Asking 'what's a good FTP' without context is like asking 'what's a good bench press'. The honest answer is: it depends on your weight, your age, your training history, and what you're trying to do. Joe Friel's Cyclist's Training Bible and Andy Coggan's category tables both anchor the conversation around watts per kilogram, not raw watts — and that's the framing every serious coach uses.
For a male amateur cyclist in their 30s or 40s, the rough ladder looks like this. 2.5-3.0 W/kg is recreational — you can hold a club ride. 3.0-3.5 W/kg is a committed amateur — you do structured training. 3.5-4.0 W/kg is genuinely strong for an amateur — you finish near the front of sportives. 4.0-4.5 W/kg lifts you into Cat 2 racing. Above 4.5 W/kg you're in Cat 1 / elite amateur territory. For women, subtract roughly 0.4 W/kg from each band on average.
The number that actually matters isn't your absolute FTP — it's whether your FTP is moving in the right direction. Anthony has interviewed dozens of coaches on the Roadman Cycling Podcast, and the consensus from John Wakefield, Dan Lorang, and Stephen Seiler is identical: a structured amateur on a sensible plan should expect 5-15% FTP gains in their first 12-18 months of dedicated training, then 1-3% a year after. If yours has been static for six months, the issue is rarely the number itself — it's the system around it.
Two warnings. First, your FTP is only useful if it was tested honestly. A 20-minute test taken without a proper warm-up routine or after a tough week underestimates your real threshold. Second, FTP is a single point on a much bigger fitness picture. Time-to-exhaustion at FTP, repeated-effort capacity, durability over four hours — these all decide how the number actually plays out on a real ride. The Age-Group FTP Benchmarks article on the site breaks down the full distribution by decade if you want a sharper read.