Average Height in Singapore (Men & Women)

Average height in Singapore today

Singaporean men born in 1996 average 172.6 cm (5′8″) and Singaporean women 160.3 cm (5′3″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). These are the figures used on this page and throughout the site. Among 200 countries and territories, Singapore ranks 84th for men and 82nd for women. Within Asia, as grouped in our data, it ranks 9th of 49 for men and 8th for women, putting it in the taller group of Asian populations alongside South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.

An average Singaporean man is very close to 173 cm, just over 5′8″. An average woman is almost exactly 160 cm, about 5′3″.

How the estimates work

NCD-RisC is a global network of health researchers. Its 2016 eLife study pooled 1,472 population-based studies with height measurements for more than 18.6 million people born between 1896 and 1996. A Bayesian model then estimated mean height at age 18 for each country and each birth cohort, meaning everyone born in a particular year.

That birth-year framing matters in a country that changed as fast as Singapore. As Our World in Data explains, adult height mostly reflects nutrition and disease during childhood and adolescence. The 1996 figure describes Singaporeans who grew up in the late 1990s and 2000s. Their grandparents, born in the 1940s, grew up in very different circumstances and are several centimeters shorter on average.

A century of growth, led by women

The NCD-RisC series for Singapore starts with people born in 1896, more than a century before the most recent cohort, and traces a long, steady rise:

The most unusual feature is the difference between the sexes. Women gained 13.3 cm over the century, the 15th largest gain for women among 200 countries. Men gained 9.7 cm, which ranks only 104th. The result is that the height gap between Singaporean men and women shrank from 15.8 cm in the 1896 cohort to 12.3 cm in the 1996 cohort.

The timing differs too. Men gained only 1.5 cm between the 1896 and 1926 cohorts, while women gained 5.1 cm over the same years. After that, both sexes rose steadily until the cohorts born in the 1970s and 1980s. Men's growth has nearly stopped since: just 0.1 cm between the 1986 and 1996 cohorts. Women were still adding a little height in the most recent cohort.

The gap between men and women

Looking at the difference between the sexes cohort by cohort shows when the change happened:

Almost all of the narrowing took place between the 1896 and 1926 cohorts, when women's height rose more than three times as fast as men's. Since then the gap has stayed within about a centimeter of 12 cm. The model does not explain why early female gains were so large, and the earliest estimates are the least certain: for women born in 1896, the 95% credible interval runs from 144.1 to 150.0 cm, and for men from 160.2 to 165.6 cm.

Taller without getting heavier

The eLife study made a specific observation about Singapore. It named Singapore, together with Japan and France, as countries with larger-than-median gains in height but little change in body-mass index. In many countries, the decades of rising height also brought rising weight, so this pattern stands out. It suggests that the improvements in diet and health that made Singaporeans taller did not, at least over the study period, translate into the large increases in BMI seen elsewhere.

Children's growth today

Child stunting, meaning low height for age, is the clearest early warning sign of poor growth. In the World Bank's World Development Indicators, the most recent stunting estimate for Singapore is 4.5% of children under five, for the year 2000. For comparison, the same series shows rates of about a third of children in Laos and over a fifth in Cambodia in recent surveys. Singapore's low figure is consistent with a population whose height has largely reached a plateau.

National service: a large measured sample

Singapore's compulsory national service means almost all young men go through a pre-enlistment medical screening, and those records have been used in research. The best published height data from this source come from the Singapore Armed Forces ECG (SAFE) study, a 2019 paper in Annals of Noninvasive Electrocardiology led by Ching-Hui Sia. The study included 144,346 young male conscripts screened between 1 November 2009 and 31 December 2014. Their mean age was 18.5 years.

The paper's main subject was heart rhythm, but its first table reports height and weight by ethnic group:

The study does not give a single overall mean, but weighting the three reported groups by their numbers gives about 172 cm. That is very close to the NCD-RisC estimate of 172.6 cm for men born in 1996, and most of these conscripts were born in the early 1990s. A large measured dataset and an independent statistical model agree to within about half a centimeter.

