Healthy weight chart by height

Find your height in the first column and read across. The kilogram column is the band itself; the pound and stone columns are the identical band converted, because neither the British nor the American convention is more correct than the other and plenty of people think in both.

The lower edge is the weight at BMI 18.5 and the upper edge the weight at BMI 24.9. That is the WHO standard adult classification, drawn from mortality and disease curves in largely European cohorts and adopted for international use in the 1990s. Anything below the band is classified as underweight and anything above it as overweight. Both of those words describe a position on a chart, not a diagnosis, and neither describes a person.

Height and weight are two numbers; a body is not. Two adults of the same height can differ by fifteen kilograms of entirely healthy tissue (one carrying more skeletal muscle, denser bone and a broader frame, the other smaller-framed and lighter-boned), and both can be in excellent metabolic health. A single ideal figure has to choose one of them and be wrong about the other. A range declines to choose, which is the honest position.

The width of the band is not a rounding allowance, and it grows with height because BMI divides by height squared. At 147 cm the band spans 13.8 kg. At 170 cm it spans 18.5 kg. At 185 cm, 21.9 kg. At 196 cm, 24.6 kg. Anyone who tells you your healthy weight is one specific figure to one decimal place is quoting a formula, not the evidence.

Four things mostly decide where inside your band you belong, and none of the four is visible to a chart:

• Muscle mass: muscle is denser than fat, so a well-trained body sits high in the band, and often above it, at a body-fat percentage most people would envy.
• Frame size: skeletal breadth at the wrist and elbow varies enough between adults of the same height to move a sensible target by several kilograms in either direction.
• Fat distribution: where the fat is stored matters more than which end of the band you sit at, because it is visceral fat around the organs that carries the metabolic risk.
• Ancestry: at the same BMI, body fat percentage and metabolic risk differ systematically between populations, which is exactly why the next table on this page exists.

The WHO's Western Pacific regional office publishes a second classification, and it is not a stricter edition of the first; it is a different calibration, and an equally citable one. 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. The healthy band therefore runs from 18.5 to 22.9 rather than to 24.9.

In weight terms the difference is real but moderate. At 170 cm the top of the band moves from 72 kg down to 66.2 kg; at 180 cm, from 80.7 kg to 74.2 kg. Both systems come from the WHO, and the same person can sit comfortably inside one band and above the other. Neither result is wrong. They answer the same question for different populations, and a chart that shows one without naming it leaves you unable to tell which you are reading.

A third layer is routinely confused with this one. The WHO's 2004 Expert Consultation kept the 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 triggers for screening and intervention, not a category table, and any chart that quietly merges them with the 2000 classification has stopped being able to cite either.

Search for an ideal weight and you are handed one confident number. It comes from one of four formulas, and you are rarely told which. All four share a shape: a base weight at five feet, plus a fixed number of kilograms for every inch above that. Hamwi (1964) was a bedside rule for estimating insulin doses. Devine (1974), the most quoted of the four, was written for dosing gentamicin and other drugs whose distribution tracks lean mass. Robinson and Miller, both 1983, refitted the same idea against newer height and weight data.

Not one of them was derived or validated as a health target. They were clinical dosing conveniences that happened to output kilograms, and pharmacy still uses them daily, correctly, for precisely that. Read as a personal goal, they are a category error. And a review of their use in drug dosing found the same thing from the clinical side, that these are estimates of a dosing scalar rather than statements about health.

Their disagreement is the most useful thing about them. Because each fitted a different dataset with a different slope, small differences compound with height. At 150 cm the four span 8.2 kg for a man; at 195 cm they span 13.4 kg, from 79.8 kg to 93.3 kg. For women at 195 cm the spread is 8.2 kg. Four published formulas, one height, more than ten kilograms of disagreement. And every one of those answers falls inside the WHO healthy band for that height, which is wider still.

One mechanical caveat before you read the tables: all four are anchored at five feet, or 152.4 cm, with a linear inches-above term. At 150 cm that term is zero, so each formula simply returns its base weight. Below about 152 cm they stop being models of anything and become constants, which is a good reason to prefer the WHO column in the last position.

The standard band was drawn from mortality curves across adults of all ages, and it fits the oldest of them poorly. A 2014 meta-analysis by Winter and colleagues pooled cohort studies of adults aged 65 and over and found the lowest all-cause mortality at a BMI of roughly 23 to 27, with risk rising clearly below 23 rather than just above 25. Sitting at the bottom of the standard adult band looked worse, in that evidence, than sitting a little above its top.

Several things plausibly drive that. Muscle and bone are lost steadily from midlife, so at the same BMI an older adult carries more fat and less of the tissue that protects against falls, fractures and the wasting that follows an illness. A modest reserve is genuinely useful when appetite collapses during an infection or a hospital stay. And unintended weight loss late in life is frequently an early symptom of undiagnosed disease rather than a choice, which drags the bottom of the mortality curve down further than body composition alone would explain.

Read the table below for exactly what it is: an association observed in populations over about 65, not an official WHO category. The WHO publishes no separate adult classification by age, and this band is not a licence to gain weight after a birthday. What it does say plainly is that unplanned weight loss in an older adult deserves a conversation with a doctor, and that pushing an eighty-year-old from a BMI of 26 down to 22 needs a far better reason than a chart.

A weight chart answers one question: where your weight sits relative to your height. It cannot see muscle, and it cannot see where fat is stored, the two things that decide what your position actually means for your health. Thirty seconds with a tape measure resolves most of what the chart cannot.

Since January 2025, mainstream clinical guidance has made that formal. A raised BMI is no longer sufficient on its own: it now requires 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, and a further assessment of whether organ function is affected before clinical obesity is diagnosed. The same logic works in your favour in reverse: if your weight sits above the band but your waist is under half your height, that discordance is itself the signal, and it is the reason the framework asks for the tape measure first.

• Measure your waist at the midpoint between the lowest rib and the top of the hip bone, at the end of a normal breath out, with the tape snug and level.
• A waist under half your height is the simplest screening target available, it needs no chart at all, and it applies across heights and sexes.
• Category boundaries are lines drawn across a continuum: a BMI of 24.9 and a BMI of 25.1 describe the same body on the same day.
• Every band on this page is for adults; under 18, weight is assessed against BMI-for-age percentiles instead, because healthy body fat changes continuously through growth.
• Pregnancy, significant oedema and limb amputation each break the assumptions behind all four tables, and no conversion repairs them.