Average Height in Pakistan (Men & Women)

Average height in Pakistan

Pakistani men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 166.9 cm (5′6″), and Pakistani women 153.8 cm (5′1″). These are the estimates of the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), whose 2016 study pooled 1,472 population-based measurement studies, covering more than 18.6 million people in 200 countries, to estimate adult height for everyone born between 1896 and 1996.

Pakistani men rank 153rd of 200 countries and Pakistani women 186th. The sex gap of 13.1 cm is wider than in most countries. Pakistani men sit somewhat higher in the world table than Pakistani women do.

The site's 166 cm page is a close match for the average Pakistani man, and 155 cm is a little above the average Pakistani woman.

Birth cohorts and why they matter here

NCD-RisC reports the height of a birth cohort at age 18. "Born in 1996" means the expected adult height of people born that year, not the average of all Pakistanis alive today. The approach is useful in Pakistan because cohorts have not simply grown taller over time. As the next section shows, women born in the 1990s are shorter than women born in the 1950s. A single average for all adults would hide that.

The underlying studies all measured height directly. They came from probability samples of the general population, and studies limited to particular ethnic, occupational or patient groups were excluded. A Bayesian model combined the surveys and borrowed information from neighboring countries for years with little data.

A century with almost no change

Pakistan stands out for how little its height changed during the 20th century.

Men gained 1.2 cm in a hundred years, and women 3.2 cm. Both figures are among the smallest gains in the NCD-RisC data. The peak came early. Men reached 167.5 cm in the 1956 and 1976 cohorts and have since slipped by 0.6 cm. Women peaked at 155.9 cm in the 1956 cohort and lost 2.1 cm by 1996.

This fits NCD-RisC's broader description of South Asia as a region where adults are only slightly taller than they were a century ago, and where height plateaued at a much lower level than in East Asia.

Starting tall, finishing in the middle

Pakistan's story is less about short height a century ago than about being overtaken. Pakistani men born in 1896, at 165.7 cm, were taller than Chinese men (161.0 cm) and far taller than Japanese men (156.2 cm) of the same generation. The most dramatic comparison is with Iran. NCD-RisC found that Iranian men had the largest gain of any male population in the world, 16.5 cm over the century.

Two neighboring populations swapped places within a few generations. That is strong evidence that changing living conditions, rather than genes, drive changes in average height. More on Iran is on the Iran average height page.

What Pakistan's own survey shows

Pakistan's main source of measured height is the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS), carried out by the National Institute of Population Studies with technical support from ICF under the international DHS program. The 2017–18 round measured the height and weight of eligible women aged 15–49. Pregnant women and those who had given birth in the previous two months were excluded. Unlike some other countries' DHS surveys, Pakistan's covers ever-married women only. Of the 4,690 women eligible for measurement, 94% gave valid results.

The PDHS does not report a mean height. Instead it reports the share of women shorter than 145 cm, a standard DHS indicator of short stature. Nationally, 5.0% of ever-married women fell below that line.

Women in the poorest households were more than three times as likely as the richest to be under 145 cm. Rural Sindh had the highest share of any area reported. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Islamabad had the lowest. The survey report adds a caution that sample sizes in some regions, especially Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, were small, so regional anthropometry should be read carefully.

Short stature next to high overweight

The same survey shows something that height data alone can miss. Only 9% of the measured women were underweight, while 52% were overweight or obese, with a mean BMI of 25.7. Pakistan therefore combines a population whose adult height stopped improving decades ago with widespread excess weight in adult women today. Height reflects nutrition in early childhood. Weight reflects diet and activity now.

Child stunting: the pipeline for future height

Adult height is built in childhood, and Our World in Data's review of the research describes nutrition and childhood illness as the main forces, with most stunting happening in the first two years of life. On that measure Pakistan still faces a serious problem.

The 2017–18 PDHS found 38% of children under five stunted (too short for their age) and 17% severely stunted. That was down from 45% in 2012–13. The detail shows where the burden falls:

• Stunting peaked at 48% among children aged 24–35 months.
• It was 57% in the poorest wealth quintile and 22% in the richest.
• It was 48% among children of mothers with no education and 16% among children of mothers with higher education.
• By region, it was highest in FATA (52%) and lowest in Islamabad (24%).

Other measures of child nutrition improved over the same five years. Wasting (children too thin for their height) fell from 11% to 7%, and underweight from 30% to 23%, while the share of overweight children stayed at about 3%. The survey report calls this a modest improvement.

WHO and UNICEF survey estimates compiled by Our World in Data show the longer arc. Stunting was 62.5% in 1986, about 41–45% through the 2000s and early 2010s, and 37.6% in 2018. Today's adults were born when stunting was common. The recent decline is a hopeful sign for the heights of future cohorts, but at 38% it is still high by global standards.

How the PDHS measures height

The DHS method is worth understanding, because it explains why Pakistan's figures look different from the NCD-RisC estimate. Field teams visit a subsample of households and measure eligible women and young children. For children, the 2017–18 survey had 3,994 eligible children under five outside Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, and valid height data for 87% of them. Each child's height is compared with the WHO growth standards. A child more than two standard deviations below the median height for their age counts as stunted, and more than three standard deviations below as severely stunted.

For women, the report gives two summary indicators: the share under 145 cm and body-mass index. It does not publish an average height. That is why the PDHS cannot be set directly next to the NCD-RisC estimate of 153.8 cm, even though NCD-RisC draws on surveys of this kind.

Why women's height matters for health

For Pakistan, where women's average height fell from 155.9 cm in the 1956 cohort to 153.8 cm in the 1996 cohort, this has practical weight. The NCD-RisC paper links short maternal stature to a higher risk of small-for-gestational-age babies, of preterm births and of complications in pregnancy, and argues that the trajectory of women's height can influence infant and maternal mortality trends.

The PDHS shows the link between generations. More than half (57%) of children reported as small at birth were stunted, compared with 35% of children reported as average or larger at birth. Mothers who were themselves short or undernourished are more likely to have small babies, and small babies are more likely to grow into short adults. The fall in Pakistani women's average height between the 1956 and 1996 cohorts is therefore a concern for children's health as well as a statistic.

Across countries, NCD-RisC also found that gains in average height from one cohort to the next were associated with lower adult mortality in middle and older age. The correlation was −0.58 for men and −0.68 for women, in countries with reliable death records.

Pakistan compared with its neighbors

Pakistani men are the tallest in South Asia in this data, 2 cm ahead of Indian men and 1.6 cm ahead of Afghan men. Afghan women, however, are 1.3 cm taller than Pakistani women. That fits the unusually wide sex gap in Pakistan. National surveys support the ordering within South Asia. Pakistan's 5% of women under 145 cm compares with 11.5% in India's NFHS-5 and 13.7% in Bangladesh's 2017–18 DHS, although these surveys come from different years and the Pakistani sample is limited to ever-married women.

All 200 countries can be compared on the average height by country hub.

What these numbers mean in practice

For Pakistanis, the useful benchmark is that the average man is about 167 cm (5′6″) and the average woman about 154 cm (5′1″). A man of 5′8″ or 5′9″ is clearly taller than average at home, but would be below average in much of Europe. The height percentile calculator shows how a given height compares with reference data.

Policymakers and health researchers are watching child stunting more closely than adult averages, because it shows where adult height will go next. Pakistan's adult average has barely moved in a century and recently slipped a little. Whether the next generation finally breaks that pattern depends on whether the fall in childhood stunting seen between 2012–13 and 2017–18 continues.