Average Height in Sweden (Men & Women)

Sweden's average height

Swedes are tall by any global standard, but Sweden's place in the world rankings has slipped over the past century as other countries caught up. In the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates for the 1996 birth cohort, Swedish men average 179.7 cm (5′11″) and Swedish women 165.7 cm (5′5″). Men rank joint 13th of 200 countries, level with Norway, and women 17th.

What the figures measure

NCD-RisC built its estimates from 1,472 population-based studies with measured heights for more than 18.6 million adults, deliberately leaving out self-reported data because of its bias. A Bayesian model estimated the average height that each birth cohort reached by age 18, so "Swedish women born in 1996" refers to women who turned 18 around 2014. Swedes of older generations, especially those born before the Second World War, are shorter on average.

From world leader to the pack

Sweden's most striking statistic is historical. NCD-RisC identifies Swedish women born in 1896 as "the tallest a century ago", with an average height of 160.3 cm, about 20 cm taller than women in Guatemala, the shortest at the time. Swedish men of that cohort were also among the tallest: only men in Sweden, Norway and the USA exceeded 171 cm.

Over the century, Swedish men gained 7.8 cm and women just 5.4 cm. Those are among the smallest gains in Europe, and the reason is the starting point: Sweden was already tall when many other countries were not. Our World in Data notes that men and women worldwide gained about 8 to 9 cm in average height over the century. Countries that began shorter, from Serbia to South Korea, gained far more and in several cases overtook Sweden.

The Swedish peak came with people born in 1976, whose averages of 180.0 cm and 166.6 cm happen to match Norway's for the same cohort exactly. Swedes born twenty years later lost a fraction of that: 179.7 cm for men and 165.7 cm for women.

Where Sweden ranked then and now

Because women gained less than men, the gap between the sexes widened by 2.4 cm over the century.

Who overtook Sweden

In the site's NCD-RisC data, Swedish men born in 1896 have the highest average of any country, 171.9 cm, just ahead of Norway (171.2 cm) and the United States (171.1 cm). Swedish women of that cohort lead the world too. A century later, a dozen countries have taller men. The table below shows how some of them caught up.

Dutch men were 2.5 cm shorter than Swedish men in the 1896 cohort and are now 2.8 cm taller. Latvian women went from 4.8 cm shorter than Swedish women to 4.1 cm taller. The United States is the mirror image: it started almost level with Sweden and gained even less, a pattern NCD-RisC highlights when it notes that the USA had the smallest gain in height of any high-income country. Sweden's story is therefore not one of stagnation in absolute terms, since Swedes are almost 8 cm taller than they were, but of a lead that others steadily erased.

What conscript records show

Like its Nordic neighbors, Sweden measured nearly every young man at conscription for much of the 20th century, creating some of the richest height data in the world.

Recent conscript averages

A 2005 report in The Local, based on figures from the Swedish National Service Administration, which measured each potential conscript every year, gave a simple before-and-after:

Height rose by 1.6 cm over three decades, while weight rose by 6.4 kg, a much bigger proportional change. The conscripts measured in 2004 would mostly have been born in the mid-1980s, between the 1976 and 1996 NCD-RisC cohorts, and their 180.2 cm average is close to the NCD-RisC figures for those generations.

Regional differences and convergence

Stefan Öberg and Kristoffer Collin of the University of Gothenburg used universal conscript inspections to study how height varied between Swedish counties across the 20th century. In their 2017 paper in Essays in Economic & Business History, they found:

• Height differences of 2 to 3 cm between counties.
• Shorter men in the southern, southeastern and northernmost parts of Sweden, and taller men around Stockholm and Göteborg.
• No urban penalty: living in or near a city was not associated with being shorter.
• Regional differences shrank over the century, as counties that started out shorter gained more height.
• County height was positively linked to real manufacturing wages and regional GDP per person, and negatively linked to infant mortality during childhood in the mid-20th century.

One finding surprised the authors: men were taller in counties with higher food prices and a higher relative price of animal foods, the opposite of what simple models of nutrition would predict.

