 6,641 | 8,156 Hz |
| 2017 | 5,931 | 8,150 Hz |
| 2018 | 4,302 | 8,270 Hz |
| 2019 | 3,775 | 8,010 Hz |
| 2020 | 4,635 | 8,072 Hz |
| 2021 | 4,564 | 8,178 Hz |
| 2022 | 4,333 | 8,130 Hz |
| 2023 | 4,007 | 8,060 Hz |
| 2024 | 3,564 | 8,020 Hz |
| 2025 | 4,281 | 7,970 Hz |
| 2026 (to October 31) | 5,825 | 7,600 Hz |
Each year counts every account that saved a tinnitus match that year, at its last match of the year, so an account that retuned in several years appears in each of them. In the latest 12 months, November 2025 to October 2026, 6,651 accounts had a median of 7,630 Hz, and 46.2% matched at 8,000 Hz or higher.
How this compares with clinical studies
Since we first wrote this, we've found a few clinical samples to compare against, and they agree that most tinnitus is high-pitched. The exact share depends on the clinic and on how pitch was matched. In the Oregon Tinnitus Archive, 803 clinic patients seen from 1981 to 1989 had a median pitch between 5,500 and 6,499 Hz. At the Tinnitus Research Initiative's Regensburg clinic, 39.6% of 805 ears had a pitch above 8,000 Hz (Schecklmann et al., 2012). At an Auckland clinic, 76% of 192 patients matched at 8,000 Hz or higher (Shekhawat et al., 2014). Our 51.9% sits inside that range, and our sample is larger than all three combined.
Method matters too. In a study that randomized 59 people to one of three matching methods, the average match ranged from 4,697 Hz with one method to 7,779 Hz with another (Neff et al., 2019).
What does your tinnitus frequency mean?
Studies that compare pitch matches with hearing tests find that the pitch generally falls inside the range of hearing loss (Norena et al., 2002; Sereda et al., 2011), and the largest of these, with 393 patients, found the same (Yakunina and Nam, 2021).
- 8,000 Hz and above (51.9% of accounts). A standard hearing test stops at 8,000 Hz (ASHA guidelines), so a pitch above that can sit in a range your audiogram never measured. In one study, 62 of 75 people with tinnitus and a normal standard audiogram had hearing loss somewhere between 10,000 and 16,000 Hz (Vielsmeier et al., 2015). Our free extended high-frequency hearing test checks 8 to 20 kHz.
- 3,000 to 6,000 Hz (17.6% matched from 3,000 to 5,999 Hz). Noise damage usually shows first as a dip in hearing at 3,000, 4,000 or 6,000 Hz, while age-related hearing loss slopes down across the high frequencies (American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2018).
- Below 1,000 Hz (5.8%). Low-pitched tinnitus is much less common. Meniere's disease affects low- to mid-frequency hearing and causes fluctuating tinnitus, hearing loss and ear fullness alongside episodes of vertigo (Basura et al., 2020), and in one study patients with active Meniere's disease described a low-pitched buzzing (Nicolas-Puel et al., 2002).
A tinnitus pitch is a clue, not a diagnosis. See a doctor or audiologist if your tinnitus is in one ear only, pulses with your heartbeat, has lasted six months or longer, or comes with hearing difficulties, dizziness or other neurological symptoms. The US clinical practice guideline singles out most of these for a hearing exam or further tests (Tunkel et al., 2014).
Why your tinnitus frequency matters for treatment
Your frequency is the starting point for notched sound therapy. The therapy takes music, white noise or other sounds and "notches out" a band of sound energy at and around your tinnitus frequency, so an accurate match puts the notch in the right place. That's why AudioNotch starts with a tuner.
Experiments on notched sound found tinnitus volume reductions of 75% (Lugli et al., 2009), 26% (Okamoto et al., 2010) and 20% (Teismann et al., 2011). High pitches need the right sound: in the 2011 study, notched music helped patients whose tinnitus was at or below 8,000 Hz but not those above it, and the authors noted that music carries relatively little energy at very high frequencies. More than half of our users match above 8,000 Hz, which is why AudioNotch also offers notched white noise and other broadband sounds that carry energy up to 20,000 Hz.
AudioNotch itself has been tested in a randomized controlled trial at Northwell Health, where patients given AudioNotch improved significantly more over 12 months than patients given standard care. After a year the AudioNotch group's tinnitus handicap had fallen 9.6 points while the standard-care group's had risen 5.0. The trial was randomized, controlled, ran for 12 months with 65 patients, and was run and published independently by Northwell Health researchers in Otology and Neurotology (Sturm et al., 2026). Our summary of the trial has the details.
How to find your tinnitus frequency
The free tinnitus frequency matcher runs in your browser with no account. It plays tones and narrowband noise, asks you to compare each with your tinnitus, and checks for octave confusion, a common matching error: in a small study, training people to tell octaves apart lowered many of their matches by one or two octaves (Moore et al., 2010). Use headphones in a quiet room at a low volume, and repeat the match on another day; a result you can reproduce is more trustworthy than a single attempt. Our guide to detecting your tinnitus frequency covers the method in detail.
Download and cite the data
Download the CSV file (20 rows, one per 1 kHz band). The columns are low_hz and high_hz (band limits, inclusive), accounts_12_months and percent_12_months (November 1, 2025 to October 31, 2026), and accounts_all_time and percent_all_time (April 21, 2012 to October 31, 2026). It contains only counts; no account can be identified from it.
The data is licensed under CC BY 4.0: you are welcome to quote, chart and republish it, including commercially, with credit to AudioNotch and a link to this page. Suggested citation: AudioNotch. What Are the Most Common Tinnitus Frequencies? Data From 60,835 Tinnitus Pitch Matches, 2012 to 2026. Updated November 2026. https://audionotch.com/blog/most-common-tinnitus-frequencies/. Journalists and researchers can contact us for other cuts of the data.
How we collected the data
- Each account counts once, at its most recent saved tinnitus match before November 1, 2026. Matches come from the AudioNotch tuner on the web, iOS and Android.
- In one study, the dominant pitch people matched moved by up to 1.56 octaves between sessions two weeks apart (Hoare et al., 2014), and some people hear noise-like tinnitus or several tones while the tuner records one frequency. That's why we treat the data as useful in the aggregate rather than precise for any one person.
- 1,811 accounts whose latest value was outside 20 to 20,000 Hz, mostly entries of 0 Hz, are excluded. In the latest 12 months, 129 accounts (1.9%) saved exactly 1,000 Hz, the web tuner's starting value, and some of those were probably never adjusted. Deleted accounts are not included.
If you're interested in sound therapy for tinnitus check out AudioNotch. We offer notched sound therapy online, on iOS and on Android, starting with a free tuner to find your tinnitus frequency. If you have any questions feel free to contact us.