Average Height in Denmark (Men & Women)

Denmark's average height today

Denmark sits in the small group of countries that define the top of the world height tables. In the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates used on this site, Danish men born in 1996 average 181.4 cm (5′11″) and Danish women 167.2 cm (5′6″). Men rank 4th of 200 countries and women rank 7th.

The NCD-RisC paper in eLife (2016) names Denmark specifically: men born in 1996 average more than 181 cm in only five countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, Estonia, Latvia and Denmark. The difference between them is small enough that the order could shift with a few more surveys, but the group itself is stable.

These numbers describe a birth cohort, the people born in a single year and measured once grown. NCD-RisC used only measured heights from population-based studies, 1,472 of them worldwide, covering more than 18.6 million people, and pooled them in a statistical model. Self-reported height was excluded because people tend to overstate it. You can check any height against the Danish averages with the height percentile calculator.

A century of Danish growth

Denmark was already among the taller countries of Europe in the 1890s, which makes its century of gains look modest next to late starters like South Korea. It still added more than 11 cm for men.

Men gained 11.4 cm and women 10.1 cm over the century. The pace slowed sharply after the 1956 cohort: men added only 0.6 cm between 1976 and 1996, and women's average fell by 0.6 cm. Women's peak in the series is the 1976 cohort at 167.8 cm.

The sex gap grew slightly over time, from 12.9 cm in the 1896 cohort to 14.2 cm in 1996. In the site's data, a gap of 12 to 15 cm is typical of rich European countries.

The draft board record

Denmark has an unusually good source of height data: its draft boards. A 2021 study in PLOS ONE by Emilie R. Hegelund and colleagues explains how it works. All Danish men must appear before a draft board around age 18 to have their fitness for military service assessed. At the board, the men have a medical examination, during which height is measured, and they take an intelligence test that has been used since 1957.

The study covered every man born from 1940 to 2000 who appeared before a draft board before 2020, a total of 1,556,770 men. It reported that mean height rose from 175 cm for men born in 1940 to 180 cm for men born in 1980. The authors used height as a proxy for nutrition, and found that changes in height, family size and education together explained most of the rise in intelligence test scores across those cohorts.

One limitation is worth knowing. About half of the men declared ineligible never appear before the board, because they send documented health problems in advance. That means the measured group is not quite the entire male population, though it comes close.

A more recent snapshot comes from Pavel Grasgruber and colleagues, whose 2022 paper in Biology lists a sample of 31,056 Danish conscripts aged roughly 18 to 26 measured in 2015, with an average of 180.7 cm (5′11″). The same table gives 168.1 cm for a sample of 315 Danish women aged 18 to 24 measured in 2007–2008.

Has Danish height stopped rising?

The short answer is yes, at least for now.

In 2006, A. Larnkaer and colleagues looked at national conscript data across Europe after 1990 and found that height in Scandinavia and the Netherlands had reached a plateau at 179–181 cm. Only in Belgium, Portugal and Spain was it still rising. The NCD-RisC paper describes the same thing at a wider scale, with northern European countries leveling off for two to three decades.

The 2025 review in Annals of Medicine by Grasgruber and colleagues goes further. Citing Ministry of Defence data, it describes a slight but long-term decline in the height of Danish conscripts from the 1990s to 2011. The authors link this to changes in the Danish diet: in their reading of FAO statistics, cereal protein consumption rose by about 49% between 1973 and 2010 while pork protein consumption fell by about 60% in the late 1990s. This is the authors' hypothesis, based on national food supply data, and other explanations are possible. They also note that the decline was small.

What growth charts show

Children's growth tells a slightly different story. When Denmark built new national growth references in 2014, J. Tinggaard and colleagues combined three population-based studies with 12,671 height measurements. Compared with the 1982 references, final heights were 1.4 cm higher for boys and 2.9 cm higher for girls. Danish children were also taller and heavier than the multiethnic World Health Organization standards for children under 5.

So the picture is of a population that is close to its ceiling, with small movements up or down depending on the cohort and the source.

