5′6″ vs 6′2″ Height Difference

Converting both heights

Five feet six inches is 66 inches and six feet two is 74. Because the inch is exactly 25.4 mm, the definition NIST traces to the 1959 international yard agreement, the heights are 167.64 cm and 187.96 cm. The difference is 8 inches, or 20.32 cm. The taller person is 12.1% taller (74 ÷ 66 ≈ 1.121).

For more on each height, see 5′6″ in cm and 6′2″ in cm.

A tall couple by any measure

Both people here 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, the 85th percentile for women aged 20 and older is 66.4 inches, putting 5′6″ around the 81st percentile. For men, the 95th percentile is 73.7 inches, so a 6′2″ man is taller than about 95% of American men.

The age breakdown adds nuance. Among men aged 20 to 29 the 95th percentile is 74.1 inches, and among men aged 40 to 49 it is 74.8 inches, so a 6′2″ man in those age groups sits right at the top-5% boundary rather than above it. Among women aged 20 to 29, the 75th percentile is 66.2 inches and the 85th is 67.2, so a young 5′6″ woman is a little less exceptional than the all-ages figure suggests, around the 75th to 80th percentile.

Compared with the national averages, both partners are tall, but not by the same amount. The woman is about 6.4 cm above the mean US woman (161.2 cm); the man is about 12.9 cm above the mean US man (175.1 cm). That imbalance is why the gap here, 20.32 cm, is wider than the average US difference of 13.9 cm.

Do tall people pair with tall people?

The tendency of similar people to form couples is called assortative mating, and height is one of the traits where it has been measured most carefully. In a 2013 PLOS ONE study of 12,502 couples from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, Gert Stulp and colleagues found a correlation of r = 0.18 between partners' heights. Put as a slope, a woman 1 cm taller than another tended to have a partner about 0.19 cm taller, and a man 1 cm taller tended to have a partner about 0.17 cm taller.

That is weak. It means a tall woman is only slightly more likely than chance to have a tall partner. A 5′6″ woman and a 6′2″ man illustrate the tendency, but the correlation also implies that many tall women have average-height partners, and many tall men have shorter partners.

Where the correlation could come from

The researchers ran a revealing set of simulations. If couples formed purely under a rule that the man must be taller, the partners' heights would correlate at about r = 0.34. If they formed under a rule that the man must not be more than 25 cm taller, the correlation would be about r = 0.47. Both values are higher than the observed 0.18. In other words, either rule on its own, applied strictly, would create more assortment than actually exists. Real couples behave as though they follow these patterns loosely, which matches the authors' conclusion that height preferences affect real pairings "only modestly".

Homogamy in preferences

Preferences point in the same direction. In a 2010 paper in Evolution, Alexandre Courtiol and colleagues ran paired-choice experiments with 200 people in France. Attractiveness judgments depended on both the rater's height and the target's height, and the authors found homogamy in the preferences of both sexes: a tendency to favor partners somewhat similar to themselves, alongside a general preference for partners taller than average. Women and men also disagreed in their preferences, which the authors framed as a conflict in mutual mate choice.

Bogusław Pawłowski had argued in 2003, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, that people adjust their preferred height ratio to their own stature, widening their pool of potential partners and producing nonlinear assortative mating. A tall woman who held out for the same ratio as a short woman would face a very small pool of suitable men.

Preferences at the tall end

A 2025 UK study in Human Nature by Alexandra Dial and Gillian Brown provides useful numbers for tall pairings. Among 242 heterosexual adults:

A 6′2″ man is about 6.7 cm taller than the women's mean ideal but 4.8 cm below their mean maximum. A 5′6″ woman is about 0.8 cm taller than the men's mean ideal and well within their acceptable range. This pair's ratio, 1.121, is a little above the women's ideal.

Dial and Brown also compared their findings with an earlier US study by Salska and colleagues (2008), which, as they summarize it, found that men of average height and above, 174 cm or taller, were generally unwilling to accept a taller partner. In the 2025 UK data, that reluctance appeared only among very tall men, 190 cm and above, consistent with a European study by Stulp and colleagues. A 6′2″ man is just below that 190 cm threshold, and the question doesn't arise for a partner 8 inches shorter.

