5′6″ vs 6′0″ Height Difference

The conversion

Five feet six inches is 66 inches and six feet is 72. The inch has been exactly 25.4 mm since the 1959 international agreement that NIST documents, so those heights are 167.64 cm and 182.88 cm. The difference is 6 inches, or 15.24 cm. The taller person is 9.1% taller (72 ÷ 66 ≈ 1.091).

More on each height: 5′6″ in cm and 6′0″ in cm.

A tall woman and a tall man

Both people in this pair are tall for their sex in the United States. In the NHANES survey of August 2021 to August 2023, with heights measured on a wall-mounted stadiometer, women aged 20 and older have a 75th percentile of 65.4 inches and an 85th percentile of 66.4 inches, which puts 5′6″ around the 81st percentile. Men's 85th percentile is 72.1 inches, so 6′0″ is around the 85th.

That symmetry, both people roughly 80 to 85% of the way up their own distribution, is why the gap is so close to average. NHANES gives the mean US man as 175.1 cm and the mean woman as 161.2 cm, 13.9 cm apart; this pair is 15.24 cm apart. Move both people up the scale by similar amounts and the gap barely changes.

Younger and older Americans

Age shifts both positions. Among adults aged 20 to 29, women's 75th percentile is 66.2 inches and men's 85th is 72.7 inches, so a young 5′6″ woman is nearer the 75th percentile of her peers and a young 6′0″ man a little below the 85th. Among adults aged 70 to 79, women's 90th percentile is 65.4 inches and 95th is 66.2, while men's 90th is 71.5 inches and 95th is 72.5. For that generation, both a 5′6″ woman and a 6′0″ man are taller than roughly nine in ten of their peers, so the same pair reads as distinctly tall rather than moderately tall.

How taller women's couples differ

This pairing is a good illustration of one of the clearer findings in research on real couples: the height difference within a couple depends strongly on how tall each partner is.

In a 2013 PLOS ONE study of 12,502 couples from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, Gert Stulp and colleagues found that the gap between partners shrank by about 0.81 cm for every extra centimeter of the woman's height, and grew by about 0.84 cm for every extra centimeter of the man's height. The average mother in the sample was 163.75 cm, the average father 177.86 cm, and the mean gap 14.11 cm.

Those slopes let us sketch what the data would predict for each member of this pair:

The calculation is a simple linear extrapolation from the reported slopes, so treat it as illustrative. It shows something intuitive, though. Women of 5′6″ in the UK data tended to have partners somewhat closer to their own height than shorter women did, and men of 6′0″ tended to have partners further below them than shorter men did. This pair's 15.24 cm lands between the two predictions, a meeting point of the two tendencies.

The researchers made an important caveat: most of this pattern arises from chance alone. If people paired completely at random, taller women would still tend to have smaller gaps, simply because there are fewer men far above them. The observed slopes were only modestly steeper than random pairing would produce, which is why the authors concluded that height preferences shape real pairings "only modestly".

Assortative mating

The same study measured the overall correlation between partners' heights at r = 0.18. Each extra centimeter of a woman's height went with about 0.19 cm more height in her partner. That weak but real tendency, taller women pairing with slightly taller men on average, is visible in this comparison: a woman around the 81st percentile with a man around the 85th.

What taller women say they want

Stated preferences show the same own-height effect. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology by Katarzyna Pisanski and colleagues asked 536 people in Canada, Cuba, Norway and the United States for their preferred partner height. A rater's own height predicted their preferred partner height for both sexes and in every country, and the effect was larger for women (estimate 2.461) than for men (1.453). In plain terms, taller women's preferences shifted upward more steeply with their own height than taller men's did.

On average, women preferred men about 2.3 cm taller than the average man in their country, and men preferred women about 2.5 cm shorter than the average woman. A 5′6″ woman is taller than average, and the study's own-height effect suggests she would on average prefer a taller-than-average partner, a description that fits a 6′0″ man.

