In 2025, a Croatian diver held his breath underwater for 29 minutes 3 seconds — over twice the record set in a California pool in 1959.

In June 2025, Croatian freediver Vitomir Maričić held his breath underwater for 29 minutes 3 seconds — roughly 2.1 times the 13-minute mark that first opened this Guinness record in a California pool in 1959.

On 14 June 2025, in the Adriatic town of Opatija, Vitomir Maričić submerged himself and did not breathe again for 29 minutes and 3 seconds. Guinness World Records certified it as the longest time a person has voluntarily held their breath underwater. It is a number that sounds impossible until you understand exactly what it measures — and what it doesn't.

Compare it to where the record started. On 15 March 1959, in a San Rafael, California pool, Robert Foster stayed under 3.05 meters of water for 13 minutes 42.5 seconds — the first mark Guinness recognized in this category. From Foster to Maričić, the record didn't just double; it grew about 2.1-fold across 66 years. "More than doubled" is technically true but sells the leap short.

Why the record is so much longer than you'd expect

Here's the detail that reframes everything: both marks are oxygen-assisted. Under Guinness rules for this category, competitors are allowed to breathe pure oxygen before submerging. That single permission changes the physiology entirely.

Physiologists at the University of Wollongong laid out the mechanism in a 2025 piece for The Conversation. Maričić pre-breathed 100% oxygen for about ten minutes before going under. Ordinary air is only about 21% oxygen; the rest is mostly inert nitrogen. By flushing his lungs and blood with pure oxygen, Maričić loaded his body with a far larger reserve than a normal breath allows — essentially topping off the tank before diving.

That's why the 29-minute figure lives in a different world from breath-holding on regular air. The same University of Wollongong analysis notes Maričić's best on ordinary air is about ten minutes — and the separate Guinness record for static apnea on air, held by Serbia's Branko Petrović, is 11 minutes 54 seconds. The gap between roughly 12 minutes on air and 29 minutes on oxygen is not willpower. It's chemistry.

How a person survives half an hour without breathing

Even with oxygen loading, the body fights back. As breath-holding continues, carbon dioxide accumulates in the blood, and it's rising CO2 — not falling oxygen — that drives the desperate urge to breathe. Trained freedivers spend years teaching their bodies to tolerate that CO2 buildup and to stay calm while every reflex screams to inhale.

The human body also has a built-in ally: the mammalian dive reflex. When the face contacts cool water, the heart rate drops and blood vessels in the limbs constrict, shunting oxygen-rich blood toward the brain and heart. It's the same response you see in seals and dolphins, and it's why cold-water immersion, not just any breath-hold, matters for these attempts. Maričić did his in the water, face submerged, letting that reflex work in his favor for nearly half an hour.

The vivid part is the stillness. A person doing this cannot swim, cannot struggle, cannot burn a single unnecessary calorie of oxygen. Motion costs air. The discipline is to lie motionless while your own body count of carbon dioxide climbs toward the edge of what a trained nervous system can ignore — and to do it under the supervision of safety divers and medics, because a blackout underwater is a drowning risk, not a stunt.

So the honest way to read the record is this: it's a genuine human achievement, but it measures a specific, oxygen-assisted feat with a clear rulebook, not the raw limit of a person holding one ordinary breath.

Which leaves the arguable seam. When Guinness lists Foster's 1959 pool time and Maričić's 2025 dive as the same record's endpoints, it's comparing two oxygen-era performances — and that's a fair lineage. But it's a different question, and a more human one, to ask how long a person can hold a single lungful of everyday air. That answer sits closer to twelve minutes, and it has grown far more slowly. Which number is the "real" limit depends on which rules you think the record should honor.