Average Height in Mexico (Men & Women)

How tall Mexicans are on average

Mexican men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 169.0 cm (5′7″), and Mexican women 156.8 cm (5′2″). The estimates come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), whose 2016 analysis pooled 1,472 population-based studies, with measured heights for more than 18.6 million people, to estimate adult height by year of birth from 1896 to 1996 in 200 countries.

Mexican men rank 124th of 200 countries and Mexican women 145th, a little below the global middle. The world median for the 1996 cohort is about 171 cm for men and 159 cm for women, so Mexicans are roughly 2 cm shorter than that midpoint.

The site's 168 cm and 170 cm pages bracket the average Mexican man, and 157 cm is almost exactly the average Mexican woman.

Understanding a birth-cohort estimate

NCD-RisC reports the expected adult height, measured at age 18, of each birth cohort, the people born in a given year. The 1996 cohort is the most recent. The figure is not an average of all Mexican adults now. Mexicans born in the 1950s are, on average, several centimeters shorter than those born in the 1990s, mostly because of the conditions they grew up in rather than age.

NCD-RisC used only representative surveys in which height was measured. Studies of special groups, such as particular ethnic communities or patients, were excluded. A Bayesian model then combined the surveys and borrowed information from similar countries where Mexican data was thin.

A century of strong gains

Mexican men gained 12.3 cm and women 13.3 cm over the century. Those gains are double what Americans managed (6.0 cm and 5.0 cm) and larger than Brazil's (about 10.5 cm). They are among the strongest in the Americas.

The timing shows growth front-loaded early in the century:

• 1896 to 1926: the fastest period, with men up 5.7 cm and women up 6.1 cm in 30 years.
• 1926 to 1956: continued strong gains, +3.6 cm for men and +4.1 cm for women.
• 1956 to 1976: a slowdown, +1.6 cm for men and +1.1 cm for women.
• 1976 to 1996: modest gains again, +1.4 cm for men and +2.0 cm for women.

Mexico started from a low base. NCD-RisC found that people born in 1896 were shortest in Asia and in Central and Andean Latin America. Mexican women of that cohort, at 143.5 cm, were among the shortest women in the world, although still taller than women in neighboring Guatemala, who were the shortest of all at about 140 cm.

To put the 1896 figures in perspective, NCD-RisC compared the shortest populations of that era with modern growth standards. Women born in Guatemala in 1896 averaged about the height of a well-nourished 10-year-old girl today, and men born in Laos the height of a well-nourished boy of 12 and a half. Mexican men of 1896, at 156.7 cm, were taller than that, but still about 20 cm shorter than a typical young American man today. A rise of more than 12 cm in four generations is a large change for any population, and it happened without any meaningful change in the population's genes.

A regional rate of change

Independent evidence matches the NCD-RisC picture. A 2014 study in PLOS Genetics, part of the CANDELA project, measured 7,342 volunteers in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Peru. It found height increasing by about 0.1 cm per year of birth, roughly 1 cm per decade, after accounting for education and wealth. The authors note that this rate is similar to what extensive longitudinal surveys across Latin America have found over the last century, a trend generally attributed to improving living standards. NCD-RisC's estimates for Mexico since the 1950s cohorts, about 3 cm over 40 years for men, run at a similar pace.

Ancestry, geography and height inside Mexico

Mexico's population has Native American, European and African ancestry in varying proportions, and the CANDELA study mapped that variation. Recruiting mainly in Mexico City, it found Native American ancestry highest in the center and south of the country, European ancestry highest in the north, and African ancestry generally low except in a few coastal areas.

Across its five-country sample, the study found that higher European or African ancestry was associated with greater height, and higher Native American ancestry with lower height. That held after adjusting for sex, age, country, education and wealth. The authors were careful about what this means. They note that lower socioeconomic position was also linked to shorter height, and that the ancestry effect could partly reflect environmental factors tied to ancestry that their education and wealth measures did not capture.

There are limits to how far this generalizes. Most Mexican volunteers were students and staff of the participating universities, so the sample is not representative of all Mexicans. The paper is useful for understanding variation, but it does not provide a national average.

Mexican Americans: a natural comparison

Because millions of people of Mexican origin live in the United States, US health surveys offer a second, very well-measured view. CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey measures standing height with a stadiometer and publishes results for Mexican American adults.

Younger Mexican American men average 171.7 cm, about 2.7 cm more than NCD-RisC's 169.0 cm for men born in Mexico in 1996. Younger Mexican American women, at 157.5 cm, are only 0.7 cm taller than the Mexican estimate. The CDC category includes both US-born and immigrant adults, so it cannot isolate the effect of growing up in the United States. Still, the direction is consistent with what Our World in Data describes in the research literature: when childhood conditions improve, average height rises, while the genetic make-up of a population changes only slowly.

The age split within the Mexican American group tells the same story on a smaller scale. Men aged 20–39 are 4.3 cm taller than men aged 60 and over, and women 2.8 cm taller. Some of that is shrinking with age, but much of it is the same generational rise seen in Mexico itself.

The table also shows that Mexican American adults remain about 5 cm shorter than the US average for both sexes. More on American heights is on the United States page.

Child growth and stunting

Childhood growth sets adult height, and Our World in Data's review of the evidence points to nutrition and childhood illness as the main drivers, with most stunting happening in the first two years of life. Mexico's child stunting rate has fallen substantially, according to WHO and UNICEF survey estimates compiled by Our World in Data:

The overall decline from about 27% to about 12–13% means that today's Mexican children are far less likely to be short for their age than the children of the late 1980s, who were born about a decade before the 1996 cohort. Recent estimates have fluctuated in the 10–14% range rather than continuing to fall, so further gains in adult height may come more slowly.

Height, diet and well-being

Our World in Data notes that height is used by economic historians as a measure of "biological standards of living," and that across 105 countries, height and the Human Development Index were found to be largely interchangeable as indicators of well-being. It also highlights the role of high-quality protein. Animal-source foods such as milk and eggs score far higher on protein quality than cereals, and research cited there links higher animal protein intake with taller populations in lower-income countries.

Mexico's gains fit this broader picture: substantial increases in height across the 20th century, with child stunting halving since the late 1980s. They also show how much room there is to grow. Mexican men born in 1996 are still 8 cm shorter than American men of the same cohort.

Mexico compared with its neighbors

Mexico sits in the middle of Latin America, almost tied with Colombia, Costa Rica and Belize. The two land borders show the extremes. To the north, American men are 8.1 cm taller. To the south, Guatemalan men are 5.6 cm shorter, and Guatemalan women, at 149.4 cm, are the shortest women of any country in the NCD-RisC study. The average height by country hub compares all 200 countries.

What these averages mean in everyday life

For Mexicans, the useful benchmarks are about 169 cm (5′7″) for men and 157 cm (5′2″) for women born in the 1990s. A man of 175 cm (5′9″) is clearly tall at home, though average in the United States. A woman of 163 cm is above average in Mexico and exactly average among young American women. To compare a specific height with reference data, use the height percentile calculator.

The longer view is the encouraging part. A Mexican man born in 1996 is on average more than 12 cm taller than his great-grandfather's generation. The fall in childhood stunting since the 1980s should carry that rise into future cohorts, even if not at the pace of the early 20th century.