BMI chart by height and weight

This is the table most people are looking for: at your height, the weight at which each WHO category begins. Read across your height row: anything below the first column is underweight, the gap between the first two columns is the healthy range, and each column after that marks the start of the next category.

The width of that healthy band is the point worth noticing. At 170 cm it spans from about 53 kg to 72 kg. Nineteen kilograms of difference, all of it inside 'normal'. Where you sit within the band is decided by muscle, frame and fat distribution, not by the chart.

The identical boundaries, converted. Pounds and stone are shown together because the British and American conventions differ and neither is more correct than the other.

The WHO's Western Pacific regional office publishes a separate classification, because body-composition research consistently finds that at the same BMI, many East, South and Southeast Asian populations carry more body fat (more of it visceral) and develop type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease at lower BMI levels. Overweight begins at 23 rather than 25, and obesity at 25 rather than 30.

Both systems come from the WHO, and both are correct within their own frame. This is why the same person can be 'normal' on one chart and 'overweight, at risk' on the other. Neither number is wrong; they are calibrated to different populations and purposes.

Find your height down the left, your weight across the top, and read the BMI where they meet. This is the chart that hangs in gyms and surgeries. It is the least useful of the three, because a grid this size has to round both inputs, but it is what a lot of people mean by 'BMI chart'.

Both recognised systems, written out. The WHO standard cut-offs were drawn from mortality and disease curves in largely European cohorts and adopted for international classification in the 1990s; the Asia-Pacific categories were published by WHO/IASO/IOTF in 2000.

A third layer exists and is often confused with the second: the WHO's 2004 Expert Consultation retained the standard international cut-offs for global comparability and added public-health action points at 23.0, 27.5, 32.5 and 37.5 for Asian populations. Those are trigger levels for screening, not a category table. Any chart that merges them has stopped being able to cite any of them.

A chart tells you where your weight sits relative to your height, and nothing else. It cannot see whether the kilograms are muscle or fat, and it cannot see where the fat is, the two things that decide what the number means for your health.

Since January 2025, mainstream clinical guidance has formalised this limit: a raised BMI now needs at least one direct measure of fat distribution (waist circumference, waist-to-height ratio or waist-to-hip ratio) before excess body fat is confirmed. Thirty seconds with a tape measure resolves most of what a chart cannot.

• Boundaries are lines on a continuum: 24.9 and 25.1 are the same body.
• Adult charts are invalid under 18; children are assessed on BMI-for-age percentiles.
• Pregnancy, significant oedema and amputation each break the formula's assumptions.
• At the same BMI, older adults typically carry more fat and less muscle than younger ones.