5′5″ in cm = 165.1 cm

Converting 5′5″ to metric

Five feet five inches is 65 inches: five feet of 12 inches each makes 60, and adding 5 gives 65. Multiplying by 2.54 gives 165.1 cm, or 1.651 m. The National Institute of Standards and Technology explains that the inch has been exactly 2.54 cm since the international yard was fixed at 0.9144 meters, announced in the United States in 1959, so 165.1 cm is exact rather than rounded.

That single decimal makes 5′5″ unusually easy to round. 165.1 cm becomes 165 cm, and 165 cm converts back to 64.96 inches, which rounds to 5′5″ again. You will see the two values used interchangeably, and in practice the tenth of a centimeter separating them is about the thickness of a sheet of thin cardboard. The 165 cm page covers the same height from the metric side.

The decimal-feet figure catches people out. 5′5″ is 5.417 feet, not 5.5 feet; "5.5 feet" means five and a half feet, which is 5′6″ (167.64 cm).

How 5′5″ compares with American adults

The CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey measured the height of a nationally representative sample of US adults between August 2021 and August 2023. Its published percentile table, interpolated, puts 165.1 cm here:

For a woman, 5′5″ is comfortably above the middle. Overall, a 5′5″ woman is taller than about 70% of American women; among women in their twenties, who are on average the tallest age group, she is around the 59th percentile, just over the median. Among women in their seventies, she stands taller than nearly nine in ten.

For a man, 5′5″ falls at roughly the 10th percentile overall: about one American man in ten is this height or shorter. The 10th percentile value in NHANES for men aged 20 and over was 165.2 cm, a millimeter above 5′5″. As with every age comparison in a single survey, the older groups mix two effects, gradual height loss with age and the shorter average stature of people born earlier, and the survey cannot separate them. The height percentile calculator lets you check any height against these tables.

The Rockettes and the 5′5″ minimum

Few organizations have tied themselves to specific heights as publicly as the Radio City Rockettes, and 5′5″ is now a landmark in that history. The precision line was designed to give the impression that every dancer is the same height, and the permitted range has moved several times:

The shifts mirror the broader rise in women's heights over the twentieth century. A dancer at 5′5″ would have been at the tall end of the troupe in its early years, was admissible in the 1960s, was excluded for decades afterward, and is eligible again today. The troupe's founder, Russell Markert, had wanted a line of tall, long-legged dancers capable of eye-high kicks, and the modern range reflects that aim while allowing the line to read as uniform from the audience.

A 5′5″ career in the NBA

Earl Boykins, listed at 5′5″ (1.65 m), is the second-shortest player in NBA history behind 5′3″ Muggsy Bogues. He played for teams including the Cleveland Cavaliers, Golden State Warriors, Denver Nuggets, Milwaukee Bucks and Houston Rockets, as well as in the Continental Basketball Association and in Italy. On November 11, 2004, he scored 32 points in a Nuggets home win over the Detroit Pistons, making him the shortest player in league history to score 30 or more in a game.

There is a family echo of 5′5″ in Bogues's story too: his father was 5′5″ and his mother 4′11″. Both players illustrate the same point about basketball. Everyone listed at 5′9″ or below in NBA history has played point guard, where ball handling, speed and court vision can offset a height disadvantage that would be decisive closer to the basket.

Famous people listed at 5′5″

The site's catalog lists a broad cross-section of people at 165 cm. With their own pages: singer Bruno Mars and singer and actress Selena Gomez, both at 165.1 cm, actor Daniel Radcliffe and footballer Diego Maradona, both at 165 cm. The same listed height covers Marilyn Monroe, Margaret Thatcher, Emma Watson, Natalie Portman and Kendrick Lamar, which is a fair indication of how ordinary 5′5″ is for both women and men in public life.

5′5″ in an international frame

The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, which pooled measured heights from more than 18.6 million people in 200 countries, provides the birth-cohort averages this site uses for country pages. For people born in 1996:

The symmetry is striking. In much of Western Europe and in Australia, 5′5″ is almost exactly the average young woman. In Peru, India and Nigeria, it is almost exactly the average young man. The same height would draw no attention in either setting, but for opposite reasons.

