Average Height in the United Kingdom (Men & Women)

Average height in the United Kingdom

British adults born in 1996 average 177.5 cm (5′10″) for men and 164.4 cm (5′5″) for women, according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). Those are the figures used on this page and across the site. British men rank around 31st of 200 countries and British women around 38th. That's tall by world standards but some way behind the tallest countries of northern Europe.

The UK also has unusually rich measured height data of its own. The Health Survey for England has measured adults every year since the early 1990s, and Scotland has its own measured survey, the Scottish Health Survey. Historians have reconstructed British heights back to the 18th century. Together they tell a story of early growth, a 19th-century setback, a big 20th-century rise and, more recently, a plateau.

How the NCD-RisC estimate works

NCD-RisC pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured heights for more than 18.6 million people in 200 countries, using only measured data and excluding self-reports. Its model estimates average height for each birth year from 1896 to 1996, adjusting for the height people lose as they age. So the 1996 figure is the height of Britons who turned 18 around 2014.

That's why national survey averages for "all adults" come out lower. The Health Survey for England figure of 175.4 cm for men includes everyone from 16 to over 75, and older adults were shorter when young and have also lost some height since.

The Health Survey for England: 17 years of measurements

The Health Survey for England (HSE) is an annual survey of people living in private households in England. It has been designed and carried out since 1994 by the Joint Health Surveys Unit of the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) and the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London. Height and weight are among the survey's core measurements, taken by the survey team rather than reported by respondents.

The 2009 trend tables, published by the NHS Information Centre, give mean height for every year from 1993 to 2009:

The commentary sums up the period plainly: between 1993 and 2009, mean height varied little from year to year, and there was no obvious pattern across years within any age band. The all-adult average for men rose by 1 cm over 16 years, mostly because older, shorter generations were gradually replaced by younger ones. Among women aged 16 to 24, there was essentially no change.

In the same period, the trend tables record a sharp rise in obesity: from 13 percent of men in 1993 to 22 percent in 2009, and from 16 percent to 24 percent of women. English adults stopped getting taller but kept getting heavier.

Height by age in England, 2009

The youngest men were about 8 cm taller than men aged 75 and over, and the youngest women nearly 8 cm taller than the oldest women. Women aged 16 to 44 were all within 0.3 cm of each other, a sign that women's heights in England had already stopped rising for those born from the mid-1960s on.

Scotland: the Scottish Health Survey

The Scottish Health Survey 2008 measured adults aged 16 and over in Scotland. Men averaged 175.0 cm and women 161.3 cm, very close to England's 175.3 cm and 161.6 cm in the same year. The Scottish tables also give percentiles, which show the spread of heights:

England and Scotland side by side

Because both surveys measured adults in 2008 using the same age bands, they can be lined up directly. The differences are small, usually under 1 cm, and they run in both directions.

Scottish men aged 25 to 34 were slightly taller than their English counterparts, and young Scottish women aged 16 to 24 slightly taller than young English women. Among older adults, the English figures run a little higher. Each Scottish age group in the table is based on a few hundred people, so differences of a few millimeters fall well within normal sampling error. The safest reading is that adults in England and Scotland are, for practical purposes, the same height.

The median is almost the same as the mean, as you'd expect for a trait that Our World in Data describes as approximately normally distributed. Among Scottish men aged 25 to 34, the mean was 178.2 cm, the highest of any age group. Men aged 75 and over averaged 168.4 cm.

A century of change in the NCD-RisC data

British men gained 10.6 cm and women 11 cm over the century. Most of that came before the 1950s cohorts. Men born in 1996 were no taller than those born in 1976, and the year-by-year series from Our World in Data shows the male peak for those born around 1984, at about 177.7 cm. Women's averages were still creeping up, by 0.6 cm over the last 20 years.

One detail sets Britain apart from many countries on this site. British women gained slightly more height over the century than British men, 11 cm against 10.6 cm, so the gap between the sexes narrowed a little, from 13.5 cm in the 1896 cohort to 13.1 cm in the 1996 cohort. In countries such as Iran and Turkey, by contrast, men gained much more than women and the gap widened. British women also climbed further in the world rankings: from around 57th of 200 in the 1896 cohort to around 38th, while British men moved from around 36th to around 31st.

The NCD-RisC paper singles out the UK here. It notes that among high-income western countries, height increases plateaued for two to three decades in English-speaking countries like the UK and in Northern European countries like Finland. The measured HSE data point the same way: young adults in 2009 were barely taller than young adults in 1993.

Three centuries of British height

Britain has some of the longest height records anywhere. The NCD-RisC paper cites the classic study by R. Floud, A. Gregory and K. W. Wachter, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980, among the works that analyzed men's heights over up to 250 years using records of conscripts, soldiers and others.

Our World in Data publishes reconstructions of men's heights by birth decade from Joerg Baten and Matthias Blum. For Britain:

These figures show that British men born in the mid-18th century were about as tall as those born in the 1900s, at roughly 169 to 170 cm. Men born in the 1850s were about 4 cm shorter than their great-grandfathers. Height only started climbing steadily for men born from the 1880s, and the fastest rise came between the 1920s and 1950s birth decades. Skeletal remains from London dated 1700 to 1850, compiled by Gregory Clark and reproduced by Our World in Data, suggest men of about 170 cm, which fits the higher 18th-century figures.

The UK compared with its neighbors

British men are about 5 cm shorter than Dutch men and about 1.4 to 2.2 cm shorter than men in Ireland, France and Norway. They're slightly taller than American men. That's a reversal of the 19th-century pattern. In the NCD-RisC data, American men born in 1896 averaged 171.1 cm, 4.2 cm taller than British men of the same generation. By the 1996 cohort, British men were 0.4 cm taller.

The NCD-RisC authors explain the American side of that reversal. The USA, they note, was one of the tallest nations a century ago but has fallen behind its European counterparts after having the smallest height gain of any high-income country. American men gained just 6 cm over the century in the NCD-RisC data, compared with 10.6 cm for British men. British women overtook American women too: they were 5.1 cm shorter in the 1896 cohort and 0.9 cm taller in the 1996 cohort.

Ireland offers a closer comparison. Irish and British men born in 1896 were almost the same height (166.4 cm and 166.9 cm), but Irish men gained more over the century and ended up 1.4 cm taller.

British heights in practice

A young British man is typically about 178 cm (5′10″) and a young woman about 163 to 164 cm (5′4″ to 5′5″). The 178 cm page shows that height in feet and inches with global comparisons. You can check any height against national averages with the height percentile calculator, or compare two people in the height comparison tool.