What is required to fully upgrade a particular bike in Zwift?

As Zwifters have noted, when it comes to upgrading this frame, all the game tells me is how far I need to ride in order to unlock the stage 1 upgrade.

It doesn’t tell me what that upgrade actually is.

And it doesn’t tell me how many Drops that upgrade will cost.

Zwift may tweak this UI in the future, but until then, here’s some documentation so you can figure out exactly what work is involved, and how much it’ll cost, to upgrade a particular bike in Zwift.

Figuring Out Your Upgrade Scheme

If you want to know exactly what it’ll take to upgrade a bike, first you have to figure out which category Zwift has assigned it to. Bikes have been placed in one of three categories:

• Distance: ride X km to unlock upgrades
• Duration: ride X hours to unlock upgrades
• Elevation: climb X meters to unlock upgrades

If you pull up your bike in your garage, you can quickly figure out which category it is in based on what the game tells you to do to unlock stage 1. In my S-Works Tarmac SL8 example above, you can see it’s telling me to ride 200 kilometers, which means this frame is in the “Distance” category. (Where almost all road bike frames live, by the way.)

Next, within each category, bikes are further divided up into entry-level, mid-range, and high-end bikes. Entry-level bikes are easier to upgrade than mid-level bikes, which are easier to upgrade than high-end bikes.

Cross-reference the work required for a stage 1 upgrade with the lists below, and you can figure out if your frame is classified as entry-level, mid-range, or high-end. Again, looking at my S-Works Tarmac SL8 screenshot above, the game says I must ride 200km to unlock stage 1. That means this is a high-end frame, based on the Distance-Based Upgrading table below.

(If you don’t want to try to figure out what scheme your bike uses, or want a reference sheet that doesn’t live in the game, there’s a long table at the bottom of this post that says exactly how each frame in Zwift is classified.)

I realize this may seem quite complex. But here are two pieces of good news:

1. You don’t have to understand it to enjoy using it. You can just ride, and upgrade your bike when the game notifies you. Or don’t upgrade your bike at all, and just keep doing what you’re already doing. You do you!
2. The upgrading scheme makes actual sense, even if it’s somewhat complex. It is related to what we would do with our IRL bikes and riding. Zwift doesn’t just pull this stuff out of thin air – it’s the work of experienced game designers who love riding their bikes. (I know because I’ve spent a lot of time chatting with them.)

With all of that said, let’s dive into the details of how each bike frame can be upgraded in Zwift.

Distance-Based Upgrading

Almost all road bike frames in Zwift fall into this category, so it’s the largest category by far. Basically, this category contains all the road frames that aren’t strictly climbing bikes. Examples of bikes in this group include the Specialized Venge, Pinarello Dogma, and Specialized Project 74.

Here’s a table showing how far you’ll have to ride for each upgrade stage, how many Drops you’ll need to spend to make the upgrade once you’ve unlocked it, and what exactly each stage upgrade is:

Duration-Based Upgrading

This category contains only TT bikes at this time. Examples of bikes in this group include the Cadex Tri, Felt IA 2.0, and Pinarello Espada.

Elevation-Based Upgrading

This category includes a handful of climbing-specific road bikes and all mountain bikes in game. Examples of bikes in this category include the Specialized S-Works Aethos, Canyon Grail, and Scott Spark RC World Cup.

Comparing Categories

Zwift isn’t disclosing the precise details behind each upgrade stage shown above, but it’s important to understand that what the game simply calls an “Aero Upgrade” may be small (say, a CDA decrease of .001) or large (perhaps a CDA decrease of .008).

Our tests show (and Zwift confirms) that, regardless of whether your bike is an entry-level, mid-range, or high-end bike, the performance upgrades a “maxed out” bike receives are the same for all bikes within that category.

Example: if you had two distance-based bikes (say, the entry-level Cannondale CAAD12 and the high-end Pinarello Dogma F 2024) and maxed out upgrading them both, their performance improvement would be the same. The only difference is that the CAAD12 would now be rewarding you with 5% Drops and XP bonuses as well!

While two frames within the same category (say, Distance) will receive the same performance boost when maxed out, that is not the case for frames from different categories (say, a TT frame from the Duration group and a climbing frame from the Elevation group).

Upgrades for the Elevation category are skewed toward weight reduction, because IRL cyclists would want to make their lightweight climbing bike even lighter. Meanwhile, upgrades for the Duration category (TT frames) are skewed toward aero improvements, because TT racers are all about aero gains! Upgrades for the largest category (Distance) are more balanced between weight reductions and aero improvements.

Here’s a simple chart illustrating this point. It shows the baseline (un-upgraded) performance of a high-end frame from each of the categories (Distance, Duration, and Elevation), and the performance of that same frame at fully-upgraded (stage 5) status:

You can see that each frame improves in performance (the maxed-out data points are up and to the right of the un-upgraded ones), but they progress in different ways. The frame in the Duration category (Speedmax CF SLX) improves the most in terms of aero performance, while the Elevation frame (Aethos) improves the most in terms of climb performance. The Distance frame (Dogma F 2024) is balanced between the two.

Complete List of Bikes, Categorized

Questions or Comments?

I hope this post helped answer some questions. If you have more upgrade-related questions or comments, post below!