5′10″ in cm = 177.8 cm

Converting 5′10″ to centimeters

Five feet ten inches is 70 inches (5 × 12 = 60, plus 10). Multiplying by 2.54 gives 177.8 cm, or 1.778 m, usually written 1.78 m. That figure is exact. The National Institute of Standards and Technology explains that the inch has been defined as exactly 0.0254 meters since the international yard was fixed at 0.9144 meters in 1959.

Rounding is gentle here. 177.8 cm rounds to 178 cm, which converts back to 70.08 inches, still 5′10″. On the other side, 177 cm is 69.69 inches, which also rounds to 5′10″. So both 177 and 178 cm are consistent with a 5′10″ listing, and you will see both on celebrity profiles. The metric perspective is on the 178 cm page.

A frequent error is to treat 5′10″ as "5.10 feet." In decimal feet, 5.10 is barely over 5′1″; the correct decimal form of 5′10″ is 5.833 ft.

5′10″ among American adults

The CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey measured standing height in a representative sample of US adults from August 2021 to August 2023. Interpolating its published percentiles:

For men, 5′10″ is modestly above average. It is about 2.6 cm (one inch) taller than the overall median of 175.2 cm, which places it around the 63rd percentile, and among men under 50 it sits in the high 50s. Among men in their seventies and eighties it climbs toward the top fifth, partly because people lose some height with age and partly because older cohorts grew up shorter; a single survey cannot separate the two.

For women, 5′10″ is rare. The 95th percentile for US women aged 20 and over was 172.5 cm, more than 5 cm below 5′10″. On the CDC growth chart for age 20, 5′10″ is close to the 99th percentile for young women. The height percentile calculator runs the same comparison for any height.

The typical young man in much of the West

5′10″ deserves the label "average" more in international comparisons than in the US survey. The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration combined height measurements from more than 18.6 million people across 200 countries to estimate mean height by birth year. For men born in 1996, several Western countries land within a centimeter of 5′10″:

The NHANES median for all American men is lower, at 175.2 cm, because it includes older men alongside younger ones. Looking only at the young, the CDC 2000 growth charts give a median of about 176.8 cm at age 20, and the UK Millennium Cohort Study, which surveyed parents of babies born in 2000, recorded fathers averaging 177.86 cm by self-report. All of these point to 5′10″ as a fair description of a typical young man in the English-speaking world.

The 1852 election: 5′10″ against 6′5″

American presidential history includes a vivid 5′10″ episode. In 1852, Franklin Pierce, listed at 5′10″ (178 cm), defeated Winfield Scott, who at 6′5″ (196 cm) remains the tallest presidential candidate in US history. The result is a useful corrective to the popular claim that the taller candidate always wins. A 2013 study summarized in the same reference found that significantly taller candidates were more likely to win the popular vote but were not more likely to win the presidency, with the number of taller winners not differing significantly from chance.

The average height of US presidents is about 5′11″, so a 5′10″ president sits just an inch below the presidential norm. On this site, Calvin Coolidge, Andrew Johnson and Franklin Pierce are all listed at 178 cm, and Jimmy Carter at 177 cm.

Famous people listed at 5′10″

The site has five people with their own pages listed at 177.8 to 178 cm: actress and singer Zendaya, actor Timothée Chalamet, rapper Megan Thee Stallion, footballer Kylian Mbappé and actor Johnny Depp. Tennis champion Serena Williams is often quoted at 5′10″ too, but this site follows her WTA listing of 5′9″. That two of the most prominent women on the list share a listed height with Chalamet and Mbappé shows how tall 5′10″ is for a woman, given that it is above the 95th percentile.

The wider catalog adds King Charles III and Narendra Modi at 178 cm, Bill Gates and Robert De Niro at 177 cm, and Jimi Hendrix at 177.8 cm.

Height bands that end near 5′10″

Several professions with published height ranges put 5′10″ at or near the top.

The Rockettes. For decades before 2022, Radio City's Rockettes had to be 5′6″ to 5′10½″ in stocking feet. A 5′10″ dancer is therefore half an inch below the maximum, among the tallest in the line. The narrow range exists to make the line look uniform from the audience, and in 2022 the troupe lowered its minimum to 5′5″ while keeping the maximum.

