Abstract. We provide notions of numerical effectiveness and numerical flatness for Higgs vector bundles on compact Kähler manifolds in terms of fibre metrics. We prove several properties of bundles satisfying such conditions and in particular we show that numerically flat Higgs bundles have vanishing Chern classes, and that they admit filtrations whose quotients are stable flat Higgs bundles. We compare these definitions with those previously given in the case of projective varieties. Finally we study the relations between numerically effectiveness and semistability, establishing semistability criteria for Higgs bundles on projective manifolds of any dimension.