In this work, thermal decomposition of methane (TDM) was experimentally studied at nominal gas temperatures of 1070 K–1450 K in a non-catalytic laboratory test reactor. The purpose was to use a simple kinetic mechanism to describe the TDM reaction, which could be applied in industrial reactor design. The experimental data was utilized to optimize global kinetic parameters describing the TDM reaction in the test reactor. For comparison, a 37-step reaction mechanism for TDM was adopted from the literature. When analyzing experimental datasets from the literature, the optimized global kinetics provided better agreement with the experimental data than the 37-step mechanism when the reactor temperature profiles were defined in detail. Since the 37-step mechanism was not able to predict the solid carbon formation well enough, the mechanism was slightly adjusted according to a reaction flow and sensitivity analysis. Additionally, it was suggested that the 37-step mechanism can be improved by optimizing the reaction mechanism by using a detailed experimental data of hydrocarbon formation in TDM achieved in an environment where the temperature profiles are fully defined. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd