Late answer time! Spur is apparently 11-13 and has the same build as younger Applejack in the flashbacks in Where The Apple Lies, suggesting the latter also was 11-13 there. Apple Bloom is anywhere between 7 (as her audition sheet says) and 10 (like Jim said). If AB was born when AJ was 11-13, that means the latter was anywhere between 18 and 23 when FiM started. That… Still makes the Mane 6 ages vague, but at least it is better than nothing.

@Background Pony #2055  
they’re they’re 17-21 old human selfs.

@Goddess Erosia  
Animation can be used in lots of ways, realistic or unrealistic. Most of the stuff I like is actually pretty unrealistic, but time/age is one factor I prefer to stay pretty “normal”. Especially, as I said, when continuity and character progession is used instead of status quo resets.

@Latecomer  
You don’t watch many cartoons because they’re unrealistic?
 
That’s….kind of the whole point of animation. You should probably just turn your brain off a little more often when watching things like this. You miss out on a lot of great entertainment otherwise.
 
I personally balance my TV diet with silly bullshit like Courage the Cowardly Dog, but I also enjoy serious shows like Breaking Bad and House MD, with a healthy amount of educational television just because nature and science is interesting. Every now and then I still need the silly bullshit to feel better about my day though.
 
 
EDIT: Yes I know the examples I just brought up are kind of ancient now…. I could embarrass myself even further by going deeper, trust me.

@Goddess Erosia  
It has to mean at least a few years, even just based on Hearth’s Warmings.
 
And I don’t watch many cartoons, possibly because that kind of thing annoys me (with a very few exceptions). It certainly doesn’t work for me in a show with ongoing continuity and progress like this one.
 
And anyway, I pegged the CMC as middle schoolers to start with (they’re basically dealing with magic puberty).

@Latecomer
 
Nine seasons doesn’t necessarily have to mean nine years. If it were really that much time, we would see other signs of people aging. Before the future scenes in the final, of course.
 
Another more obvious example is the baby, Flurry. The younger you are, the more dramatic the changes brought by aging will be. You basically morph into a different kind of creature every 2 months up until a stopping point where things slow and normalize a little - it’s actually quite strange and interesting. You can very clearly tell the difference between a six-month-old and a kid that’s a year-and-a-half old, and likewise another six months after that. But you can’t really tell as much of a difference between a seven year old and a nine year old.
 
I’m speaking about average human growth patterns of course - there are some variables out there, some kids mature faster, some even go through puberty as young as seven. But still the point is - if the 9 seasons of the show really represented 9 years like you seem to be implying, Flurry wouldn’t be a baby anymore even though she arrived relatively late into the series.
 
The CMC not being shown to grow past the age they were initially shown to us doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me, since this is far from the only cartoon to conveniently ignore realities like that. There’s lots of shows - actually dare I say MOST shows don’t have a completely realistic aging system for their characters, because unless you really want to do a Rugrats-All-Grown-Up kind of deal, it could really mess with the structure of the show.
 
I’ve seen shows that have a baby like Flurry progress into the same age as “the kid-friends” meanwhile the kids who were already about the CMC’s age just don’t grow older than that and stay the same for some reason. And that makes even less sense.
 
To be honest I’m not sure how many years I’d say the span of the show has gone through. We’re using cartoon logic here so it may not be that much time at all, despite it feeling like it’s nine years or more to us. I mean hell, the Simpsons family is basically immortal in the weird sense that they don’t age - Maggie is like 47 years old or something now but she’s still somehow a baby. The Simpsons went from 80’s technology to i-phone craze and now they’ll make jokes about drones so they do sort of exist in a modern world that changes in the same way ours does and yet the family itself doesn’t progress in the same way.
 
It’s kind of insane when you think about it - Maggie Simpson starts as a baby right at the dawn of the internet, and yet now we have Netflix and pizza-drones and Trump as president but apparently this is all happening within the span of like 2 months, to her.

@Goddess Erosia  
The CMC. 8-10. Five episodes before the show ends. If you can’t see a problem with that, then it isn’t one to you, I guess.

@Latecomer  
…what’s the problem, exactly?

Ugh. This is why some questions are better not asked - and maybe some episodes better not made this late.

@Goddess Erosia  
15 in Motherly Scootaloo and 15 human years in an original IP idea I have that has a race based on/inspired by MLP but that’s just fanon.

@Wiimeiser
 
Yeah and another thing to consider is we don’t even know what age is legally an adult in their civilization. It could easily be 16.
 
What we do know is Twilight basically lived like a college student going off on their own right at the pilot of season 1. Her “friendship assignment” she was sent on in Ponyville is the equivalent of being sent to a dorm somewhere for a field study.

@Goddess Erosia  
I think Twilight’s first song in Magical Mystery Cure was because it was her birthday. Sixteenth at the youngest for various reasons

….yeah that’s basically exactly how I felt about the mane six. I openly laugh at people who try to tell me Twilight Sparkle is underage.
 
She was more “young at heart” in the first season but come on, even since the beginning we’ve seen the mane six live basically like adults. Even Pinkie Pie - she’s hyperactive and goofy and a kid at heart but lots of people are like that. Even she has a JOB and she pays rent.
 
Realistically, Rainbow Dash probably is the youngest but even then I doubt she was “a kid” even at season 1. She probably was like 17.

@Jupiter maça  
Sounds about right.

M6 S1 .17-20  
M6 S9 .26-30

@superfun  
I can given they have identical personalities to they’re 17-year old human selfs.
 
But one of the supplementary books said “Pinkie Pride” states it was 10 years since Rainbow moved to Ponyville. The above would mean 21 makes most sense as Spur suggest 11 is the youngest they’re allowed to be so independent.

@superfun  

 
Well considering you have to be 18 to own a business and rarity ran her clothing business for a few years before twilight and spike arrived in ponyville, id assume rarity is 21-24 and we know fluttershy is the oldest so id say futters is at least 25.

The CMC I can see as that age at the start of the show, but by present when they’re doing an important social service so I can’t see them younger than 12 by S9
 
I’ve calculated 5 years is the smallest amount that could be between S2 and S9. At what point in that time do these speculated dates apply? Is this admitting they don’t take into account the passage of in the series?
 
The wiki says Lauren’s original proposal for Apple Bloom was 7 at the start of the series so this fits that if time passed by the the time Jim applied this.
 
This is still good information that we’ve long wondered. I look forward to using this.

Seasons 6 and 7 don’t give off the impression that the cmc are outside 11-14. They were obviously treated as much younger in Growing Up is Hard to Do, for the sake of the story, but that’s a huge outlier in how they’re typically written.

I knew it.

I can’t really imagine the mane 6 as being anything younger than 21.