Average Height in Laos (Men & Women)

Average height in Laos today

Lao men born in 1996 average 160.5 cm (5′3″) and Lao women 151.3 cm (5′0″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). These are the figures used on this site. They place Laos near the bottom of the world table: Lao men rank 198th of 200 countries and territories, and Lao women 194th. Within Asia, Laos ranks 47th of 49 for men and 45th for women.

An average Lao man is very close to 160 cm, about 5′3″, and an average Lao woman is just over 151 cm, a little under 5′0″. The NCD-RisC eLife paper singles Laos out: it lists Timor-Leste, Yemen and Laos as the countries with the shortest men in the 1996 cohort, all at roughly 160 cm.

What these numbers measure

NCD-RisC's 2016 study pooled 1,472 population-based data sources covering more than 18.6 million people born from 1896 to 1996. A Bayesian model estimated mean height at age 18 for each country and each birth cohort. The cohort framing is important for Laos. As Our World in Data explains, adult height is mainly a record of nutrition and disease during childhood. The figure for the 1996 cohort describes young adults who were small children in the late 1990s, a time when, as shown below, about half of Lao children under five were stunted.

The credible intervals are moderately wide, 158.4 to 162.6 cm for men and 149.9 to 152.7 cm for women, so the true averages could differ from the central estimates by a centimeter or two.

A century of slow growth and a recent stall

Laos has grown taller over the century, but by much less than most countries:

The men's gain of 7.6 cm ranks 127th of 200 countries, and the women's gain of 6.6 cm ranks 131st. Almost all of the growth happened in cohorts born before the mid-1960s. After that the curves flatten completely for men and turn slightly downward for women. Lao women reach their highest estimated average with the cohort born in 1963, at 151.9 cm, and women born in 1996 are 0.6 cm shorter.

Short then and short now

Laos was already among the shortest populations at the start of the series. The eLife paper notes that Lao men born in 1896 averaged just 152.9 cm, with a credible interval of 147.9 to 157.9 cm, and that men born the same year in Sweden, Norway and the United States were about 18 to 19 cm taller. A century later the gap with those countries is still roughly the same size, because heights in Northern Europe and North America also rose. Laos did not catch up; it moved up roughly in step with the slowest group of countries.

Children's growth: the key to the adult numbers

Because adult height is set in childhood, the trend in child stunting (low height for age) is the best guide to what future Lao adults will look like.

National trend

The World Bank's World Development Indicators record these stunting rates for Lao children under five:

For roughly fifteen years, from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, close to half of young children in Laos were stunted. Those children are the cohorts born in the late 1980s to early 2000s, which is exactly where the NCD-RisC adult estimates stop rising. The fall to about a third of children since 2015 is real progress, but it is still a high level. A 2024 study in BMC Health Services Research by Viphonephom, Kounnavong and Reinharz notes that the WHO classifies stunting above 30% as critical, and it puts the 2022 national rate at 31.5%.

Urban, rural and regional gaps

The same study, drawing on the Lao Social Indicator Surveys of 2011–2012 and 2017, shows how unevenly stunting is spread:

• Urban areas: about 24% of children stunted.
• Rural areas: about 39%.
• Vientiane Capital: 14%.
• Phongsaly province in the far north: 54%.

Some provinces improved quickly. In Luangnamtha, stunting fell from 53% to 34% between 2012 and 2017, and in Saravan from 54% to 43%. The study also notes that the country has 49 officially recognized minority ethnic groups, making up nearly half the population, and that rural and minority children face a greater risk of stunting.

Government response

Laos adopted a National Nutrition Policy in 2008, followed by a National Nutrition Strategy to 2025 with a plan of action for 2016–2020 and a National Plan of Action on Nutrition for 2021–2025, according to the 2024 study. The paper describes the policy framework but does not report outcome statistics for these programs.

