Ideal Weight Chart by Height

Each formula below defines a base weight at 5 feet and adds a fixed amount for every inch above that. They were published between 1964 and 1983, and none of them was designed to describe health.

This is the most useful thing on the page. The four formulas are usually presented interchangeably, as though each is a different route to the same answer. Run all four across the same heights and a clear pattern appears: they very nearly agree at one height and pull apart in both directions from there.

For men the closest agreement is at 170 cm, where the four answers fall within 1.5 kg of each other. The widest gap is 16.0 kg at 200 cm. For women the pattern is the same but less extreme: 1.8 kg apart at 170 cm, widening to 10.0 kg at 200 cm.

The reason is that the formulas trade off base weight against per-inch increment. For men, Miller starts highest at 5 feet (56.2 kg) and adds the least per inch (1.41 kg); Hamwi starts lowest (48.0 kg) and adds the most (2.7 kg). Those two differences cancel out near average adult height and compound at the extremes. So the choice of formula barely matters for someone of average height, and matters a great deal for anyone tall or short — which is exactly the opposite of how a reliable measure should behave.

A second pattern is worth noticing. Every formula returns one number, while the healthy BMI range in the last column is 14 kg wide at 150 cm and 26 kg wide at 200 cm. Almost every formula value in both tables sits inside that range, which is why the numbers look plausible — but they are not centred in it, and they sit differently by sex. At 170 cm the four male figures all land in the upper half of the healthy range, while all four female figures land in the lower half. A formula that reads high for men and low for women at the same height is describing the body ideals of its era rather than a health threshold.

There is one value outside the healthy range in these tables: Miller's figure for a man at 150 cm is 56.2 kg, which is a BMI of 25.0. That is an artefact of the 5-foot floor described in the table note, and a fair illustration of how little these equations were built to handle the edges.

None of the four was created to tell people what to weigh. They come from clinical medicine, where a standardised reference weight is needed for calculations that should not scale with a patient's fat mass.

• Devine (1974) was published to standardise gentamicin dosing. It remains widely used in pharmacology and ventilator tidal-volume settings, which is the context it was validated in.
• Hamwi (1964) came from diabetes care, as a quick bedside estimate for calculating diet prescriptions.
• Robinson (1983) and Miller (1983) were both revisions of Devine, fitted to the Metropolitan Life insurance height and weight tables of the era.

Two consequences follow. They inherit the assumptions of mid-twentieth-century insurance data, which was not representative of the population at large. And they take no account of frame size, muscularity, age, or ethnicity — the factors that make one number per height inadequate as a personal goal.

For readers working in imperial units, the table below averages the four formulas at each height and converts to pounds, alongside the healthy BMI range.

If you want a target to work toward, the healthy BMI range in the last column is the more defensible starting point, and then only as a range. Three refinements make it more useful than any of these formulas:

• Pick a point in the range, not the middle by default. Someone carrying substantial muscle belongs at the upper end; someone with a small frame and little training history belongs lower. The range exists precisely because one number cannot cover both.
• Use body composition where you can. Body fat percentage answers the underlying question — how much of my weight is fat — that a height-based formula cannot. The body fat calculator needs only a tape measure, and the body fat percentage chart gives the published ranges by sex.
• Set an interim goal you can reach.A loss of 5 to 10 percent of current body weight delivers most of the measurable metabolic benefit and is far more achievable than a jump to a formula's number. The body weight planner turns a goal weight and a deadline into a weekly schedule.

The ideal weight calculator runs all four formulas at your exact height and shows the healthy BMI range beside them, which is the honest way to present numbers that disagree this much.