Average Height in Malaysia (Men & Women)

How tall are Malaysians on average?

Malaysian men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 167.9 cm (5′6″), and Malaysian women 156.3 cm (5′2″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). These are the reference values for Malaysia on this site, used in the height comparison tool and in our average height by country rankings.

Among 200 countries and territories, Malaysian men rank 137th and women 151st, which puts Malaysia in the lower half of the world table but well above several of its Southeast Asian neighbors. Men are 11.6 cm taller than women on average.

The last row is the important one. In many countries the NCD-RisC curve had flattened or even turned down by the 1996 cohort. Malaysia's was still rising, and Malaysia is also one of the few middle-income countries with a large national survey that breaks adult height down by ethnic group.

What the NCD-RisC numbers represent

The estimates follow birth cohorts. The 1996 figure is the expected height at age 18 of Malaysians born in 1996, not the average of all adults alive today. This distinction matters a great deal in a country where average height has risen steadily: an all-ages survey will always look shorter than the youngest cohort, because it includes older people who grew up in harder times.

NCD-RisC's 2016 study pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured height on more than 18.6 million people, for birth years from 1896 to 1996 in 200 countries. It accepted only physically measured height, and its model weighted national surveys more heavily than local studies. The same estimates are available as an interactive chart on Our World in Data.

A century of rising height

Malaysians born at the end of the 19th century were short by today's standards. Men averaged 157.6 cm and women 147.5 cm. Each 30-year step brought about 4 cm of growth for men up to the 1956 cohort, and women gained 4.4 cm between 1926 and 1956 alone.

Growth slowed after that, to 1.4 cm for men between 1956 and 1976 and 0.9 cm between 1976 and 1996, but it didn't stop. This places Malaysia alongside other East and Southeast Asian countries where NCD-RisC found the rise still continuing, such as China and Thailand, rather than with countries where height had plateaued.

Climbing the world table

Because Malaysia kept growing while many other countries slowed, its position in the world rankings improved markedly over the century. Ranked against the same 200 countries and territories in our dataset, Malaysian men born in 1896 placed 176th; by the 1996 cohort they were 137th. Malaysian women moved from 167th to 151st. Few countries outside East Asia and parts of Europe climbed as far.

The size of the gap between men and women barely changed along the way: 10.1 cm in the 1896 cohort and 11.6 cm in the 1996 cohort. NCD-RisC found that across the world, men's and women's height gains over the century were correlated, and by the 1996 cohort the gap was about 12 cm almost everywhere, so Malaysia is typical in that respect.

The 1996 national survey: height by age and ethnicity

Malaysia's most detailed source on adult height is the National Health and Morbidity Survey (NHMS) of 1996, analysed in a 2000 paper in the Medical Journal of Malaysia. The survey used a nationally representative sampling frame based on the Department of Statistics' Labour Force Survey, stratified by state and urban or rural residence. Of 31,594 eligible adults aged 20 and over, 28,737 (91 percent) were measured.

Measurement followed a standard protocol. Trained observers measured height without shoes, to the nearest tenth of a centimeter, using a tape fixed to a rigid wall. People who were bedridden, pregnant or had spinal deformities weren't measured.

Overall and ethnic averages

Adjusted for age, the survey found an average of 165.0 cm for men and 154.0 cm for women. Breaking it down by ethnic group:

Indian Malaysian men were the tallest men, while Chinese Malaysian women were the tallest women. The "other indigenous" category, which covers indigenous groups other than Malays, was the shortest for both sexes, about 3 cm below Malays.

Younger generations were already taller

The survey's most striking result was how much height varied by age. In every ethnic group and for both sexes, height fell steadily from the youngest to the oldest age bands:

Some of that difference is due to the height people lose as they age, but the authors argued that the pattern was better explained as a cohort effect: younger Malaysians had grown up with better nutrition and health care, the result of rapid socio-economic development over the previous four decades, and so had come closer to their growth potential. They compared it to the secular increase in height seen in Japan after rapid development. That's consistent with the NCD-RisC curve, which shows a 4 cm rise for men between the 1926 and 1956 cohorts.

