Feet and Inches to cm Chart

Converting feet and inches to centimeters

If you think in feet and inches, this hub is your bridge to the metric system. The chart lists every height from 4′0″ to 7′6″, one inch at a time, with its exact value in centimeters and meters. Sixteen of the most searched heights, from 4′11″ to 6′5″, have dedicated pages that work through the arithmetic and show the height to scale beside average adults and well-known people.

The formula takes one line:

cm = (feet × 12 + inches) × 2.54

For 5′7″: 5 × 12 = 60, plus 7 makes 67 inches, and 67 × 2.54 = 170.18 cm.

Why the answer is always exact

The factor 2.54 is a definition, not a measurement. According to NIST, a 1958 conference of English-speaking nations agreed to define the yard as exactly 0.9144 meters, announced in the United States in Federal Register Notice 59-5442 and effective July 1, 1959. Since a yard is 36 inches, one inch is exactly 0.0254 meters, or 2.54 centimeters.

A neat consequence follows. Because 2.54 has only two decimal places, every whole-inch height converts to a centimeter value with at most two decimal places, and the conversion never needs rounding to be exact. 5′0″ is exactly 152.4 cm, 5′10″ is exactly 177.8 cm and 6′0″ is exactly 182.88 cm. Rounding only enters when you choose to state the result as a whole number of centimeters. Going in the other direction, from centimeters to inches, almost never comes out even, which is why the cm to feet chart shows a decimal inch for every value.

Half and quarter inches

Fractions of an inch are common in medical and sports measurements. They convert just as cleanly:

So 5′7½″ is 170.18 + 1.27 = 171.45 cm, and 6′0¼″ is 183.515 cm. The height converter accepts decimal inches directly if you prefer to type 67.5.

The featured heights in context

A conversion tells you what a height is in metric units. The table below adds what it means. Percentiles come from the CDC's NHANES survey for August 2021 to August 2023, which measured US adults aged 20 and over, and the famous examples are featured people listed on the site at or within a centimeter of each height.

Several useful facts fall out of this table:

• 5′9″ is the median American man. NHANES measured the median at 175.2 cm, which is within a millimeter of 5′9″ (175.26 cm).
• 5′3″ to 5′4″ is the typical American woman. The median woman measured 161.2 cm, about 5′3.5″.
• 6 feet is roughly the top 15% of men. At about the 85th percentile, 6′0″ is tall but not rare; around one American man in seven reaches it.
• Heights from 5′8″ up are above the 95th percentile for women. A woman of 5′8″ is taller than about 19 in 20 American women.

Percentiles here are interpolated between the published 5th to 95th percentile values, matching the method used on each height page. The height percentile calculator gives an exact estimate for any height and age group.

Where the foot and inch came from

Feet and inches are among the oldest units still in daily use. The Roman foot, or pes, was normally about 295.7 mm, slightly shorter than today's foot, and the Romans divided it into 12 unciae. The English words "inch" and "ounce" both descend from uncia, which is why there are 12 inches in a foot rather than 10.

England's foot had a more tangled history. A longer foot of about 335 mm, associated with Belgic or North German peoples, was used in early medieval England, and a statute from around 1300 fixed a new statute foot at exactly 10/11 of that older length. An act of 1593 then defined the statute mile as 5,280 feet. For centuries, British and American feet were tied to physical standards kept in each country, and by the twentieth century they differed by a few parts per million. The 1959 international agreement ended that, defining the foot as exactly 0.3048 meters; the UK adopted it in law through the Weights and Measures Act 1963, effective January 1, 1964. The last holdout, the US survey foot used in land surveying, was retired at the end of 2022.

Children's heights in feet and inches

Parents in the US often hear their child's height in feet and inches at checkups, while the growth chart itself is drawn in centimeters. The CDC's 2000 growth charts give these median heights, shown here in both systems:

The table shows the familiar pattern of girls briefly overtaking boys around age 12, then boys pulling ahead through their mid-teens as girls approach adult height. Many of the shorter heights in this hub's chart, from 4′0″ to about 4′11″, are therefore most often looked up for children. The site's growth chart and height calculator explain how a child's percentile is calculated.

Where feet and inches are still used

The United States is the main country where everyday height is stated in feet and inches, although the system has been formally defined in metric terms since the nineteenth century. Usage is split even within the US: American doctors typically discuss height with patients in feet and inches, while clinic records are often kept in centimeters, and body mass index is always expressed in kilograms per square meter. In the UK, Ireland and Canada, official documents and health records are largely metric, but many people still describe their own height in feet and inches in conversation.