Satisfaction with one's own height

In a separate 2013 study in Personality and Individual Differences, Stulp, Abraham Buunk and Thomas Pollet looked at how satisfied people were with their own stature, combining a sample of 650 students with a previously published dataset of 52,677 people. The women most satisfied with their own height were slightly above average; the most satisfied men were tall. A 5′6″ woman and a 6′0″ man fit those descriptions closely. The same paper found that women were most satisfied with partners about 21 cm taller than themselves and men with partners about 8 cm shorter, so this pair's 15.24 cm sits between the two peaks.

Will a 6′0″ man mind a tall partner?

A 2025 UK study in Human Nature by Alexandra Dial and Gillian Brown asked 242 heterosexual adults about their minimum and maximum acceptable partner heights. Men's mean maximum acceptable partner height was 182.12 cm, far above 5′6″. Women's mean minimum acceptable partner height was 168.96 cm, comfortably below 6′0″.

The authors compared their results with an earlier US study by Salska and colleagues (2008), which, as Dial and Brown summarize it, reported that men of average height and above, 174 cm or taller, were generally unwilling to accept a taller female partner. In the 2025 UK sample that reluctance appeared only among very tall men, 190 cm and above, similar to a European study by Stulp and colleagues. None of these findings suggests any reluctance about a partner 6 inches shorter, which is what this pair represents.

Six inches in context

It helps to line this gap up against the other benchmarks the research offers:

The pair sits just above every population average and well short of the women's satisfaction peak, a long way below the 25 cm level at which UK couples became somewhat rarer than chance. In the UK data, gaps between 15 and 20 cm were slightly more common than random pairing predicts, and this pair falls at the bottom of that band. If US women and men were paired at random, the site's estimate suggests about 45% of couples would have the man at least 15.24 cm taller, so this is close to a coin-flip outcome even without any preference at work.

Danish averages

The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration's estimates for people born in 1996, based on 1,472 population studies with measured heights of more than 18.6 million people, show this pair is close to the average couple in several northern European countries:

The average couple in Denmark, at 167.2 cm and 181.4 cm, is within half a centimeter of 5′6″ on the woman's side and about 1.5 cm short of 6′0″ on the man's. NCD-RisC also notes that Danish men are among the tallest in the world, alongside the Dutch, Belgians, Estonians and Latvians, all averaging more than 181 cm.

The Danish figures also show how recently this became an ordinary pairing. NCD-RisC estimates that Danish men born in 1896 averaged 170.0 cm and women 157.1 cm. Against those averages, a 6′0″ man would have stood almost 13 cm above the typical man of his generation and a 5′6″ woman more than 10 cm above the typical woman. In the United States, where gains over the century were the smallest of any high-income country according to the same study, men born in 1896 averaged 171.1 cm and women 158.5 cm, and the 1996 averages are 177.1 cm and 163.5 cm. The American pair at these heights has therefore stayed tall across the century, while the Danish pair went from exceptional to typical.

Standing together

With average body proportions, a 6′0″ person's eyes sit at about 171 cm, the chin at about 159 cm and the shoulders near 150 cm. A 5′6″ head reaches 167.6 cm, around the taller person's mouth and a little below the nose. The two eye lines are about 14.3 cm apart. At a normal conversation distance of about 76 cm, the shorter person looks up at roughly 11°; at a close 46 cm, about 17°.

A 2-inch heel on the 5′6″ partner brings the gap down to 4 inches, and a 3-inch heel to 3 inches, at which point the two are close to eye to eye.

Fit and sizing

A 5′6″ woman sits between standard misses sizing, which is described as designed for women of about average height, around 5′4″, and tall sizing, which usually starts around 5′8″. The 1971 PS 42-70 misses table assumed heights of 5′2.5″ to 5′6.5″, so 5′6″ was at its upper edge. A 6′0″ man fits standard men's sizes, often near the longest regular inseams.

Famous people near 6′0″

Celebrity heights are approximate. None of the people with pages here is listed at exactly 5′6″. Near 6′0″, Joe Biden and Allen Iverson are listed at about 183 cm.

Related comparisons

Raising the taller side by two inches gives 5′6″ vs 6′2″, an 8-inch gap. Lowering the shorter side by an inch gives 5′5″ vs 6′0″. The height percentile calculator shows where any height falls by age and sex.