Average Height in Latvia (Men & Women)

Latvia: home of the world's tallest women

Latvia holds a distinction that surprises many people. In the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates used on this site, Latvian women born in 1996 average 169.8 cm (5′7″), the highest of 200 countries. Latvian men average 181.4 cm (5′11″) and rank 5th.

The NCD-RisC paper in eLife (2016) lists the tallest women of the 1996 cohort in this order: Latvia, the Netherlands, Estonia and the Czech Republic, all above 168 cm. Latvia also appears on the paper's short list of countries where men born in 1996 averaged more than 181 cm, alongside the Netherlands, Belgium, Estonia and Denmark.

These figures describe a birth cohort, everyone born in one year and measured as an adult. NCD-RisC pooled 1,472 population-based studies covering more than 18.6 million people, using only heights measured by trained staff rather than self-reported. To see how your height compares with Latvian averages, use the height percentile calculator.

A century of growth

Latvia's century of change is one of the strongest in Europe, particularly for women.

Latvian women gained 14.3 cm across the century and men 12.0 cm. Women started 13.9 cm shorter than men and finished only 11.6 cm shorter, one of the narrowest gaps of any tall country in the site's data.

Two features stand out. First, the biggest leap came between the 1926 and 1956 cohorts, when men added 5.1 cm and women 4.8 cm. Second, Latvia was still gaining at the end of the series. Between 1976 and 1996, men grew another 1.3 cm and women 1.7 cm. Among the 19 countries whose men born in 1996 average at least 179 cm, no other country gained as much over those two decades, for either sex.

How Latvian women reached the top

Latvian women were not always the tallest. The ranking changed only in the most recent cohort of the NCD-RisC data:

In the 1956 cohort, Latvian women were 1.8 cm behind the leaders. By 1976 they had moved to second place, 0.9 cm behind Dutch women, and by 1996 they were 1.1 cm ahead, because Latvian women kept gaining while Dutch women's height slipped slightly. Latvia's lead is therefore new and narrow, and it rests on the difference between a country still growing and one that had leveled off.

Over the full century, the 14.3 cm gain of Latvian women ranks among the largest in the world. In the site's data only South Korea, Japan, Czechia, Serbia, Croatia and Greenland gained more, with Greece tied. Within Europe, Latvia's gain is matched by Greece and exceeded only by Czechia, Serbia and Croatia.

Still gaining when others had stopped

The contrast with northwestern Europe is sharp. Between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts, height was flat in the Netherlands, slightly lower for women in Denmark and Sweden, and lower for both sexes in Iceland. The NCD-RisC paper describes this pattern: gains plateaued first in Northern Europe and English-speaking countries, with Eastern Europe following later.

NCD-RisC's second major study, published in The Lancet in 2020, adds a revealing detail. It tracked children and adolescents in 200 countries from 1985 to 2019, comparing each country's growth curve with a common reference. Latvia was one of four countries, with the Czech Republic, Morocco and Iran, where children progressively improved relative to other countries as they approached age 19. In other words, Latvian children were not unusually tall at school age, but they pulled ahead during adolescence.

What Latvian growth studies show

Latvian anthropologists have been measuring children for most of a century, and a 2024 paper in the journal Children by Silvija Umbraško and colleagues at Riga Stradiņš University pulls much of that history together.

A 17-year longitudinal study

The core of the paper is the first study in Latvia to follow the same children from birth to age 17, measuring them each year in the week of their birthday. Emigration and withdrawals shrank the group, and the analysis covered 35 boys and 35 girls who had reached 17. At that age the boys averaged 180.8 cm (range 168.7 to 192.4 cm) and the girls 170.1 cm (range 156.7 to 175.0 cm). Both sexes had essentially stopped growing by 17. It is a small sample, so the averages are best read as an illustration rather than a national figure.

Measured from birth, the girls in the study grew a total of 119.6 cm by age 17 and the boys 129.7 cm. Because the same children were measured year after year in the anthropology laboratory at Riga Stradiņš University, the study shows individual growth curves rather than the snapshot averages of a cross-sectional survey.