Reading the conscript figures carefully

A few limits apply. The SAFE paper does not describe how height was measured, and it does not report height for the 2,853 conscripts classified as "Others". Ages ranged from 16 to 37, although the average was 18.5. The sample is also male only, so there is no comparable measured dataset for young Singaporean women in this study. None of this undermines the figures, but it explains why we keep the NCD-RisC estimate as the headline value.

The table also shows something about build. Malay conscripts were the shortest of the three groups but the heaviest after Indian conscripts, with the highest mean BMI (23.2, against 22.0 for Chinese conscripts). Weight and BMI varied much more than height: the standard deviation of weight was 14.0 kg for Chinese conscripts and 17.8 kg for Malay conscripts, a reminder that height and body size do not move together.

The standard deviation of height was 6.2 cm for Chinese and Malay conscripts and 6.6 cm for Indian conscripts, so roughly two-thirds of young Singaporean men fall within about 6 cm of their group's average.

Ethnic composition and height

Singapore's resident population is officially classified into Chinese, Malay, Indian and Other groups. According to figures cited in Wikipedia's article on the demographics of Singapore, ethnic Chinese make up 75.5% of residents, Malays 15.1% and Indians 7.6%. Because Chinese Singaporeans are by far the largest group, the national average for men is pulled toward the Chinese figure.

The SAFE data show that the differences between the groups are modest. Indian conscripts were on average 1.1 cm taller than Chinese conscripts, and Malay conscripts 2.1 cm shorter. Those gaps are much smaller than the gaps between the corresponding home countries in the NCD-RisC data, which is the more striking finding:

These figures come from different methods and samples, so they should not be over-interpreted. Malaysia's national figure includes many non-Malay citizens, and India's covers a country of more than a billion people with large regional differences. Still, the pattern fits the general rule described by Our World in Data: where children grow up, and the nutrition and health care they receive, shapes adult height more than ancestry alone. Singaporean Indian conscripts were measured more than 8 cm taller than the Indian national average for men.

Singapore compared with the region

Using NCD-RisC data for the 1996 cohort:

Singapore is the tallest country in Southeast Asia for both sexes in this dataset. Its men are 4.7 cm taller than Malaysian men and 9 cm taller than Indonesian men. Compared with East Asia, Singaporean men are about 1 cm shorter than men in Hong Kong and 2.3 cm shorter than South Korean men. Singaporean women, on the other hand, are slightly taller than women in Hong Kong, China and Japan.

The 2020 NCD-RisC study in The Lancet adds a long-run perspective. In 2019, the gap between the tallest and shortest countries for 19-year-olds was 20 cm or more, with the shortest boys in Timor-Leste and Laos, both in Southeast Asia. Singapore, at the other end of the regional range, illustrates how wide the differences within one region can be.

For the full list, see average height by country.

Using the averages

• Cohort matters. Older Singaporeans, especially women born before the 1960s, are noticeably shorter than today's young adults.
• Groups overlap. The differences between Chinese, Malay and Indian conscripts are small compared with the spread within each group.
• Check individual heights properly. To see what percentile a height falls in, try the height percentile calculator, or compare two people side by side with the main comparison tool.
• Ask a doctor about children. A child's growth should be assessed by a pediatrician using growth charts, not by comparison with national averages.

Key takeaways

• Singaporean men born in 1996 average 172.6 cm and women 160.3 cm (NCD-RisC), the tallest in Southeast Asia.
• Women gained 13.3 cm over the century, the 15th largest gain in the world, while men gained 9.7 cm.
• NCD-RisC identifies Singapore as a country that grew taller with little change in BMI.
• National service data for 144,346 young men show 172.3 cm for Chinese, 170.2 cm for Malay and 173.4 cm for Indian conscripts.
• Singaporean conscripts of Malay and Indian descent are taller than the national averages of Malaysia and India.