Fashion modeling. The British Association of Model Agents gives 5′8″ to 5′11″ for female models, so a 5′10″ woman sits comfortably in the range. For men the picture is reversed: commonly cited male model guidance is 5′11″ to 6′2″, and fashion agencies often look for 6′1″ and up, which puts a 5′10″ man just short.

Horse racing. Flat jockeys typically stand between 4′10″ and 5′7″, but jump racing allows heavier weights, and jump jockeys are often taller, with multiple examples over 5′10″.

How long 5′10″ has been "average"

The NCD-RisC birth-cohort series shows that 5′10″ became typical for men in Western Europe surprisingly recently. Italian men are the clearest example, because their 1996 cohort averages exactly 177.8 cm:

An Italian man born in 1896 who stood 5′10″ was about 13 cm, or 5 inches, taller than the average man of his generation, which would have made him unusually tall. American men reached roughly 5′10″ on average with the 1956 cohort and have hovered around it since, while French men passed it with the 1976 cohort and kept going. The NCD-RisC authors describe height as associated with longevity, education and earnings, and they found that the gap between the tallest and shortest national populations has not narrowed over the century, even as rankings shuffled.

Cockpits and capsules

Historic height limits in flight were set by the size of the vehicle, and 5′10″ fell inside them. When NASA chose its first astronauts in 1959, candidates had to be shorter than 5′11″ to fit inside the Mercury capsule. The seven men selected ranged from Gus Grissom at 5′7″ to Alan Shepard at the 5′11″ limit, so a 5′10″ pilot would have qualified with an inch to spare. Modern airline cabin crew rules are about reaching safety equipment rather than fitting a seat, and typically fall somewhere between 152 cm and 185 cm, which also includes 5′10″.

Growing to 5′10″

On the CDC 2000 stature-for-age charts, the US reference for ages 2 to 20, 177.8 cm is crossed:

• Boys, 95th percentile: at about 14 years 2 months.
• Boys, median: never quite; the median curve ends at about 176.8 cm at age 20, roughly 1 cm short of 5′10″.
• Girls: no standard percentile curve up to the 95th reaches 5′10″ by age 20.

On the age-20 chart, 5′10″ equals about the 55th percentile for young men. These are reference curves describing a population, not targets for any individual, and questions about a child's growth should go to a pediatrician.

5′10″ and couple heights

Several of the featured comparison pages pair 5′10″ with a shorter partner: 5′3″ vs 5′10″, a 7-inch (17.78 cm) gap, 5′2″ vs 5′10″, and 5′4″ vs 5′10″. Those gaps bracket the average difference within real couples. In the UK Millennium Cohort Study, which covered more than 12,500 heterosexual parent couples, the mean height difference was 14.11 cm, about 5½ inches, and the man was taller in 92.5% of couples.

A meta-analysis by Gert Stulp and colleagues pooled 154 correlations between partners' heights from studies around the world and found that 148 were positive, with an overall correlation of about 0.23. That indicates modest assortative mating, meaning taller people tend to pair with taller partners, but only weakly. The authors concluded that height does not appear to be a major factor in mate choice, and they found no evidence that the strength of the pattern had changed over time.

For a 5′10″ woman, the arithmetic is notable. Because 5′10″ is the 63rd percentile for men, roughly six in ten American men are 5′10″ or shorter, so pairings in which she is the taller partner are far more common than the national 7.5% figure would suggest. For a 5′10″ man, nearly every woman is shorter, and the UK study's observation that couples rarely exceed a 25 cm gap would only apply with a partner under about 153 cm (5′0″).

Measuring 5′10″ accurately

The window that rounds to 5′10″ is only 2.54 cm wide, so measure carefully. Stand barefoot with heels, buttocks and shoulder blades touching a wall, look straight ahead, and lower a flat, rigid object onto the crown; mark and measure to the floor. Avoid first-thing-in-the-morning readings. A Southampton study found that stature fell by about half a centimeter over the morning and then stabilized after roughly six hours out of bed. It is also worth checking a long-remembered number. Validation studies cited by the UK couples researchers found that men overstate their height by about 1.2 cm on average and women by about 0.6 cm, with larger errors after fifty. A man who has always said "5′10″" might measure 177 cm, which still rounds to 5′10″, or 176 cm, which is closer to 5′9″. For any side-by-side comparison, the height difference calculator draws two figures to scale and estimates where one person's head reaches on the other.