Body Fat Percentage Chart for Men and Women

These are the American Council on Exercise categories, the most widely reproduced set of body fat ranges. The two columns differ by roughly 7 to 8 percentage points at every level, because women carry substantially more essential fat — a biological floor, not a difference in condition.

The label to be careful with is "average". It describes what is common in the population, which is not the same as what is healthy — average body fat has risen for decades. Most guidance puts the desirable range for health at roughly 10 to 20 percent for men and 18 to 28 percent for women, which straddles the fitness and average bands rather than matching either.

The U.S. Navy method estimates body fat from circumference measurements. For men the equation depends on just two inputs: your height, and your waist measurement minus your neck measurement. Measure your neck below the larynx and your waist at the navel, both relaxed, then subtract. Find that difference down the left edge and your height across the top.

The equation for women uses three circumferences instead of two. Add your waist and hip measurements, subtract your neck, and read the total down the left edge. Measure the hips at their widest point and the waist at its narrowest.

A percentage is abstract until you convert it to mass. The table below splits a 80 kg body into fat and everything else at each body fat percentage, and shows the weight change needed to reach 15 percent if lean mass is fully preserved.

The last column contains the result most people guess wrong. Going from 25 percent to 15 percent at 80 kg is not a 10 percent loss of body weight — it takes 9.4 kg, not 8 kg. The reason is that the denominator shrinks as you lose fat: lean mass stays at 60 kg, and 60 kg of lean mass only represents 85 percent of a body at 70.6 kg. Every fat-loss target expressed as a percentage point costs more weight than the arithmetic suggests.

This also explains why the same drop in percentage points costs a different amount of weight depending on where you start. Losing 5 points from 40 to 35 percent takes 6.2 kg here, while losing 5 points from 20 to 15 percent takes 4.7 kg. The leaner you get, the fewer kilograms each percentage point costs — and, in practice, the harder each one is to lose.

The grids above give one decimal place, which flatters the method. The Navy equation carries a standard error of roughly 3 to 4 percentage points against underwater weighing, so a reading of 16.9 percent honestly means somewhere around 13 to 21 percent. Three things are worth knowing before you take any single reading seriously.

• One centimetre of waist moves the answer a lot. At 180 cm, going from a 45 cm to a 46 cm waist-minus-neck difference changes the estimate by 0.8 percentage points. At a heavier measurement the same centimetre is worth 0.6 points. Since a tape can easily be pulled a centimetre tight or sit a centimetre off the navel, measurement technique matters more than the decimal place.
• Height changes the answer on its own. The same 52 cm difference reads 22.4 percent at 165 cm and 18.2 percent at 190 cm — a gap of 4.2 points from height alone. For women the height effect is larger still: 33.7 percent at 155 cm versus 27.0 percent at 180 cm for the same circumference total.
• The equation only sees your outline. It was fitted to Navy personnel, so it performs best on builds close to that sample. Very muscular people with thick necks read low, and people who store fat mainly on the limbs or hips rather than the abdomen read low too, because the tape never goes near it.

The practical consequence: use one method consistently and watch the trend, rather than comparing a tape estimate against a smart scale against a gym caliper reading. A tape measurement taken the same way each month will detect a real change of 2 to 3 percentage points reliably, even though its absolute accuracy is worse than that.

Lower is not indefinitely better. Below the essential fat threshold — 2 to 5 percent for men and 10 to 13 percent for women — the body is stripping fat it uses structurally, in cell membranes, nerve tissue, and around organs.

For women the risk begins well above that floor. Sustained low body fat combined with insufficient energy intake disrupts menstrual function and bone density, a pattern now described as relative energy deficiency in sport. It is driven by energy availability rather than by a specific percentage, but persistent single-digit to low-teens body fat is where it is most commonly seen.

Physique athletes reach 4 to 6 percent (men) and 12 to 15 percent (women) for a competition day and do not hold it, because appetite regulation, hormone levels, sleep, mood, and training performance all degrade at that level. If you want a target worth holding year-round, the fitness band in the first table is a better answer than the lowest number you can reach.

To estimate your own figure without reading it off a grid, the body fat calculator runs the same equations on your exact measurements, and the macro calculator can set intake against your lean mass rather than your total weight.