Average Height in Belgium (Men & Women)

Belgium's average height: a surprise near the top

Most people would guess that the world's tallest men live in the Netherlands, and they'd be right. Fewer would guess that the runner-up is Belgium. In the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates for the 1996 birth cohort, Belgian men average 181.7 cm (6′0″), second of 200 countries, just behind Dutch men at 182.5 cm. Belgian women average 165.5 cm (5′5″) and rank 20th.

The NCD-RisC authors list Belgium among the countries where men born in 1996 surpass 181 cm, together with the Netherlands, Estonia, Latvia and Denmark. The spread among those five countries is small; Belgian men are only 0.3 cm ahead of men in Latvia and Denmark. But the women's ranking is much lower, and the resulting gap between the sexes is the second largest in the world in the site data, after North Macedonia.

What the numbers represent

NCD-RisC's 2016 eLife study pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured height for more than 18.6 million adults, excluding self-reported data because people tend to overstate their height. A Bayesian model then estimated the mean height each birth cohort reached at 18. The 1996 values describe Belgians who turned 18 around 2014, the most recent generation in the series. Older Belgians, born before the large gains of the late 20th century, are considerably shorter on average.

From mid-table to second place

Belgian men's rise is one of the most remarkable in the NCD-RisC data. In the 1896 cohort, they ranked 33rd and were 4.7 cm shorter than Swedish men. Over the century they gained 14.5 cm, the sixth-largest gain for men in the world, behind Iran, Greenland, South Korea, Greece and Japan. Crucially, Belgian men kept growing when their neighbors had stopped. Between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts they added 2.3 cm, while Dutch men gained nothing and Swedish and Norwegian men lost a few millimeters.

Belgian women followed a more ordinary path. They gained 10.1 cm over the century, roughly the global norm described by Our World in Data, and only 0.2 cm between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts. That divergence between the sexes is what produced Belgium's unusually large gap.

Belgium, the exception to the European plateau

Researchers noticed Belgium's late growth before NCD-RisC did. In a 2006 letter in Acta Paediatrica, Larnkjær and colleagues reviewed national conscript data after 1990 and found that height had reached a plateau at 179 to 181 cm in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and at 174 cm in Italy. In Belgium, Portugal and Spain, by contrast, height was still increasing. A 2008 review by Danubio and Sanna in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences reached the same conclusion: the secular trend in adult height had halted in northern Europe and Italy but was still in progress in Belgium, Spain and Portugal.

The published research doesn't pin down why Belgium kept growing after its neighbors stopped, and it would be speculation to offer a single cause. What it does show is that Belgium's position near the top is recent: Belgian men born in the 1950s were mid-table in Europe.

Late growth, compared

The table below sets Belgium's most recent gains beside its neighbors', using the change between the 1976 and 1996 NCD-RisC cohorts.

Belgian men gained more in those twenty years than men in any neighboring country, and more than four times as much as German men. France is the only neighbor that comes close, which fits the wider pattern Larnkjær and others described: late-continuing growth in parts of Western and Southern Europe, against a plateau in the north. For women, by contrast, Belgium's 0.2 cm gain is unremarkable. The Belgian story of the late 20th century is almost entirely a story about men.

That is also why Belgium's position relative to the Netherlands differs so much by sex. Belgian men closed most of the gap with Dutch men, from 3.1 cm in the 1976 cohort to 0.8 cm in the 1996 cohort. Belgian women were 3.7 cm shorter than Dutch women in the 1976 cohort and are still 3.2 cm shorter today.

Flemish growth references: measuring 16,000 young people

Belgium's best modern growth data come from Flanders. Between 2002 and 2004, Roelants, Hauspie and Hoppenbrouwers measured 15,989 healthy children and young adults of Belgian origin aged 0 to 25, a representative sample of Flanders, and built new reference charts for height, weight, BMI, head circumference and puberty. Their 2009 paper in Annals of Human Biology reported:

• A positive secular trend in height and weight among children over 5.
• Adult median height increasing by 1.2 cm per decade in boys and 0.8 cm per decade in girls.
• Median weight rising by 0.9 kg per decade in boys and 1.0 kg in girls, with the weight distribution becoming more skewed toward heavier children.
• A median age at first menstruation of 13.0 years, unchanged over the previous 50 years.
• About 10% of boys entering puberty before age 9.

