Abstract Age estimation performance has been greatly improved by using convolutional neural network. However, existing methods have an inconsistency between the training objectives and evaluation metric, so they may be suboptimal. In addition, these methods always adopt image classification or face recognition models with a large amount of parameters, which bring expensive computation cost and storage overhead. To alleviate these issues, we design a lightweight network architecture and propose a unified framework which can jointly learn age distribution and regress age. The effectiveness of our approach has been demonstrated on apparent and real age estimation tasks. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art results using the single model with 36× fewer parameters and 2.6× reduction in inference time. Moreover, our method can achieve comparable results as the state-of-the-art even though model parameters are further reduced to 0.9M (3.8MB disk storage). We also analyze that Ranking methods are implicitly learning label distributions.