The capital versus the country

The difference between Vientiane and the provinces shows up in adult height too. Wikipedia's table of national height surveys lists a 2008 WHO STEPS survey of non-communicable disease risk factors in Vientiane Capital, which measured 1,635 men and 2,430 women aged 25 to 64. Because the heights were measured rather than self-reported, and the sample was large, it is one of the more useful adult datasets for the country, though it covers only the capital. It reported average heights of:

The capital's adults, who include many people born well before 1996, were measured about 2 cm taller than the national estimate for young adults. Given the much lower child stunting rates reported for Vientiane, this is what you would expect. It also means national averages can understate the height of people raised in the capital and overstate the height of people raised in the poorest rural provinces.

Ethnic diversity and geography

The population of Laos is commonly described in three broad groups linked to the elevation where people traditionally live, as summarized in Wikipedia's article on Laos:

• Lao Loum (lowland Lao): ethnic Lao, who make up more than half of the population, plus other lowland groups.
• Lao Theung (mid-slope Lao): mainly Mon-Khmer-speaking groups in the central and southern mountains, about 30% of the population.
• Lao Soung (highland Lao): including the Hmong and Yao (Mien), about 10% of the population.

We have not found published national height figures broken down by these groups, so this page does not estimate them. The stunting data, however, show that the highest rates are in rural and mountainous provinces where minority groups are concentrated, which is likely to affect adult height there too.

Laos compared with its neighbors

Using NCD-RisC data for the 1996 cohort:

Laos is the shortest of all its neighbors, for both men and women. The gap with Thailand is the most striking: Thai men are 8.7 cm taller and Thai women 6.6 cm taller. Thailand's height is still rising, according to the eLife study, while Laos's has stalled. The gaps with Vietnam (3.9 cm for men) and Cambodia (2.8 cm) are smaller but still sizable.

The pattern is consistent with the child data. The 2024 study compares 2022 stunting rates: about 20% in Vietnam, 22% in Cambodia, 27% in Myanmar and 31.5% in Laos.

Global context

The 2020 NCD-RisC study in The Lancet, which modelled the height of school-aged children and adolescents up to 2019, found that the shortest 19-year-old boys in the world were in Timor-Leste (160.1 cm), followed by Laos, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. The gap between the tallest and shortest countries was 20 cm or more, equivalent to about six years of growth for boys. Dutch men born in 1996 average 182.5 cm in NCD-RisC, 22 cm taller than Lao men.

For the full list of countries, see average height by country.

Lao averages next to familiar heights

Numbers like 160.5 cm are easier to picture next to people you know. The comedian Kevin Hart is listed on this site at 158 cm, so the average Lao man born in 1996 would stand about 2.5 cm taller than him. Several well-known musicians, including Nicki Minaj and Doja Cat, are listed at 160 cm, essentially the same as the Lao average for men. The average Lao woman, at 151.3 cm, would be about 7 cm shorter than Kevin Hart.

Seen from the other direction, the average Lao man is shorter than the average woman in 40 of the 41 European countries in the NCD-RisC data. Only women in North Macedonia (159.8 cm) are shorter, while Dutch women (168.7 cm) are about 8 cm taller than Lao men and Czech women (168.5 cm) almost as much. That comparison is less about Laos than about how wide the global range of human height has become: the same species, measured the same way, can differ by more than 20 cm on average depending on where and when people grow up.

What this means in practice

• Cohorts differ. Younger Lao children today are less likely to be stunted than those born in the 1990s, so future cohorts may grow taller if the decline continues.
• Place matters. Someone raised in Vientiane is likely to be taller than the national average suggests.
• Compare carefully. To see how a particular height ranks, use the height percentile calculator.
• Seek medical advice for children. If a child seems to be growing slowly, a doctor should assess growth with standard charts. National averages are not a diagnosis.

Key takeaways

• Lao men born in 1996 average 160.5 cm and women 151.3 cm (NCD-RisC), among the shortest in the world.
• Height rose by about 7 cm over the century but stalled for cohorts born after the 1960s, and women's height has slightly declined.
• Nearly half of Lao children under five were stunted from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s; the rate was about a third in 2023.
• Stunting is far higher in rural and northern provinces than in Vientiane Capital, whose adults are measurably taller.
• Laos is shorter than all its neighbors, with Thai men almost 9 cm taller.