Height Percentile

Where does your height land among adults in your country? Means and standard deviations from NCD-RisC's global height database.

Where you stand

Your percentile

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Country average

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Difference from average

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Standard deviation

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Shorter than you

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Heights vary wildly by country

Dutch men average 183.8 cm (6'0.4") — tallest in the world. Indonesian men average 163.6 cm (5'4.4"). The same 175cm man would be 10th percentile in the Netherlands and ~80th percentile in Indonesia. The "average" you're being compared against is local.

How this works

For each country + sex we have a mean and standard deviation. Adult heights are approximately normally distributed at population scale, so we compute z = (your height − mean) / SD and look up the percentile in the standard normal CDF (Abramowitz & Stegun, accurate to ~1.5e-7).

Caveats

  • This compares against adults. Children/adolescents have separate growth percentile charts (CDC for the US, WHO globally).
  • Population means shift by ~1 cm per generation in many places. NCD-RisC tracks this; we use the most recent published cohort.
  • Heights within a country also vary by ethnicity, region, and birth cohort. The single mean smooths over those.