There are a lot of sagas and many series on the character of Goku AKA Son Goku. The problem is, the original author did not even write some of them! To find how out how old is Goku, we first need to settle which series we need to consider and which series we will leave be. There’s some debate about the status of the series that is not written by the author but approved or edited by him. Are they canon(considered part of the Anime by fans) or non-canon(not considered by fans to be part of Anime)? Some series may be available online that the author may not even know about, so we’ll not be considering those at the least.
The below table will help us eliminate some more series.
| Dragon Ball: | Dragon Ball Z: | Dragon Ball GT: | All other Dragon Ball series: |
| This is the first canon series because it’s written by the author. We will count this seires when finding out how old is Goku. | This is the second canon series because of the same reason as the first one. We will count this also for answering the question to how old is Goku. | This series takes place in Anime roughly 5 years after the timeline of the epilogue of Dragon Ball Z. It’s an important series. It changes the answer to the question of how old is Goku if we consider it. But we’ll not due to the following reasons. This is gray area and it’s debatlabe whether it’s canon or non-canon. The orignal author apparently liked it. But it’s a fact that the author didn’t write this series. Someone else wrote it. The age of Goku comes out to be roughly 151 according to this. | Other canon sagas like Dragon Ball Super, Super Dragon Ball Heroes. As they are also canon, we will see them also to conclude how old is Goku. |
Dragon Ball:
Goku starts at 11 years old(he misstated he was 14 because of his illiteracy in math.)
He fought in 3 world tournaments(held every 3 years) starting at an age of 12. Hence his age: 18.
Dragon Ball Z:
Goku AKA Kakarot fights his brother Raditz after five years in first saga(hence age 23). Then he comes back to fight Frieza after one year(hence age 24). Then he spends three years training and spends a year in Time Chamber(hence age 28). We can say it’s 27 chronologically because of the different time passing inside chamber. But we will consider this from his perspective.
Now a seven-year skip for fight with Majin Buu(hence age 35). Then the epilogue after a 10 year skip makes the age of Goku to be roughly 45.
Other Dragon Ball Sagas:
Let’s take the Saga of Dragon Ball Super as an example. It probably occurs four years into the 10 year skip(hence age 39).
Then there’s the movie of Super where Goku fights Brolly and roughly only a year should have passed(hence age 40). But since fans think of movies as non-canon(because of a different reason) so age is still 39.
Then there are the All Universe fights which occur roughly less than a year later after this(hence age became 40).
Or even when we consider the Universe 6 fight or the Black Goku and Trunk saga in the Super Dragon Ball Heroes, we still may have only a one year gap from the series of super in timeline, hence we can say the age is still 41.
By the time of writing this, the Super Dragon Ball Heroes is still in continuation with less than 45 episodes, so the answer to how old is Goku could change drastically in this series. There’s another movie of Goku scheduled to go live in 2022 but that’s non-canon and hence won’t affect this calculation.
As you can see, the other saga and series operate before the time that the epilogue of the Dragon Ball Z takes us to. So, this will not give us the conclusive answer on how old is Goku in canon Anime series. Although you can say that he’s 41 years old in the current story that’s being serialized right now. The conclusive answer to how old is Goku till now in canon Anime is the one that the Dragon Ball Z gave. Goku is 45 years old(or 44 if you look at this chronologically, because of the time chamber arc)