An earlier Latvian study cited in the paper also looked at posture at the end of growth. In that sample, 17-year-old boys averaged 180.4 cm and girls 167.6 cm, and about a third of the boys and two-fifths of the girls had postural problems such as scoliosis or daily back pain.

The authors note that the study ran through a severe economic downturn from 2008 to 2010, the COVID-19 pandemic and a large wave of emigration, all of which affected Latvian society during the children's growing years.

Ninety years of Latvian teenagers

The same paper compares its results with earlier Latvian studies of 17-year-olds:

The authors calculate an increase of 10.8 cm for 17-year-old boys over about 90 years. For girls, the paper's text describes a smaller gain of 6.0 cm to 166.3 cm, which does not match the 170.1 cm reported in its own results section, so the girls' trend should be read with caution. The paper also reports that the pubertal growth spurt now begins about a year earlier than in the 20th century.

Earlier cross-sectional work cited in the paper identified the peak of the growth spurt at 11–12 years in girls, with gains of about 7.8 cm a year in a 1996–1997 survey of 1,350 Riga schoolgirls, and at 13–14 years in boys, with gains of about 8.5 cm a year in a 2005–2007 survey of 1,359 schoolboys.

Measured adults: a lower figure for women

Not every source agrees with the NCD-RisC estimate for Latvian women. In their 2022 paper in the journal Biology, Pavel Grasgruber and colleagues listed a measured Latvian sample from 2014 of adults aged 20 to 29:

• Men: 180.2 cm (342 men)
• Women: 167.3 cm (636 women)

The men's figure is 1.2 cm below NCD-RisC's 1996 cohort estimate, and the women's figure is 2.5 cm below it. That is a meaningful gap. Possible reasons include the age range (20 to 29 covers several birth years), sampling differences, and the way NCD-RisC's model blends information from neighboring countries. On these measured data alone, Latvian women would rank level with Lithuanian and Danish women rather than above the Dutch. Either way, they are among the tallest women in the world.

Diet and the Baltic states

The 2025 review in Annals of Medicine by Grasgruber's group argues that the quality of dietary protein is one of the strongest predictors of height across countries. In their reading of FAO food supply data, protein quality in the Baltic states has improved so much that they have "taken over the baton" of the best-fed nations of the contemporary world from the Netherlands. This is the authors' interpretation of national food statistics rather than a measured link in individuals, but it is consistent with Latvia's late height gains.

Our World in Data makes the broader point that nutrition is one of the strongest determinants of height, and that the differences between generations largely reflect childhood nutrition and health rather than genetics.

Height and health are not the same thing

Height gains do not always move in step with other health measures. A 2023 Estonian study in Frontiers in Public Health notes that the gap in life expectancy between men and women in Estonia has been among the largest in Europe since at least 1980, along with Latvia and Lithuania. Latvian adults grew taller across the late 20th century even as adult male mortality remained a serious problem, a reminder that height mostly records childhood conditions.

Latvia and its neighbors

Latvia and Estonia are almost twins in the NCD-RisC data, and both are clearly taller than their other neighbors.

Estonian men are 0.2 cm taller than Latvian men, while Latvian women are 1.1 cm taller than Estonian women. Lithuania, Latvia's southern neighbor, trails by 2.4 cm for men and 3.2 cm for women. Read more on the Estonia, Lithuania and Russia pages.

What Latvian height means day to day

An average Latvian woman at 169.8 cm is just under 5′7″. That is taller than the average man born in 1996 in 88 of the 200 countries in the NCD-RisC dataset, from Timor-Leste and Yemen to Guatemala and Nepal. An average Latvian man at 181.4 cm is just under 5′11½″. A woman of 170 cm is simply average in Latvia; see the 170 cm page for how that height compares around the world.

The takeaway

Latvia shows how much can change in a century and how recently some of that change happened. Its women went from 155.5 cm to 169.8 cm, its men from 169.4 cm to 181.4 cm, and both were still gaining in the most recent birth cohorts. Whether Latvian women are first in the world or merely among the top few depends on the source, but either way the country belongs in the same conversation as the Netherlands.

Compare Latvia with any other country in the average height hub.