Average Height in Brazil (Men & Women)

Brazil's average height

Brazilian men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 173.6 cm (5′8″), and Brazilian women 160.9 cm (5′3″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Its landmark 2016 study pooled 1,472 measurement studies covering more than 18.6 million people, and estimated mean height for every birth year from 1896 to 1996 in 200 countries.

That puts Brazil in the upper middle of the world table, with men 66th and women 70th of 200. Brazilian men are about 2.5 cm taller than the world median for men born in 1996, and Brazilian women about 2 cm taller than the median for women.

The site's 173 cm page shows the average Brazilian man's height in context, and 160 cm is within a centimeter of the average Brazilian woman.

The idea behind birth-cohort estimates

NCD-RisC reports average height at age 18 for each birth cohort, the group of people born in one year. Once people reach adulthood, their height stays roughly constant for decades, so a cohort's adult height reflects the nutrition and health conditions of its childhood. In a country that has changed as much as Brazil, cohort figures avoid mixing grandparents who grew up in the 1940s with grandchildren who grew up in the 1990s.

The NCD-RisC estimates draw only on studies that measured height, and only on samples representative of the general population. Brazil has several large national measurement surveys, which makes its estimates more solid than those for many other middle-income countries.

A century of uninterrupted growth

Brazil's height trend is one of the steadiest in the world.

Men gained 10.4 cm and women 10.7 cm, and every interval in the table shows a gain. Brazilians grew about 1 cm per decade almost throughout. Many large countries leveled off: the United States from the 1950s cohorts, Japan from the 1960s cohorts, and India and Pakistan from the 1970s cohorts. Brazilians born in 1996 were still about 2 cm taller than those born 20 years earlier.

That steady rate matches other evidence from the region. A 2014 study in PLOS Genetics measured 7,342 volunteers in five Latin American countries, including Brazil, and found height increasing by about 0.1 cm per year of birth, roughly 1 cm per decade. The authors note that this is similar to what extensive longitudinal surveys across Latin America have found for the last century, a trend usually attributed to rising living standards.

IBGE's national measurement survey

Brazil's richest source of measured height is the Pesquisa de Orçamentos Familiares (POF), the household budget survey run by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The 2008–2009 round, published in 2010 with the Ministry of Health, measured the weight and height of household members of all ages. Interviewers used portable stadiometers with a retractable tape reaching 200 cm, precise to 0.1 cm. Children under two were measured lying down, and everyone else standing.

IBGE publishes medians, the height of the person in the middle of each group, rather than means. For an approximately symmetric trait like height, the two are very close.

The age gradient is steep. Young men in their early twenties were more than 7 cm taller than men aged 75 and over, and young women more than 8 cm taller than the oldest women. Some of that reflects shrinking with age, but most of it is the generational rise also seen in the NCD-RisC data. Men aged 20–24 in the survey were born around 1985–1989, and their median of 173.0 cm sits neatly between NCD-RisC's estimates for the 1976 and 1996 cohorts.

IBGE has run comparable surveys for decades: the ENDEF national family expenditure study of 1974–1975, the PNSN national health and nutrition survey of 1989, and the POFs of 2002–2003 and 2008–2009. The 2010 report observes that, compared with international reference curves, Brazilians gained far more in weight than in height over the 35 years since ENDEF.

When Brazilian teenagers stop growing

Because the POF measured every age, it also shows when Brazilians reach adult height. Median height for boys climbs steeply through the early teens: 151.0 cm at 12, 157.5 cm at 13 and 164.1 cm at 14. Growth then slows sharply, to 170.0 cm at 16 and 172.6 cm at 18, with almost no further gain by the early twenties (173.0 cm at 20–24). Girls finish earlier. Their median reaches 157.0 cm at 13 and 160.0 cm at 15, then adds only about a centimeter more, to 161.1 cm, by their early twenties. In other words, Brazilian girls are close to adult height by about 15 and boys by about 18. That is why NCD-RisC's choice of age 18 works well as a reference point for adult height.

The sample behind these figures is large. The 20–24 age group alone included 8,299 men and 7,938 women, about four-fifths of them in urban households. The same tables give typical weights, which rose with age much more than height fell: men aged 20–24 had a median weight of 69.4 kg, rising to 74.6 kg at ages 35–54, while women rose from 57.8 kg to between 63.8 kg and 65.1 kg over the same span.

North, South and the rural–urban gap

Brazil is a vast country, and the POF shows clear regional differences among young adults.

Young men in the South are about 5 cm taller than young men in the North, and the gap for women is almost as large. The Northeast sits in between. There is also an urban–rural divide. Nationally, men aged 20–24 had a median of 173.5 cm in cities and 170.9 cm in rural areas, and women 161.6 cm and 158.9 cm. The South is the exception. Young rural men there had a median of 175.4 cm, the highest of any group in the regional tables and slightly above their urban counterparts.

Ancestry and living conditions

Brazil's population has European, African and Native American roots, and researchers have asked how much ancestry contributes to height differences. The PLOS Genetics study, which recruited its Brazilian volunteers mainly in Porto Alegre, found that higher European or African ancestry was associated with greater height and higher Native American ancestry with lower height. That was after accounting for age, sex, country, education and wealth. The authors caution, however, that the ancestry effect could partly reflect environmental factors linked to ancestry that their socioeconomic measures did not capture. They also found that education, wealth and year of birth had strong effects of their own.

Child growth: the foundation of adult height

Brazil's fall in child stunting is one of the clearest public health trends in Latin America. WHO and UNICEF survey estimates compiled by Our World in Data show the share of children under five who are stunted falling from 19.8% in 1989 to 13% in 1996, 7% in 2007 and 8% in 2019.

The POF 2008–2009 found low rates as well, but its report adds an interesting methodological note. Using a reference built from Brazilian children in households with income above one minimum wage per person, IBGE estimated stunting at 6.0% among children under five. Using the WHO standard directly would have given 11.9%, which IBGE considered inconsistent with the decline in stunting seen since the mid-1970s. The highest stunting rate by region was in the North (8.5%) and the lowest in the South (3.9%), the same order as adult height.

Our World in Data, reviewing the research, notes that adult height and the Human Development Index have been found to be largely interchangeable as indicators of well-being across countries. Brazil's adult height and child growth both improved steadily, and both still vary by region in ways that track development.

Brazil compared with its neighbors

Brazil is among the tallest countries in South America. Argentine men are 1 cm taller, but Brazilian women are 1.7 cm taller than Argentine women. Only Uruguayan women are taller in this group. To the west, the Andean countries are much shorter. Peruvian men are 8.4 cm shorter than Brazilian men. NCD-RisC found that a century ago Central and Andean Latin America had some of the world's shortest populations.

Famous Brazilians and everyday heights

Football star Neymar is listed on this site at 175 cm (5′9″). That is almost exactly the average for Brazilian men of his generation, a reminder that elite footballers are not selected for height the way basketball players are.

For Brazilians, the most useful benchmark is the POF median for their own age group. A 22-year-old man of 173 cm is exactly average, while a 70-year-old man of the same height would be well above the median for his age. The height percentile calculator compares any height with reference data. The average height by country hub shows where Brazil sits against all 200 countries in the NCD-RisC data.