When 5′5″ was an average man's height

The same NCD-RisC dataset follows birth cohorts back to 1896, and it shows how recently 5′5″ was typical for men in Europe. Italian men born in 1896 averaged 164.7 cm, a few millimeters under 5′5″. French men of that cohort averaged 166.4 cm, British men 166.9 cm and German men 167.2 cm. In other words, a 5′5″ man born at the end of the nineteenth century would have been close to the middle of the crowd in Rome or Paris.

Over the following century, Italian and French men gained roughly 13 cm each, carrying their averages past 5′10″. Japanese men born in 1896 averaged only 156.2 cm, so 5′5″ would have made someone of that generation notably tall; their grandsons born in 1956 averaged 169.3 cm. The NCD-RisC authors identify South Korean women and Iranian men as the groups with the largest gains of the century, 20.2 cm and 16.5 cm respectively. Height is a sensitive marker of childhood nutrition and health, which is why these curves track economic development so closely.

Getting an accurate 5′5″

Because a single inch separates 5′4″, 5′5″ and 5′6″, a careful measurement is worth the effort. The Rockettes measure dancers in stocking feet, and that is the right standard at home too: no shoes, heels together against a wall, eyes looking straight ahead and a flat object lowered onto the crown. Measure around midday. Research on schoolchildren in Southampton found that stature falls by roughly half a centimeter during the morning and then stabilizes after about six hours out of bed. Self-reports tend to drift upward; validation studies cited in a large UK couples study found men overstate by about 1.2 cm and women by about 0.6 cm on average. If a measurement comes out at 164.5 cm, 5′5″ is still the honest rounded figure.

Growing to 5′5″

The CDC 2000 stature-for-age charts, which span ages 2 to 20, give these ages for reaching 165.1 cm:

• Boys, median: about 14 years 2 months. The median boy is still growing and finishes near 176.8 cm by 20.
• Boys, 95th percentile: about 12½ years.
• Girls, 95th percentile: about 12 years 5 months.
• Girls, median: the median curve never reaches 5′5″; it levels off at about 163.3 cm by age 20.

So for girls, reaching 5′5″ means ending up a little above the median, at about the 61st percentile on the age-20 chart. For boys, 5′5″ at age 20 sits around the 5th percentile. Growth charts describe a reference population; questions about a specific child's growth are best taken to a pediatrician.

Practical life at 5′5″

Clothing. US petite lines are cut for women about 5′4″ (163 cm) and under, so 5′5″ usually falls just outside. Petite sizing also considers proportions, such as shorter limbs and a shorter back, so a 5′5″ woman with a short torso may still prefer petite tops while buying regular trousers. Men at 5′5″ face the opposite issue: regular inseams are often too long, and "short" lengths are offered by some brands.

Horse racing. There is no height limit for jockeys, but low racing weights mean that flat jockeys typically stand between about 4′10″ and 5′7″. At 5′5″ you would be near the upper middle of that range, with weight being the real constraint.

Cabin crew. Airlines that keep height or reach rules usually want flight attendants to be above about 152 cm (5′0″) and below about 185 cm, so that every crew member can reach overhead safety equipment; regional carriers with low ceilings may set narrower limits. At 165.1 cm, a 5′5″ applicant sits in the middle of that typical window. The rules were once far stricter and more about appearance: an early airline description of its hostesses required heights between 5′0″ and 5′4″, which would have excluded a 5′5″ applicant by an inch.

Work and pay. Economists have studied whether height pays. One 2004 study, published in the Journal of Political Economy, estimated that each extra inch of height was associated with about 1.8% higher wages for men, and found that height at age 16 predicted adult wages, suggesting that social experiences in adolescence play a role. These are averages across large samples and say little about any one person's prospects.

5′5″ against other heights

Because an inch is 2.54 cm, 5′5″ is 2.54 cm taller than 5′4″, the conventional edge of petite sizing, and 2.54 cm shorter than 5′6″. Next to the median American man (175.2 cm) a 5′5″ person is about 10 cm, or 4 inches, shorter, and next to a 6′0″ partner the gap is 7 inches (17.78 cm), a pairing shown to scale on the 5′5″ vs 6′0″ page. For any other comparison, the height difference calculator draws both figures and estimates where one reaches on the other.