Average Height in Thailand (Men & Women)

Average height in Thailand

Thai adults born in 1996 average 169.2 cm (5′7″) for men and 157.9 cm (5′2″) for women, according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Those are the figures used on this page and in the site's tools. They place Thai men around 122nd of 200 countries and women around 129th, in the middle of the world and near the top of mainland Southeast Asia.

The more interesting part of Thailand's story is the direction of travel. Unlike many countries where heights have leveled off, Thai heights were still rising quickly for people born in the 1990s. The NCD-RisC authors name Thailand, together with China, as a country where large East Asian-style height gains are still happening.

Where the numbers come from

NCD-RisC pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured heights for more than 18.6 million people in 200 countries. Researchers from Mahidol University were among the Thai collaborators. Only measured heights were included, and the statistical model estimates average height by birth year, adjusting for height lost with age. The 1996 figure therefore describes Thais who turned 18 around 2014, not the average of all adults alive today.

A century of height in Thailand

Thailand's path looks different from the typical European or East Asian pattern. In Japan and much of Europe, the NCD-RisC data show the fastest gains coming earlier in the century, followed by a slowdown or plateau. In Thailand, gains for men were modest at first: 2.8 cm between the 1896 and 1926 cohorts, and 3.2 cm between 1926 and 1956. Then they sped up. Men born in 1996 were 2.9 cm taller than men born only 20 years earlier. Women followed the same pattern, gaining 2.7 cm between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts.

That late acceleration is why Thailand climbed in the world rankings. Thai men born in 1896 ranked around 171st of 200 countries, and Thai women around 161st. By the 1996 cohort they had moved up to around 122nd and 129th.

The older historical record

Thailand is one of the countries where the Clio-Infra reconstructions of Joerg Baten and Matthias Blum, charted by Our World in Data, reach well back into the 19th century. They put Thai men at about 160 to 162 cm from the 1860s to the 1930s, with little change for 70 years, then show a jump to about 166 cm for the 1940s birth decade and a steady rise to about 171 cm for men born in the 1990s.

The two series differ in detail, but they agree on the main point: Thai men born before the 1940s were short and their height changed little for generations, while those born from the mid-20th century on grew steadily taller.

Rural and urban Thailand: the Thai Cohort Study

The most detailed picture of Thai height trends comes from the Thai Cohort Study, a long-running study of students at Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University (STOU), run with the Australian National University. In 2005, about 200,000 STOU students were mailed questionnaires and 87,134 returned them. Of those, 86,105 reported their height. The results, by Susan Jordan and colleagues, were published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in 2012.

STOU students live all over Thailand and have modest incomes. The authors say the cohort matches the Thai population well on sex, median income, region and religion, though people in their 20s and 30s are overrepresented.

Height by birth year

Overall, heights rose by about 1 cm per decade for those born between 1940 and 1990. Men born in 1986–1990 were about 4 cm taller than men born in 1940–1955, and women almost 3 cm taller.

The growing urban advantage

The study asked where each person lived at age 10 to 12. That made it possible to compare people raised in cities with those raised in the countryside:

For the oldest group, urban and rural men differed by less than 1 cm. For those born in 1986–1990, the gap was 2.8 cm. Urban men gained about 1.5 cm per decade and rural men about 1 cm per decade. For women the rates were about 1.3 and 0.9 cm per decade. The youngest urban-raised men were 6.4 cm taller than the oldest rural-raised men.

The authors link this to income inequality between rural and urban Thailand, which widened from the 1960s to at least the early 1990s, when most cohort members were children. They conclude that the growing height gap probably reflects widening economic disparities and their effects on childhood health and nutrition. They also warn that rural-born Thais, who benefited less from these changes, may face greater health risks later in life, including obesity.

Family factors

Beyond rural and urban upbringing, several family factors were linked to adult height in the study:

• Parents' education: women whose mothers had tertiary education were about 1.1 cm taller than those whose mothers had no formal education. Men whose fathers had tertiary education were about 1.4 cm taller.
• Birth size: people recalled by relatives as large at birth were about 2.8 cm (women) to 3.3 cm (men) taller as adults than those recalled as small.
• Family size: having more siblings was linked to shorter stature, more strongly in men than in women.
• Birth order: later-born men and women tended to be taller than first-borns. The authors note that other studies have found the opposite, and that birth spacing and cultural factors may explain the difference.
• Household assets: people who grew up in homes with more possessions, such as electricity, a radio, a television or a refrigerator at age 10 to 12, were taller on average, though the effect was smaller in women.
• Region of residence was also significantly associated with height.

None of these factors fully explained the rise across birth years. Even after accounting for them, people born later were still taller. The authors conclude that the pattern most likely reflects access to resources in early childhood, and ultimately the quality and quantity of nutrition and the ability to control childhood infections. They also point out that they had no data on parents' or siblings' heights, so the study couldn't measure the role of genetics within families.

How Thailand's pace compares with Japan and Korea

The Thai Cohort Study's rate of about 1 cm per decade is slower than what longer-running data have shown for Thailand's richer neighbors to the north. The authors cite studies suggesting gains of about 1.5 cm per decade for Japanese women nationally, 2 cm per decade for urban Korean women, and 2 cm per decade for Japanese men. Urban Thai men, at 1.5 cm per decade, came closest to those rates.

The study also notes that rural–urban height differences have been reported in both European and Asian populations, but that in the European studies the gaps appear to be shrinking. In Thailand, at least for people born between 1940 and 1990, the gap was growing.

Why height matters for future health

The authors draw two health warnings from their findings. In rural areas, a relative height deficit combined with an increasingly energy-dense diet and sedentary lifestyle could lead to high levels of obesity. They cite work based on the Thai National Health Examination Surveys suggesting that obesity was already rising faster in rural than in urban areas. They also note that height is positively associated with several cancers, including breast, prostate and colon cancer, which were relatively rare in Thailand compared with Western populations, and suggest that rates may rise as average heights increase.

A caveat: self-reported heights

The Thai Cohort Study collected heights by questionnaire, not by measurement. The authors note that overestimation is the norm when people report their own height, including among STOU students. That's one reason the cohort's averages for young adults (170.3 cm for men born 1986–1990) sit a little above NCD-RisC's measured estimate for the 1996 cohort (169.2 cm), even though the NCD-RisC people were born later. The authors also cite an earlier study of measured, Bangkok-based military recruits born between 1951 and 1985, which found a similar rise of about 1.3 cm per decade for men.

Thailand compared with its neighbors

Thais are the tallest of their immediate neighbors in the NCD-RisC estimates. Thai men are 1.3 cm taller than Malaysian men, 4.5 to 4.8 cm taller than men in Myanmar and Vietnam, and 8.7 cm taller than men in Laos. Women show a similar ranking.

China is the benchmark further north. Chinese men born in 1996 are 2.6 cm taller than Thai men. A century earlier, Chinese men born in 1896 were also 2.5 cm taller, so the gap has hardly changed, while Thailand pulled clearly ahead of its Southeast Asian neighbors.

Thai heights in everyday terms

A young Thai man is typically about 5′7″ and a young Thai woman about 5′2″. Men born in 1986–1990 in the Thai Cohort Study reported about 170 cm, and the 170 cm page shows what that height converts to and how it compares with averages in other countries. To see how any height compares, try the height percentile calculator, or put two figures side by side in the height comparison tool. The average height hub lists every country on the same basis.

Thailand's record fits Our World in Data's description of height as a measure of living standards: populations grow taller as childhood nutrition and health improve. If the trend for the 1990s cohorts continues, Thais born in the 2000s could be taller still.