That split is why conversions come up so often. Typical situations include:

• Travel and visas. Most countries' forms ask for height in centimeters.
• Medical records abroad. A clinic outside the US will usually record your height in cm.
• Online shopping. European size charts use centimeters, especially for children's clothing and for long or short leg lengths.
• Comparing athletes. American leagues list players in feet and inches, while European clubs, the Olympics and international federations use centimeters.

Feet and inches to meters

Some forms, and every BMI formula, want height in meters rather than centimeters. The step is trivial, divide centimeters by 100, but it is worth seeing how the numbers line up, because squaring the height in meters is where small conversion errors grow:

If you round 5′9″ to 1.7 m instead of 1.753 m before squaring, the squared value drops from 3.07 to 2.89, and a calculated BMI rises by about 6%, enough to move someone across a category boundary. Converting precisely from total inches avoids that. The site's height and weight chart applies exactly these conversions for every inch from 4′10″ to 6′6″.

How accurate are the heights people quote?

A conversion is exact, but the starting number often is not. Three common issues affect the feet-and-inches heights people state.

Self-reported heights drift upward

A 2024 systematic review in the journal Nutrients found that self-reported and measured heights agree well overall, but that men tend to overreport their height. A 2018 meta-analysis of 21 studies covering 18,749 women of reproductive age found self-reported height averaged 0.36 cm above measured height. The average effect is small, a fraction of an inch, but heights that cluster on round numbers such as 6′0″ and 5′10″ are a familiar sign of rounding up.

Listed sports heights vary

Athletes' listed heights have not always been measured the same way. Wikipedia's list of the tallest NBA players notes that official NBA sources have listed Manute Bol at both 7′6″ and 7′7″, and that Slavko Vraneš, officially listed at 7′5″ while playing, is given as 7′6″ by most sources today. When a famous person's height is quoted in feet and inches, treat it as a listing to be checked, not a laboratory measurement. Individual celebrity pages on the site, such as Taylor Swift's, explain where each figure comes from.

Bodies change through the day

Height falls slightly after you get up, as the discs of the spine compress. A study in Archives of Disease in Childhood found most of the daily loss in children happened during the morning, with little further change after about six hours. Measured in the morning, you may be a quarter inch or more taller than in the evening. For the most consistent result, measure at the same time of day.

Common mistakes when converting feet to cm

• Treating decimal feet as feet and inches. 5.5 feet is five and a half feet, which is 5′6″ or 167.64 cm, not 5′5″. When someone writes "5.5," check which they mean.
• Multiplying feet by 30 instead of 30.48. It understates every height: 6 × 30 = 180 cm, but 6 feet is 182.88 cm, almost 3 cm more.
• Forgetting to add the inches before multiplying. Converting 5′7″ as 5 × 30.48 + 7 gives a meaningless 159.4. The inches must be converted too: 152.4 + 7 × 2.54 = 170.18 cm.
• Entering 5′10″ as 5.10 in a decimal field. In a calculator that expects decimal feet, 5.10 means 5.1 feet, or 155.4 cm, more than 22 cm short of the real 177.8 cm. Convert to total inches first (70) and multiply by 2.54.
• Rounding the feet first. Calling 5′11″ "about 6 feet" and converting gives 182.88 cm, which overstates the real 180.34 cm by more than 2.5 cm.

Choosing how to state the result

Once converted, decide how precise to be. For most purposes, the nearest whole centimeter is right: 5′9″ becomes 175 cm, 5′11″ becomes 180 cm and 6′2″ becomes 188 cm. Medical and research settings usually record heights to the nearest millimeter or half centimeter, but only when the measurement itself was taken with a proper stadiometer. Quoting 175.26 cm for a remembered height of 5′9″ suggests a precision that the original number never had. The reverse also applies: if your metric height was measured carefully, keep the decimal when you convert, and round once at the end.

Using the chart and the height pages

The chart on this page lists all 43 heights from 4′0″ to 7′6″ with exact centimeters and meters. Linked heights open a dedicated page that shows the conversion step by step, decimal feet, the height's US percentile for men and women, a to-scale drawing next to an average adult and featured people listed at that height. To compare two heights instead of converting one, use the height difference calculator, and to see a converted height beside celebrities, characters or friends, open the 3D height comparison tool.