5′7″ in cm = 170.18 cm

From 5′7″ to centimeters

Five feet seven inches is 67 inches: 5 × 12 = 60, plus 7 = 67. Multiply by 2.54 and you get 170.18 cm, or 1.70 m. The National Institute of Standards and Technology explains that the inch has been exactly 0.0254 meters since the international yard was defined in 1959, so the result needs no rounding.

The near miss with 170 cm is what makes 5′7″ memorable in metric countries. The two values differ by 1.8 millimeters, less than the thickness of a coin, and in everyday use they are interchangeable. 170 cm converts back to 66.93 inches, which rounds to 5′7″; 171 cm is 67.32 inches, which also rounds to 5′7″. The metric view is on the 170 cm page.

5′7″ on the American height curve

The CDC's NHANES survey for August 2021 to August 2023 measured standing height in a nationally representative sample of US adults. Interpolating between its published percentiles:

For men, 5′7″ is a little over 5 cm (2 inches) below the national median. Roughly one American man in four is 5′7″ or shorter. Among men in their twenties and forties, the proportion is closer to one in five; among men over 80, 5′7″ is the median itself, since that group measured 169.9 cm at the 50th percentile. The age pattern reflects both height loss later in life and the fact that older Americans were born when average stature was lower, effects a single cross-sectional survey cannot pull apart.

For women, 5′7″ is tall: taller than about 89% of American women aged 20 and over and about 83% of women in their twenties. The 90th percentile for women was 170.4 cm, essentially the same height. The height percentile calculator performs the same calculation for any age band.

Astronauts: the shortest of the Mercury Seven

When NASA picked its first astronauts in 1959, height was a hard engineering constraint. According to NASA's own history of astronaut selection, the first astronauts had to be shorter than 5′11″ to fit in the Mercury spacecraft. Of the 69 military test pilots screened in the second round, six were eliminated for exceeding the height limit.

Within the group that was chosen, the range ran from 5′7″ to the 5′11″ maximum. Gus Grissom was the shortest at 5′7″ (1.70 m), and Alan Shepard the tallest, right at the limit. Weight was less fixed than height, because candidates could lose weight, but the capsule set a 180-pound ceiling. Modern NASA astronaut requirements focus on degrees, experience and passing the long-duration flight physical rather than a single height cutoff.

Basketball at 5′7″

Two of the most celebrated short players in basketball history stood 5′7″.

Spud Webb. Usually listed as a 5′7″ (170 cm) point guard, although this site's catalog records him at 168 cm and scouting reports around his draft gave 5′6″, Webb played college basketball at Midland College and North Carolina State before a career with four NBA teams. He won the 1986 NBA Slam Dunk Contest, one of the most famous upsets in the event's history, and he had been able to dunk since high school, when he was only 5′3″. Most scouts had expected him to play in Europe or with the Harlem Globetrotters.

Yuki Kawamura. As of the 2025–26 season, the Japanese guard, listed at 5′7″ (1.70 m), is the shortest active NBA player and the only active player listed below 5′9″. Only 27 players at or below 5′9″ have ever played in the league, all of them point guards.

The old American Basketball Association had its own 5′7″ footnote: the shortest players to sign with ABA teams, Jerry Dover and Monte Towe, were both 5′7″.

Famous people listed at 5′7″

This site's catalog holds dozens of people at 170 to 171 cm. Those with their own pages include actor Tom Cruise, listed at 170 cm, singer Beyoncé at 170.2 cm, and model Emily Ratajkowski at 170 cm, as well as two presidents, John Adams at 170 cm and his son John Quincy Adams at 171 cm. Elsewhere in the catalog at the same listed height are Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Audrey Hepburn, Céline Dion, Lana Del Rey, Mark Zuckerberg, William McKinley and Rishi Sunak.

Napoleon, the man most associated with the "short" stereotype, may belong here too. Estimates of his height range from about 1.67 m to 1.70 m; historians who favor the higher figure point out that he was measured on Saint Helena decades after France adopted the metric system. Either way, he was close to average for his time.

