Average Height in Nepal (Men & Women)

How tall are Nepalis?

Nepali men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 162.3 cm (5′4″), and Nepali women 150.9 cm (4′11″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). These are the canonical values for Nepal on this site, used in the height comparison tool and in our average height by country table.

Nepal is among the shortest countries in the world. Among 200 countries and territories, Nepali men rank 195th and Nepali women 197th. In their 2016 study, the NCD-RisC researchers singled out Nepal, along with the Philippines and Bangladesh, as the places where women born in 1996 were shorter than 151 cm, with only Guatemala lower. The gap between Nepali men and women, 11.4 cm, is close to the global average.

Yet Nepal is also home to one of the most striking public health turnarounds in the data. The share of young children who are stunted has fallen by more than half since the late 1990s, which sets up the next generation to be noticeably taller than today's adults.

What a birth-cohort average measures

NCD-RisC estimates height by year of birth. The 1996 figure is the expected height at age 18 of people born that year. It's not the same as the average height of all adults living in Nepal today, which includes older generations who grew up in harder conditions.

The 2016 study pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured height on more than 18.6 million people, for 200 countries and birth years 1896 to 1996. It used only measured height, not self-reports. A statistical model then estimated trends for each country, giving more weight to national surveys than to local studies. Our World in Data publishes the same series as an interactive chart.

A century of slow growth

Nepalis born at the end of the 19th century were very short. Women averaged just 144.1 cm, ranking 187th of 200, and men 157.6 cm. Over the following sixty years, women gained 7.0 cm and men 3.8 cm. After the 1956 cohort, the curve became almost flat: men added 1.1 cm by 1976 and then lost 0.2 cm, and women added 0.2 cm and then lost 0.4 cm.

Over the full century, Nepali men gained only 4.7 cm, a small gain by global standards, which echoes one of the main findings of the NCD-RisC paper: there was little change in adult height over the century in South Asia, in sharp contrast with East Asia. The authors noted that the rise in height seemed to have plateaued in South Asian countries like Bangladesh and India at levels 5 to 10 cm below Japan and South Korea.

Nepali women gained more than men, 6.8 cm, which narrowed the gap between the sexes from 13.5 cm in the 1896 cohort to 11.4 cm in 1996. NCD-RisC found that a century ago, the male–female gap tended to be slightly larger in poorly nourished countries, suggesting boys had a relative advantage over girls where food was scarce. By the 1996 cohort that difference had largely disappeared worldwide, and Nepal's numbers follow the same path.

What Nepal's national surveys show

Nepal has run national Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) since at least 1996, led by the Ministry of Health and Population with the international DHS program. The surveys measure the height of women, and they track how many are shorter than 145 cm, a threshold used to identify women at higher risk of obstructed labor.

Fewer very short women

In 1996, about one woman in seven was under 145 cm. By 2022, the share among women aged 20 to 49 had fallen to about one in ten. That's progress, but it is still a high rate: by comparison, the share in Ghana's 2022 survey was 0.4 percent, and in Côte d'Ivoire's 2021 survey about 1 percent. When men were measured in 2016, only 0.4 percent were under 145 cm.

The 2022 report also found that 27 percent of adolescent girls aged 15 to 19 were of short stature for their age, showing that many girls are still falling well behind international growth standards.

Differences across provinces and zones

The 2022 survey shows large differences within the country:

The two columns don't always move together. Madhesh has the highest share of short adult women, while Karnali has the highest provincial rate of child stunting but a lower share of short women. Sudurpashchim has the lowest share of short women but more than a quarter of its children are stunted. Adult height reflects conditions twenty to forty years ago, while child stunting reflects the present, and the provinces' circumstances have changed in different ways.

The clearest pattern is wealth. Women in the poorest fifth of households were nearly three times as likely to be under 145 cm as women in the richest fifth, and their children almost three times as likely to be stunted.

Child stunting: a remarkable decline

Stunting, being too short for one's age compared with WHO growth standards, is the best early indicator of adult height. Nepal's progress here has been rapid:

In 2001, more than half of all young Nepali children were stunted. By 2022, the rate was under a quarter. The decline came during and after the Nepalese Civil War, a conflict between the monarchy and Maoist insurgents that lasted from 1996 until a peace accord in November 2006.

The NCD-RisC cohort series ends with people born in 1996, who were young children when stunting was at its peak. The children who benefited from the decline are only now reaching adulthood, which means the gains should start to show up in adult height data in the coming years.

An older measured survey

Nepal also took part in the WHO STEPS programme of surveys on noncommunicable disease risk factors. As tabulated on Wikipedia's country height list, the 2012–2013 survey measured 1,326 men and 2,798 women aged 15 to 69, finding average heights of about 161.7 cm for men and 150.4 cm for women. Those all-ages figures are very close to the NCD-RisC cohort values, as expected for a country where average height changed little between the 1956 and 1996 cohorts.

Young Nepalis today

NCD-RisC's 2020 Lancet analysis of school-age children and adolescents estimates that 19-year-olds in Nepal in 2019 averaged about 164.4 cm for young men and 152.4 cm for young women, compared with 161.8 cm and 150.4 cm in 1985. That's a gain of 2.6 cm for young men and 2.0 cm for young women over 34 years.

The 2020 analysis used newer data and a different model, so it can't be joined to the 2016 cohort series. On that measure, young Nepalis still rank near the bottom, 194th for men and 198th for women, but the direction is upward.

Height and the Gurkhas

Nepal's best-known connection to height may be the Gurkhas, the Nepali soldiers recruited into the British Army. According to a 2015 Forces News report on the selection process, recruits must be at least 158 cm tall and weigh at least 50 kg. The same report noted that more than 7,800 people had applied for 230 places in the previous year's intake.

A 158 cm minimum is about 4 cm below the average for Nepali men born in 1996, so most young Nepali men meet it, though a meaningful minority don't. It's a practical reminder that population averages shape real-world rules such as recruitment standards.

Why height is a useful measure for Nepal

The NCD-RisC researchers argue that average height is a meaningful public health indicator, not a curiosity. Taller adults tend to live longer and have lower risks of cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and taller women and their babies face fewer complications around birth, although taller height is also linked to a higher risk of some cancers. Because height differences between countries are thought to arise mainly from the environment, above all a mother's own nutrition in pregnancy and a child's nutrition and exposure to infection through childhood and adolescence, a country's height curve works as a record of how well its children have been fed and kept healthy.

For Nepal, that framing makes the survey data especially telling. The national average for adults barely moved for four decades of birth cohorts, while the share of stunted young children was halved in a little over twenty years. Those two facts aren't in conflict: the adult data describe children of the past, and the stunting data describe the children of today. If the long-established link between childhood growth and adult height holds, the Nepali cohorts born since the mid-2000s should be measurably taller than their parents, and the share of women under 145 cm should keep falling.

Nepal compared with its neighbors

Nepal is the shortest country in South Asia for men and level with Bangladesh for women. Nepali men are 2.6 cm shorter than Indian men and 3.0 cm shorter than men in Bhutan. The contrast with China is much larger: 9.5 cm for men and 8.8 cm for women.

What the averages mean

At 150.9 cm, the average Nepali woman born in 1996 is just under 4′11″. A woman of 160 cm would be tall in Nepal but below average in much of Europe. To see where any height falls, use the height percentile calculator, or convert 163 cm to feet and inches.

National averages describe populations, not individuals, and they say nothing about a single person's health. If you're concerned about a child's growth, a health worker or pediatrician can assess it on standard growth charts.