Hypertension is an important determinant of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality and has a substantial heritability, which is likely of polygenic origin. The aim of this study was to assess to what extent multiple common genetic variants contribute to blood pressure regulation in both adults and children, and to assess overlap in variants between different age groups, using genome wide profiling. SNP sets were defined based on a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies on systolic (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) performed by the Cohort for Heart and Aging Research in Genome Epidemiology (CHARGE, n=29,136), using different P-value thresholds for selecting single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Subsequently, genetic risk scores for SBP and DBP were calculated in an independent adult population (n=2,072) and a child population (n=1,034). The explained variance of the genetic risk scores was evaluated using linear regression models, including sex, age and body mass index. Genetic risk scores, including also many non-genome-wide significant SNPs explained more of the variance than scores based only on very significant SNPs in adults and children. Genetic risk scores significantly explained up to 1.2% (P=9.6*10−8) of the variance in adult SBP and 0.8% (P=0.004) in children. For DBP, the variance explained was similar in adults and children (1.7% (P=8.9*10−10) and 1.4% (P=3.3*10−5) respectively). These findings suggest the presence of many genetic loci with small effects on blood pressure regulation both in adults and children, indicating also a (partly) common polygenic regulation of blood pressure throughout different periods of life.