Average Height in Finland (Men & Women)

The average height in Finland

Finland ranks among the world's tall nations, essentially level with its Scandinavian neighbors. In the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates for the 1996 birth cohort, Finnish men average 179.6 cm (5′11″) and Finnish women 165.9 cm (5′5″). Men rank 16th of 200 countries and women 12th.

Finland is also something of a textbook case in international height research. When the NCD-RisC authors described how gains in height stalled in rich countries, they chose Finland as their example of a Northern European country where the increase reached a plateau for two to three decades.

Where these averages come from

NCD-RisC's 2016 study in eLife pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured heights for more than 18.6 million people. Self-reported heights were left out because they are systematically biased. A Bayesian model then estimated the mean height each birth cohort reached at age 18. So the Finnish figures above describe young adults born in 1996, who turned 18 around 2014. Older Finns are shorter on average because they grew up when Finland was poorer and because people lose some height with age.

A century of Finnish height

Finland's story differs from Sweden's and Norway's in where it started. Finnish men born in 1896 averaged 167.7 cm, about 3.5 cm shorter than Norwegian men and more than 4 cm shorter than Swedish men of the same cohort. Finnish women were 6.4 cm shorter than Swedish women, who NCD-RisC identifies as the tallest women in the world a century ago at 160.3 cm.

Over the next eighty years Finland caught up. Men gained 11.9 cm and women 12.0 cm across the century, compared with 7.8 cm and 5.4 cm in Sweden. Most of the catching up happened before the 1956 cohort: Finnish men added 9.9 cm between the 1896 and 1956 cohorts, including 5.5 cm in the thirty years from 1926, the generations that grew up through Finland's wars and the post-war rebuilding.

Then the curve flattens. Men gained 2.1 cm between the 1956 and 1976 cohorts, and nothing more by 1996, where the estimate is 0.1 cm lower. Women follow the same arc, peaking with the 1976 cohort at 166.2 cm and dipping 0.3 cm by 1996. These differences are within the margin of uncertainty, so the safest reading is a plateau rather than a decline.

The plateau debate: stopped, or still creeping up?

Not every study agrees that Nordic height has stopped rising. Two lines of evidence pull in slightly different directions.

Evidence for a halt

In a 2006 letter in Acta Paediatrica, Larnkjær and colleagues reviewed national conscript data after 1990 and concluded that height in Scandinavia and the Netherlands had levelled off at 179 to 181 cm. Only Belgium, Portugal and Spain still showed rising heights. NCD-RisC cited this work when it described the Finnish plateau, and its own cohort estimates for Finland are flat after 1976.

Evidence for slow, continuing growth

In 2019, Holmgren and colleagues from the University of Gothenburg compared the populations used for current and previous national height references in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. They found that adult height had kept increasing among people born from the 1950s to the 1990s. For Finland, the gain was about 7 mm per decade for both women and men. Their title made the point directly: Nordic populations "are still getting taller". The extra height came from more growth during childhood, even though puberty was arriving earlier.

Holmgren's comparison also shows how Finland's slow growth compares with its neighbors. The rates below are increases in adult height per decade of birth, from the 1950s to the 1990s cohorts, as reported in the paper:

Finland's rate is in the middle of the Nordic range, and unusual in being identical for men and women. Norwegian men stand out with a much faster rate, while Swedish men show the slowest. These differences of a few millimeters a decade are tiny compared with the centimeters per decade that Finland gained in the first half of the 20th century, but they add up: at 7 mm a decade, Finns born in the 1990s would be close to 3 cm taller than Finns born in the 1950s.

The two findings are less contradictory than they look. A gain of 7 mm per decade is small enough to be hard to separate from zero in a global model with wide uncertainty bands, and the studies use different samples. What both agree on is that the rapid gains of the early and mid-20th century, when Finnish height rose by several centimeters per generation, are over.

Finland's growth references

Finland periodically updates the charts used to monitor children's growth, and the most recent update offers one of the clearest measurements of Finnish height change. In 2011, Saari and colleagues at the University of Eastern Finland published new national growth references built from 73,659 healthy children and young people aged 0 to 20, born between 1983 and 2008, using records from primary health care providers.