Birth order and height: 652,518 brothers

Sweden's military conscription register has also allowed researchers to ask questions that need huge samples. In 2013, Myrskylä and colleagues analyzed the adult height of 652,518 men born between 1951 and 1983, comparing brothers within the same families so that shared genetic and social background cancelled out.

They found that, compared with first-born sons, second-born sons were 0.4 cm shorter, third-born sons 0.7 cm shorter and fourth-born sons 0.8 cm shorter. The pattern held across large and small families and across social classes, but it weakened in more recent birth cohorts. The authors pointed out that the gap between third- and first-born sons was larger than the population-level height increase over ten years, and suggested that shrinking family sizes might explain part of the rise in average height in countries with falling fertility.

Height and health: a register study of 5.5 million Swedes

Sweden's national registers also make it possible to study how height relates to health in almost the whole population. Benyi and colleagues followed 5.5 million Swedish women and men aged 20 to 74 for up to 54 years, identifying 278,299 cancer cases and 139,393 deaths. Per 10 cm of extra height:

• The risk of cancer overall rose (hazard ratio 1.19 for women and 1.11 for men), most strongly for malignant melanoma.
• Cancer mortality was also higher in taller people.
• Overall mortality, however, was lower in taller people, especially men (hazard ratio 0.91), because taller people died less often from other causes such as cardiovascular disease.

This fits the wider finding in the NCD-RisC paper that gains in population height are associated with lower mortality in middle and older age. These are population associations, not predictions for any individual.

Is Sweden still getting taller?

Studies disagree slightly. Larnkjær and colleagues, reviewing conscript data after 1990, concluded in 2006 that height in Scandinavia and the Netherlands had reached a plateau at 179 to 181 cm. NCD-RisC shows a small decline between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts. But in 2019, Holmgren and colleagues from the University of Gothenburg, comparing the populations used for Swedish height references, found that adult height still increased among Swedes born from the 1950s to the 1990s, by 6 mm per decade for women and 5 mm per decade for men. They also measured the parents of children in Swedish reference studies: mothers born from the 1920s to the 1960s gained 11 mm per decade and fathers 14 mm per decade.

Holmgren's team also looked at when the extra height is gained. In the Swedish reference populations, born in 1956, 1974 and 1990, the increase came from more growth during childhood, even though the middle of puberty arrived earlier. That matters for parents and pediatricians: growth charts based on older generations can make a modern Swedish child look unusually tall or early-maturing, which is why the authors stressed the need to update national references regularly.

Taken together, the data describe a slowdown from more than a centimeter per decade in the mid-20th century to a few millimeters or less today.

Sweden compared with its neighbors

Sweden, Norway and Finland are essentially tied today, with differences of a few millimeters. Denmark stands out, with men 1.7 cm taller and women 1.5 cm taller than Swedes. Germany is now level with Sweden too, even though German men born in 1896 were 4.7 cm shorter than Swedish men.

An earlier survey-based comparison shows how persistent the Nordic advantage has been. Cavelaars and colleagues collected self-reported heights of adults aged 20 to 74 from national surveys in ten European countries between 1987 and 1994, and found men and women tallest in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. In every country, less-educated adults were shorter than better-educated ones.

Swedish height in practical terms

An average Swedish man, at 179.7 cm, is just under 5′11″; an average Swedish woman, at 165.7 cm, is about 5′5″. Both are a little above the simple average of 41 European countries in the site data (178.4 cm and 165.1 cm). To see these heights side by side, or next to a celebrity, use the height comparison tool. To find out where your own height falls, try the height percentile calculator.

Summary

Swedish men average 179.7 cm and women 165.7 cm, ranking 13th and 17th in the world. A century ago Swedish women were the tallest in the world, and Swedish men were among the tallest; Sweden's modest gains since then reflect how tall it already was. Conscript data show height rising 1.6 cm between 1975 and 2004 and regional differences narrowing across the 20th century, while register studies link height to birth order, cancer risk and lower overall mortality. Compare Sweden with all 200 countries in the average height by country guide.