Height, schooling and test scores

The draft board data have made Denmark a natural laboratory for questions that go beyond height. Hegelund's team found that the estimated mean intelligence test score of conscripts rose from 100 for men born in 1940 to 108.9 for men born in 1980, and has declined since. Over the same 1940–1980 cohorts, average height rose by about 5 cm, years of schooling rose from a median of 9 to 11, and family size fell as the national fertility rate dropped from 3.0 children per woman in 1946 to 1.5 in 1980.

The researchers treated height as a marker of nutrition, a common practice in this field because it reflects the cumulative intake of good-quality food during childhood. At the level of birth cohorts, changes in height, family size and education explained a large share of the rise in test scores. The spread of scores also narrowed: the standard deviation fell from 15.0 for men born in 1940 to 10.0 for men born in 2000.

None of this means taller individuals are smarter in any meaningful personal sense. It means that the same improvements in living conditions that made Danish men taller seem to have lifted their test performance too, at least until the 1980 birth cohort.

Danish teenagers in the global ranking

NCD-RisC's 2020 study in The Lancet tracked children and teenagers in 200 countries from 1985 to 2019. Danish girls stood out: at age 19 they were the third tallest in the world in 2019, behind the Netherlands and Montenegro and ahead of Iceland.

The study also singled out Danish boys, along with boys in Portugal, Poland and Montenegro, for one of the healthiest changes in body size since 1985. They gained a moderate-to-large amount of height while their body-mass index barely rose. Denmark was also among the countries where late-adolescent BMI changed by less than 0.5 kg/m² over those 34 years.

Another finding applies to Denmark and the other countries at the top of the table. Their children were already tall at age 5 and kept or widened that lead through adolescence, which suggests that both early childhood and the teenage growth spurt matter.

How the data sources compare

Different sources give slightly different "average Danish heights," and each answers a different question.

The NCD-RisC figure is slightly higher than the conscript figures. The sources differ in method: NCD-RisC models one birth year from many pooled studies, while the conscript samples mix several ages, and the 2025 review notes that 18-year-olds make up only about 60% of Danish conscripts measured. The differences are within a centimeter or so, which is small next to the variation between countries.

Genes and height in Scandinavia

Danes have also contributed to the genetics of height. A 2008 study in Nature Genetics by D. F. Gudbjartsson and colleagues scanned the genomes of more than 25,000 Icelanders along with Dutch and American samples, and then tested selected variants in 5,517 Danes. It found 27 genome regions linked to height. Each variant shifted height by only 0.3–0.6 cm, and together they explained about 3.7% of the variation in height.

That result fits a broader point made by Our World in Data. Within a well-nourished country like Denmark, most of the differences between individuals come from genes, but each gene has a tiny effect. Differences between generations and between countries are a different matter, and they track childhood nutrition and health.

Denmark and its neighbors

Denmark is taller than the rest of Scandinavia in the NCD-RisC estimates, which surprises people who think of Sweden or Norway as the tallest Nordic countries.

A century ago, Swedish and Norwegian men were taller than Danish men. Sweden's women, at 160.3 cm, were the tallest in the world in 1896, according to the NCD-RisC paper. By the 1996 cohort, Denmark had moved ahead of both countries by almost 2 cm for men and about 1.5 cm for women. Compare the full profiles on the Sweden, Norway and Netherlands pages.

The gap to Germany is 1.5 cm for men and 1.3 cm for women. Only the Netherlands is clearly taller than Denmark in the region.

What Danish height means in practice

An average Danish man at 181.4 cm is close to 5′11.5″, and an average Danish woman at 167.2 cm is just under 5′6″. A man who is 6′0″ (about 183 cm) is only slightly above average in Denmark, while a woman of 170 cm is somewhat tall but far from rare. See the 180 cm page for how a height close to the Danish male average compares across countries.

Denmark's record also shows how valuable systematic measurement can be. Because nearly every young man has stood on a draft board stadiometer for decades, researchers can follow height cohort by cohort and link it to education, intelligence scores and diet. Few countries have anything comparable.

For side-by-side comparisons with any other country, use the average height hub.