The survey's youngest group, adults in their twenties in 1996, were born roughly between 1967 and 1976. Malay men in that group averaged 166.0 cm, just below the NCD-RisC estimate of 167.0 cm for the 1976 cohort.

The 2005 STEPS survey

Malaysia also took part in the World Health Organization's STEPS survey programme on noncommunicable disease risk factors. As tabulated on Wikipedia's country height list, the 2005 survey measured 1,044 men and 1,528 women aged 25 to 64 and found average heights of about 165.2 cm for men and 154.4 cm for women, very close to the 1996 national survey's age-adjusted figures for all adults. Because the sample included adults born from the early 1940s to around 1980, it sits below the NCD-RisC values for the youngest cohort, as expected.

Young Malaysians today

NCD-RisC published a separate analysis in The Lancet in 2020 that modelled the height of school-age children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019. Its country data estimate that 19-year-old Malaysians in 2019 averaged about 169.2 cm for young men and 157.1 cm for young women, compared with 165.9 cm and 154.9 cm in 1985.

That's a gain of 3.3 cm for young men and 2.2 cm for young women over 34 years, more evidence that the Malaysian rise hasn't finished. On that measure, young Malaysian men rank 152nd of 200 countries and young women 164th. The two NCD-RisC analyses use different data and models, so they shouldn't be combined into one trend line, but they point the same way.

Child stunting: a stubborn problem

Adult height depends heavily on growth in early childhood, which makes child stunting (being too short for one's age compared with WHO growth standards) a leading indicator.

The UNICEF, WHO and World Bank joint estimates for Malaysia, published by the World Bank, show surprisingly little progress:

About one child in five was stunted at both ends of that period. For a country whose adult height has been rising for a century, this is a notable caution: continued gains in adult height aren't guaranteed if childhood growth stops improving.

Why height is worth tracking

The NCD-RisC researchers argue that height is far more than a curiosity. Taller adult height is associated with longer life and with a lower risk of heart disease, stroke and respiratory disease, and taller mothers face fewer complications in pregnancy and childbirth. It is also associated with a higher risk of some cancers. Because the differences in average height between countries are thought to come mainly from the environment, especially nutrition and infections in childhood and the mother's own health in pregnancy, a country's height curve works as a long-running record of how well its children have been fed and protected from disease.

The authors of the 1996 Malaysian survey made the same point in their own words, noting that shorter people tend to have higher mortality not because height itself is harmful but because short stature reflects nutritional and health deficits earlier in life. Read that way, the steady rise in Malaysian height since the 1920s cohorts is a record of a century of improving living conditions, and the flat child-stunting figures are a reminder that the record is still being written.

Malaysia compared with its neighbors

Malaysia sits in the middle of maritime Southeast Asia. It is about 4 to 5 cm shorter than Singapore, 1.3 cm shorter than Thailand for men, and noticeably taller than Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines. Malaysian women are 6.7 cm taller than Filipino women, who are among the shortest in the world in the NCD-RisC data.

Given Malaysia's ethnic makeup, the comparison with China is also worth noting. Chinese Malaysian men in the 1996 survey averaged 166.9 cm (age-adjusted, all ages), and those in their twenties 168.6 cm, a few centimeters below the NCD-RisC value for men in China born in 1996 (171.8 cm), though the figures cover different cohorts and methods.

Using the averages sensibly

An average sits in the middle of a broad distribution. Many Malaysian men are taller than 175 cm, and many women are shorter than 150 cm. To see where a particular height falls, use the height percentile calculator, or convert 168 cm to feet and inches.

National averages don't tell you anything about an individual's health. If you're concerned about a child's growth, a pediatrician or clinic nurse can track it against standard growth charts.