Average Height in Sri Lanka (Men & Women)

How tall are Sri Lankans?

The site's figures for Sri Lanka come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), which estimates that Sri Lankans born in 1996 average 165.7 cm (5′5″) for men and 154.6 cm (5′1″) for women. In the site's table of 200 countries and territories, Sri Lankan men rank 170th and Sri Lankan women 172nd, in the lower fifth of the world.

That ranking is typical of South Asia. The NCD-RisC paper reports that adult height in South Asian countries plateaued at much lower levels than in East Asia, around 5 to 10 cm shorter than in Japan and South Korea. Sri Lanka is slightly taller than India and Bangladesh but follows the same broad pattern.

Sri Lanka also has something many countries lack: a nationally representative study of adult height with published results by birth year, education and income. That study, together with research on child stunting, gives a detailed picture of who is taller and why.

How the NCD-RisC estimates work

For Sri Lanka, as everywhere in the study, the researchers used only measured heights, because self-reported height is biased in ways that differ by country, age, sex and education. That choice matters for a series with small steps: Sri Lankan men gained just 1.1 cm between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts, from 164.6 cm to 165.7 cm, a change that reporting bias could easily swamp.

The estimates describe birth cohorts: everyone born in a given year, estimated at about 18 years old. A Bayesian hierarchical model combined each country's own data with information from other years and other countries in its region, relying more on regional information when a country's data were limited.

A century of slow growth

Over the century, Sri Lankan men gained 8.8 cm and women 9.3 cm, roughly matching the 8 to 9 cm global gain reported by Our World in Data. Unlike many countries, Sri Lanka never had a period of very rapid growth. The largest gains came early, about 3 to 4 cm per 30-year step up to the 1956 cohort, and then slowed to about 1 cm per 20 years.

Importantly, the curve hasn't turned down. Men and women born in 1996 are each 1.1 cm taller than those born in 1976. Sri Lanka is still growing, just slowly. Women in particular have gained slightly more than men over the century, so the gap between the sexes has narrowed from 11.6 cm in the 1896 cohort to 11.1 cm in the 1996 cohort.

Climbing the world table

Sri Lanka's slow but steady growth has moved it up the world rankings, because many other countries stalled or reversed. In the site data, Sri Lankan men born in 1896 ranked 183rd of 200 countries and territories, and women 179th. By the 1956 cohort they had slipped further, to 186th for men and 187th for women, as Europe, East Asia and Latin America grew faster. By the 1996 cohort they had climbed back to 170th and 172nd.

The climb in the later cohorts came partly from Sri Lanka's own gains and partly from declines elsewhere. The NCD-RisC paper describes falls in adult height in many sub-Saharan African countries for people born after the early 1960s, and a plateau in much of South Asia. A country that kept adding a centimeter every 20 years could overtake countries that stopped growing.

For context, the shortest populations of the 1896 cohort in the NCD-RisC study were men in Laos, at 152.9 cm, and women in Guatemala, at 140.3 cm, a height the authors compare to that of a well-nourished 10-year-old girl. Sri Lanka's 1896 figures, 156.9 cm for men and 145.3 cm for women, were above those extremes but well below the tallest countries of the time: men in Sweden, Norway and the USA, who averaged over 171 cm.

Sri Lanka's national adult height study

The most detailed local evidence comes from a study published in Economics and Human Biology in 2011 by Priyanga Ranasinghe and colleagues at the University of Colombo. They analyzed height in a nationally representative sample of 4,477 adults aged over 18, recruited in 2005 and 2006. The participants' average age was 46.

Main results

Height fell with age, and the tallest people were those born after 1977. That's a direct confirmation, from local data, of the gradual rise across generations shown by NCD-RisC. The figures line up closely: the study's average for men born after 1977, 165.6 cm, falls between the NCD-RisC estimates for the 1976 cohort (164.6 cm) and the 1996 cohort (165.7 cm), and its 154.0 cm for women matches the NCD-RisC estimates for those cohorts (153.5 to 154.6 cm).

The all-adult averages are lower because they include older people born in the early and middle twentieth century, who grew up when Sri Lankans were shorter.