An 8-inch gap in the couple data

How does a 20.32 cm gap compare with what real couples do? In the UK Millennium Cohort data analyzed by Stulp and colleagues, the mean gap was 14.11 cm with a standard deviation of 9.25 cm, so this pair is about two-thirds of a standard deviation wider than average. Gaps of 5 to 20 cm were more common than random pairing would predict, while gaps of 25 cm or more were slightly rarer: 13.9% of couples against 15.7% expected. At just over 20 cm, this pair sits at the upper edge of the common range and comfortably below the point where couples thin out.

The gap also lands close to a preference peak. In a separate 2013 study in Personality and Individual Differences, Stulp, Abraham Buunk and Thomas Pollet found that women were most satisfied with partners about 21 cm taller than themselves, and men with partners about 8 cm shorter. The same paper reported that tall men were the most satisfied with their own height, and women slightly above average the most satisfied with theirs, which describes both members of this pair.

If US women and men were paired at random, the site's estimate from NHANES distributions suggests about 27% of couples would have the man at least 20.3 cm taller.

Taller than any national average

The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration pooled 1,472 population studies with measured heights of more than 18.6 million people to estimate national averages by birth year. For people born in 1996, the tallest men were in the Netherlands, averaging about 182.5 cm, followed by Belgium, Estonia, Latvia and Denmark, all above 181 cm. No country's average man reaches 6′2″; even the Dutch average is about 5.5 cm shorter.

On the women's side, the tallest averages, in Latvia, the Netherlands, Estonia and the Czech Republic, all exceed 168 cm, slightly above 5′6″. So a 5′6″ woman is close to average in the world's tallest female populations, while a 6′2″ man is tall even there.

Our World in Data, which presents the same NCD-RisC series, describes the Netherlands as the tallest population in the world and notes that Dutch height increases have stalled in recent cohorts. The NCD-RisC estimates show Dutch men born in 1976 and 1996 both averaging 182.5 cm, so a 6′2″ man is not becoming any more ordinary there.

The same data show how much the reference point has moved. Dutch men born in 1896 averaged 169.4 cm and women 154.8 cm. Against those figures, a 6′2″ man would have been nearly 19 cm above average and a 5′6″ woman almost 13 cm above, a strikingly tall couple for the time. Our World in Data adds that the gap between the tallest and shortest world regions widened over the century for men, from about 8 cm to 12 cm, with European and Central Asian men making the largest gains and overtaking North American men along the way.

Standing together

With average body proportions, a 6′2″ person's eyes are at about 176 cm, the chin at about 163.5 cm and the shoulders near 154 cm. A 5′6″ head reaches 167.6 cm, around the taller person's mouth, roughly 4 cm above the chin. The eye lines differ by about 19 cm. At a normal conversation distance of about 76 cm, that means an upward gaze of roughly 14°; at a close 46 cm, about 22°.

Footwear narrows that quickly. Women's standard ballroom shoes typically have a 2 to 2.5-inch heel; in a 2-inch heel, a 5′6″ woman stands 5′8″ and the gap to a barefoot 6′2″ partner shrinks to 6 inches, with her eyes at about 161.7 cm, just below his chin.

Sizing

A 5′6″ woman sits between US misses sizing, described as designed for women of about average height, around 5′4″, and tall sizing, which usually begins around 5′8″. The same reference notes that taller women may find their size and height addressed by manufacturers less often, though at 5′6″ most women still fit regular lengths. A 6′2″ partner faces the more pressing version of that problem. A 6′2″ man is taller than about 95% of US men, so regular sizes designed around the middle of the distribution are more likely to run short in the sleeve and inseam.

Famous people near 6′2″

Celebrity heights are approximate. None of the people with pages on this site is listed at exactly 5′6″. Near 6′2″, Barack Obama is listed at 187 cm, and Adam Driver and Bill Clinton at 189 cm.

Related comparisons

Narrowing the gap on the taller side gives 5′6″ vs 6′0″, a 6-inch difference. Raising the shorter side gives 5′8″ vs 6′2″, also 6 inches. The 3D button above puts this pair side by side in the main comparison tool.