The authors concluded that the growth charts previously used in Belgium, based on data collected more than 30 years earlier, had become obsolete. The difference between boys' and girls' rates of increase, 1.2 cm versus 0.8 cm per decade, mirrors the national pattern in the NCD-RisC series, where men's height has risen faster than women's.

Regional differences: Flanders and Wallonia

Belgium's language divide is also a height divide. Using 613,257 records of medical examinations carried out before military conscription, covering about 68% of the young men concerned, D. A. Deliège analyzed the height of young Belgian men in a 2003 paper in Health & Place. After accounting for age group and year:

• Young men in Wallonia, French-speaking and poorer, were 1.24 cm shorter than those in Flanders, Dutch-speaking and richer.
• The shortest men lived in Hainaut, a deprived area, and the tallest in Walloon Brabant, the wealthy green suburbs of Brussels.
• Height increased by 1.11 cm between 1978 and 1990.

The fact that the tallest province is in Wallonia, not Flanders, shows that the regional difference tracks wealth more than language. Walloon Brabant's commuter suburbs outranked every Flemish province.

Nineteenth-century Belgium: brothers, class and height

Belgian conscription records reach back to the 19th century. Alter and Oris used heights measured at military conscription examinations in three Belgian communities to study brothers. Shared genes make brothers' heights correlate strongly, but poor diet, disease and heavy labor can interfere. Their 2008 paper in Human Nature found that both average height and the correlation between brothers' heights differed by social status. Sons of the local elite were taller, and their brothers' heights matched more closely, which the authors interpreted as elite families being far better able to shield their children from the environmental challenges of the time.

The gap between Belgian men and women

Belgium's 16.2 cm gap between the sexes is wider than in any neighboring country, and the 2020 NCD-RisC analysis of school-aged children in The Lancet offers a clue about where it opens up. Tracking height and BMI from 1985 to 2019 in 200 countries, it named girls in Belgium (along with girls in Puerto Rico) as examples of children who started at age 5 with healthy heights, as good as the global median or better, but who became progressively less healthy compared with peers in other countries as they grew older, "by not growing as tall". Belgian boys were not named in that group.

In other words, the gap doesn't come from Belgian girls being short as young children. It develops during adolescence, when Belgian boys keep pace with the tallest populations in the world and Belgian girls fall behind theirs.

Belgium compared with its neighbors

Belgian men are 0.8 cm shorter than Dutch men but 1.8 cm taller than German men and 2 cm taller than French men. Belgian women, however, are 3.2 cm shorter than Dutch women and 0.4 cm shorter than German women, and only 0.6 cm taller than French women.

Belgian height in practical terms

An average Belgian man, at 181.7 cm, is almost exactly 6 feet tall, and an average Belgian woman, at 165.5 cm, is about 5′5″. Measured against the world, a Belgian man of average height stands 10.4 cm above the global mean for his generation, and taller than the average man in 198 of the other 199 countries in the NCD-RisC data. A Belgian woman of average height is 6 cm above the global mean for women and would count as tall in most of the world, but in her own country she is 16 cm shorter than the average man, a larger difference than almost anywhere else. Among the five countries where men born in 1996 exceed 181 cm, Belgium has by far the shortest women: Latvian women average 169.8 cm, Dutch and Estonian women 168.7 cm, Danish women 167.2 cm and Belgian women 165.5 cm. The height comparison tool can show a couple of average Belgian height side by side, which makes the 16 cm gap easy to see. To check where your own height falls, use the height percentile calculator.

Summary

Belgian men, at 181.7 cm, are the second tallest in the world after the Dutch, while Belgian women, at 165.5 cm, rank 20th. Men's height rose 14.5 cm across the century and kept increasing into the most recent cohorts, making Belgium an exception to the plateau seen in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. Flemish growth references, conscription records showing a Flanders–Wallonia gap driven by wealth, and evidence that Belgian girls fall behind during adolescence all help explain the country's unusual profile. Explore other countries in the average height by country guide.