Who is taller

In multivariate analysis, three factors were significantly associated with height:

• Year of birth, reflecting the generational trend.
• Level of education.
• Household income.

Rural women were found to be very slightly taller than urban women on average (151.4 cm against 151.3 cm), a difference the authors report as statistically significant; no such difference was seen in men. The authors concluded that height in Sri Lanka was associated with income and education and showed a distinct increasing trend over successive generations.

Height and health markers

The study also found small negative correlations between height and several cardiometabolic markers: systolic blood pressure, the presence of diabetes, and total, HDL and LDL cholesterol. The correlations were weak (for example, −0.069 for diabetes and −0.106 for total cholesterol), so height on its own says very little about an individual's health. They fit the broader pattern described by NCD-RisC, which links taller adult height with lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

Child stunting: progress, then a pause

Because adult height reflects childhood nutrition and health, trends in child growth hint at what future adult cohorts will look like. Stunting means a child's height for age is more than two standard deviations below the WHO growth standard.

The World Bank's series for Sri Lanka:

What drives stunting in Sri Lanka

A 2013 study in the Ceylon Medical Journal by Ravi Rannan-Eliya and colleagues re-analyzed the Demographic and Health Surveys of 1987, 1993, 2000 and 2006–07 and the 2009 Nutrition and Food Security Survey, re-estimating every survey with the 2006 WHO growth standards so they could be compared. They found:

• Stunting and wasting improved substantially from 1987 to 2000, then stagnated from 2000 to 2006–07.
• Economic inequalities in undernutrition were greater than in most other countries.
• Maternal height, household wealth, length of breastfeeding and altitude were significant determinants of stunting, while differences in child feeding practices and other factors weren't.
• Of these, maternal height and household wealth had the most influence.

The authors concluded that food insecurity appeared to be the main driver of undernutrition, while calling for more research. They also argued that the strong link between a child's height and the mother's height suggests intergenerational factors, which they described as epigenetic and proxied by short maternal height, limit how well the WHO growth standards apply in Sri Lanka.

That last point echoes a theme in the NCD-RisC paper: short maternal stature affects the next generation, increasing the risk of babies who are small for their gestational age and of preterm births. Height gains in one generation of women can make the next generation's gains easier.

Sri Lanka and South Asia

NCD-RisC estimates for South Asia (1996 birth cohort):

Sri Lanka sits in the middle of the region for men and near the top for women: Sri Lankan women are 2 cm taller than Indian women and nearly 4 cm taller than women in Bangladesh and Nepal. Only the Maldives is taller for both sexes.

The trends differ more than the levels. India's men gained just 2.9 cm over the century in the site data, and Pakistan's 1.2 cm; Sri Lanka's men gained 8.8 cm. The NCD-RisC paper notes that South Asia saw little change in height over the century compared with most other regions, and Sri Lanka is one of the region's stronger performers within that pattern.

What these heights mean day to day

An average Sri Lankan man born in 1996 stands 165.7 cm, about 5′5″, roughly 5 cm below the global male average of 171 cm given by Our World in Data. An average woman, at 154.6 cm, is about 5′1″, compared with a global female average of 159 cm.

Averages only tell part of the story. Our World in Data explains that adult height within a population is approximately normally distributed, a bell curve centered on the mean. The Sri Lankan study reported standard deviations of 6.9 cm for men and 6.4 cm for women. In a normal distribution, about two-thirds of people fall within one standard deviation of the mean, so roughly two in three Sri Lankan men in the 2005–06 sample would have been between about 157 and 170 cm, and two in three women between about 145 and 158 cm. A Sri Lankan man of 178 cm, about 5′10″, would be roughly two standard deviations above the national average for that sample, taller than about 97 or 98 men in 100.

To compare an individual height with these averages, try the height percentile calculator, or convert with the cm to feet page for 165 cm. The average height hub lists all 200 countries.

Sri Lanka's height story is one of patient, uninterrupted improvement: no dramatic surge, but no reversal either. Local research ties height to education and income, and points to mothers' height as a key link between generations. As child stunting has fallen in recent surveys, the next adult cohorts may continue the slow climb that began more than a century ago.