Compared with the previous Finnish growth data, collected from 1959 to 1971, they found:

• Taller length or height for age in virtually every age group.
• An increase in adult height of 1.8 cm for boys and 1.9 cm for girls.
• Much larger differences around puberty: up to 2.8 cm in girls and 5.6 cm in boys, reflecting earlier maturation.
• No increase in median weight for height.

The adult gain of under 2 cm across roughly a generation fits well with both the plateau seen by NCD-RisC and the slow growth reported by Holmgren's team.

Height, genes and social position in Finland

Finnish researchers have done much of the world's work on how genes and environment combine to shape height, using the country's twin registers and population surveys.

A 2016 pooled analysis in eLife by Jelenkovic and colleagues, with co-authors including Silventoinen and Kaprio of the University of Helsinki, combined 40 twin cohorts covering 143,390 complete twin pairs born between 1886 and 1994. Genetic variance in height generally increased across birth cohorts. Contrary to what some had expected, the study found no evidence that heritability is lower where living standards are low, or that it rises as living standards improve.

A 2023 study led by Silventoinen in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health linked Finnish population health surveys from 1992 to 2011, with 29,996 participants aged 25 to 75, to national registers on social position and coronary heart disease. The team calculated a polygenic score for height from 33,938 genetic variants, and also the "residual" height left after accounting for that score. Both showed clear gradients with education, social class and income, but the residual part, which reflects environmental influences, showed the larger associations. In plain terms, even in modern Finland, differences in height between social groups are not purely genetic.

Self-reported versus measured height

The Finnish Twin Study also tested how accurately people report their own measurements. Tuomela and colleagues compared self-reported and measured values for 444 twins. Correlations were high, between 0.86 and 0.98, but people tended to overestimate their height, and the degree of overestimation was similar in men and women. That is one reason this site, like NCD-RisC, relies on measured data for country comparisons.

Finland and its neighbors

The Nordic three are practically identical today: Finnish men are 0.1 cm shorter than Swedish and Norwegian men, while Finnish women are 0.2 to 0.3 cm taller than their Swedish and Norwegian counterparts. Across the Gulf of Finland, Estonians are clearly taller, by 2 cm for men and almost 3 cm for women. Russian men are 3.1 cm shorter than Finnish men, though Russian women are within 0.6 cm of Finnish women.

The table hides how much the order has changed. A century ago, a Finnish man was the shortest of this group except for Russia; today he is effectively tied with the Swedes and Norwegians.

A smaller gap between Finnish men and women

The gap between Finnish men and women in the 1996 cohort is 13.7 cm, a little wider than the global gap of about 12 cm described by Our World in Data. It has changed surprisingly little over the century: 13.8 cm in the 1896 cohort, 12.7 cm in 1926, 13.2 cm in 1956, 13.5 cm in 1976 and 13.7 cm in 1996. Men and women in Finland gained almost exactly the same amount of height, 11.9 cm and 12.0 cm. That is not the case everywhere. In Sweden and Norway, where women were already very tall in the 1896 cohort, women gained much less than men over the same century. Finnish women began the century well behind Swedish women and caught up step by step, which is why their ranking (12th) is now slightly better than Finnish men's (16th).

What Finnish height means in practice

An average Finnish man, at 179.6 cm, is just under 5′11″, and an average Finnish woman, at 165.9 cm, is about 5′5″. Both sit slightly above the simple average of 41 European countries in the site data (178.4 cm and 165.1 cm). To see these heights at true scale next to each other, next to a celebrity, or next to your own height, try the height comparison tool. The height percentile calculator estimates where a given height falls within a population.

Summary

Finnish men average 179.6 cm and women 165.9 cm, ranking 16th and 12th in the world. Finland started the 20th century noticeably shorter than Sweden and Norway, closed the gap by the mid-century cohorts, and then levelled off, which is why NCD-RisC uses it as an example of a plateau. National growth references show a gain of under 2 cm in adult height over about a generation, and a Nordic comparison suggests a slow rise of about 7 mm per decade may continue. Finnish twin and survey research adds that height still tracks social position as well as genes. Compare Finland with every other country in the average height by country guide.