What Is the Average Height for My Age?

Curious how you stack up? The calculator above turns your birth date into a personal number, showing where you land on the average height curve for people your age. This page fills in the bigger picture: how height changes from toddler years to old age, and what "average" actually means.

Height moves fast at first. A typical 2-year-old stands around 2'10" (86.5 cm), and by age 10 that's grown to roughly 4'6" (138 cm). Then comes the real sprint of the teenage years, and most people are close to their adult height by their late teens. After that, height barely budges for about four decades.

Eventually it reverses. Starting around age 60, most people lose a little height each decade as spinal discs compress and posture shifts - a slow, quiet shrink that adds up over the 70s and 80s.

Grow, plateau, shrink

In the United States, the average adult man stands about 5'9" (175 cm) and the average adult woman about 5'4" (161 cm), based on CDC survey data. Averaged across both sexes, adult height in the US works out to roughly 5'6" (168-169 cm) - the number this page's calculator uses as its adult baseline.

Those figures hold fairly steady from the early twenties into the late fifties, a long plateau after growth itself has already wrapped up. Girls typically reach adult height around 15 or 16, while boys keep growing a bit longer, often into their late teens. Genetics set most of the range, but childhood nutrition and health matter too - part of why average heights differ from country to country, and why they've crept upward over the past century as living conditions have improved.

How the calculator works

The calculator estimates your expected height by matching your exact age - down to the month, based on your birth date - against reference growth data. For children and teens, it uses CDC growth-chart medians, the same percentile curves pediatricians use at checkups. For adults, it uses NHANES survey averages, the CDC's long-running national health survey that measures height directly in thousands of Americans.

Because that underlying data is reported separately for males and females, this page's profile averages the two together into one representative number by age. That's handy for a quick comparison, but it will sit between the male and female medians rather than matching either exactly.

Like any average, it's a reference point, not a target. Height varies widely by individual, family, and background, and the numbers here interpolate between known data points rather than tracking any one person's actual growth.