What does positive covariance indicate about the values of two variables?

In statistics, covariance is a measure of association used to determine the direction of the relationship between two random variables.

A positive covariance indicates that the two variables have a positive association. Specifically, it means that greater values of one variable tend to occur alongside greater values of the other variable.1

While covariance identifies the direction of this relationship, it does not indicate the strength of the association, as its magnitude is dependent on the units of the variables involved. For a more precise measure that indicates both the direction and the strength of a relationship, statisticians often prefer using correlation, such as Pearson’s r, which is a normalized version of covariance.1