How long do kegels take to work?
Two numbers do almost all the work in this category. You will meet both within a few minutes of searching, usually without the conditions that produced them.
This page states the conditions. It is the least satisfying answer on this site and the most useful one.
The two figures everyone quotes
The first is around 75% improvement in erectile function. The second is 82.5% improvement in premature ejaculation. Both are real, both come from published trials, and both are routinely quoted with no indication of what the men in those trials were actually doing.
What the men in the first trial actually did
Dorey et al., 2004, British Journal of General Practice. 55 men were randomised. The 28 in the intervention arm attended five 30-minute teaching sessions in consecutive weeks, using a manometric biofeedback unit, so that a clinician could confirm each man was producing the correct contraction. Only then did they begin a daily equipment-free programme at home, prescribed for six months. The 27 controls were given lifestyle advice only, and were offered the same intervention after the outcome assessment at three months.
So the sample did not train for one uniform period. Roughly half of it trained for six months and roughly half for three, and Dorey's own discussion frames the headline result as arriving after three months of intervention and three months of pelvic floor exercises.
That headline comes from a final blind assessment of both arms combined, including the men who withdrew: 22 (40.0%) had reached normal erectile function and 19 (34.5%) had improved. Those add to the 74.5% that gets rounded to 75%.
Two things rarely travel with the number. The first is that training duration differed by arm, so six months describes when the assessment happened, not what every man did.
The second is what the withdrawals do to it. 22 of the 55 did not stay for the intended duration: six left having achieved normal erectile function, seven left following improved erectile function, and nine left showing no improvement. Thirteen of the twenty-two, then, left having normalised or improved. Counting them is not a hidden inflation. It does mean the figure shows what the protocol achieved rather than that it held for every man counted.
What the men in the second trial actually did
Pastore et al., 2014, Therapeutic Advances in Urology. 40 men with lifelong premature ejaculation. 33 of the 40, which is 82.5%, gained control of the ejaculatory reflex.
Those men attended a clinic three times a week for 12 weeks. That is 36 supervised sessions of an hour each, and each hour was divided into three twenty-minute blocks: physio-kinesiotherapy, electro-stimulation delivered by an anal probe, and biofeedback. The paper describes no home practice at all.
It was also a single-arm study. Everybody got the treatment, there was no control group, and there was no placebo condition.
The two are not comparable to each other
They are quoted side by side constantly, as though they were two readings of the same thing. They differ in intervention, in outcome measured, and in timeframe.
One prescribed daily self-directed work at home after taught instruction, for three months or six depending on the arm. The other ran twelve weeks of supervised clinic sessions on equipment. One measured erectile function; the other measured ejaculatory latency and control. One was randomised with a control arm; the other was a single-arm case series.
Putting "75% and 82.5%" in one sentence produces an impression of a consistent body of evidence pointing at one number. The two studies point at different things under different conditions.
Neither one is you
This is the part that matters for the question in the title.
If you are following a written protocol at home with no clinician and no equipment, you are not in either trial's condition. You are closer to Dorey's men than Pastore's, and you are still missing the five taught sessions on a manometer that came before their home programme began.
The honest framing is that these trials tell you the method can produce results in men who were taught it properly and stayed with it for months. They do not tell you what percentage of self-directed readers get there, because nobody has measured that.
Anyone quoting you a timeline with a specific number attached to self-directed training is quoting something that has not been measured.
What the reviews say about protocol length
Myers and Smith, 2019, in Physiotherapy, reviewed pelvic floor muscle training for erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation in men over 18 and included ten trials.
Their conclusion on protocol design is the relevant one here: no optimal training protocol has been identified. The protocols in the included trials varied significantly in overall therapist contact, concurrent interventions, intervention length, training frequency and intensity. The studies themselves were of low to moderate methodological quality with discrepancies in reporting, and the heterogeneity was not conducive to pooling the data.
So the literature does not contain an agreed answer to how long this takes, because it does not contain an agreed answer to what "this" is.
The honest answer
Weeks to months. The most usable sentence in either paper is Dorey's own conclusion: to obtain a benefit, pelvic floor muscle exercises should be properly taught and practised for at least three months. Three months is a floor, not a forecast, and the taught half of that sentence is the half that gets dropped.
Nobody has measured the self-directed version, so any figure you are given for it is an extrapolation. The two trials support a timeframe of months for men who were taught the contraction and trained consistently. That is the strongest claim the evidence carries.
What to measure instead of weeks
Weeks elapsed is a poor progress measure because it does not distinguish training from repetition.
Three things are worth tracking instead. Whether you can hold a contraction for longer than you could a fortnight ago. Whether you can produce the same quality of contraction standing as lying down. Whether you can let the muscle go completely between repetitions, rather than partly.
Those three change before anything downstream does, and they tell you whether the programme is working long before the outcome you actually care about moves.
The Performance System runs twelve weeks, which is the length of the Pastore trial.
Its opening month is modelled on the Dorey home protocol: daily training, in lying, sitting and standing.
It says which trial underwrites which part at every point it makes a claim, for the reasons this page has just spent nine hundred words on.