5′7″ in the global picture

The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration pooled height measurements from more than 18.6 million people in 200 countries. Its estimates for adults born in 1996 show 5′7″ in a range of roles:

A 5′7″ man would be at the national average in Japan, and a 5′7″ woman at the national average in Latvia, whose young women are among the tallest in the world. Japanese men born in 1996 are only marginally taller than those born in 1976, who averaged 171.4 cm; Japan's large height gains happened earlier in the century.

Growing to 5′7″

On the CDC 2000 stature-for-age charts, the US reference for ages 2 to 20, 170.18 cm is reached at these ages:

• Boys, median: about 15 years 1 month.
• Boys, 95th percentile: about 13 years 2 months.
• Girls, 95th percentile: about 13 years 6 months.
• Girls, median: not reached; the median girl ends near 163.3 cm.

At age 20, 5′7″ corresponds to about the 18th percentile for young men and the 86th for young women. A child's own trajectory over time is more informative than any single height, and a pediatrician can interpret it.

Work and sport at 5′7″

Horse racing. Racing has no height limit for jockeys, only weight limits, but flat jockeys typically stand between about 4′10″ and 5′7″. That puts 5′7″ at the top of the usual flat range. Jump racing, which carries higher weights, often features taller jockeys, with several over 5′10″.

Precision dance. The Radio City Rockettes are one of the few employers to publish a height band, and 5′7″ has fit inside it for most of the troupe's modern history. The range was 5′5″ to 5′8″ in the mid-1960s, then 5′6″ to 5′10½″ in stocking feet until 2022, when the minimum dropped to 5′5″. Only in the troupe's earliest years, when the band ran from 5′2″ to 5′6½″, would a 5′7″ dancer have been too tall for the line.

Everyday dominance. Height affects small social moments, not only careers. Gert Stulp and colleagues observed more than 2,000 pedestrians in naturalistic studies and found that taller people were less likely to give way in a narrow passage or busy shopping street, and more likely to keep a straight walking line. The authors suggest that these brief interactions may contribute to the familiar link between height and social status. A 5′7″ man, a couple of inches below the US median, is near the middle of that spectrum rather than at either end.

5′7″ in couples

Five foot seven sits on both sides of the couple-height equation. For a woman, it is tall enough that many male partners will be within a few inches of her height. For a man, it is a common height that is still taller than most women: NHANES places the women's 90th percentile at 170.4 cm, essentially 5′7″. Some simple arithmetic with the NHANES percentiles shows what this means in practice. A 5′7″ woman is taller than roughly a quarter of American men, since 5′7″ sits near the 26th percentile for men aged 20 and over. If she were paired at random with an adult man, the chance that he would be shorter than her would therefore be about one in four, well above the national average. Couples data suggest real pairings lean only slightly away from that random baseline. In a study of more than 12,500 UK parent couples, Gert Stulp and colleagues found that the woman was taller in 7.5% of couples, compared with 10.2% expected under random pairing, a reduction of about a quarter. They also found that taller women tended to have smaller height gaps with their partners, and that when the "man taller" pattern was broken, it was usually broken by only a few centimeters.

For a 5′7″ man, the arithmetic runs the other way. The same NHANES table puts 5′7″ at about the 89th percentile for women, so roughly nine in ten adult women are shorter than him. The UK couples study found that pairs with the man more than 25 cm taller were somewhat rarer than chance, but for a 5′7″ man that would mean a partner under about 145 cm (4′9″), a height reached by very few women.

The featured comparisons for this height pair it with shorter partners, such as 5′0″ vs 5′7″, a 7-inch gap, and 5′1″ vs 5′7″.

Measuring 5′7″ properly

Because 5′6½″ and 5′7½″ differ by only 2.54 cm, technique decides which you report. Measure barefoot against a wall, heels together, eyes level, with a flat object lowered onto the crown. Avoid early-morning readings. A study of schoolchildren in Southampton found that stature dropped by about half a centimeter between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. and then held steady, so a midday measurement gives the most repeatable figure. Self-reports tend to round up: validation studies summarized in the UK couples study above found men overstate their height by about 1.2 cm and women by about 0.6 cm on average. A man who measures 169.5 cm can fairly call himself 5′7″; one who measures 168 cm is closer to 5′6″. If you want to compare yourself with a partner or friend, the height difference calculator shows both figures to scale and estimates where one person's head reaches on the other.