Average height by country: 199 countries compared

Last updated: 13 September 2026

We took height-at-19 figures for 199 countries, published by NCD-RisC in The Lancet, and lined them up. The striking part isn't who tops the table — it's how early each country's place is already settled.

• 23.7 cmseparate the tallest country from the shortest among 19-year-old boys: Netherlands (183.8 cm) and Timor-Leste (160.1 cm).
• 86%of the final gap between a Dutch and an American boy is already there by age five.
• +8.1 cmgained by China between 1985 and 2019 — the largest rise in the world for boys.
• 22 countrieshave 19-year-old boys who are shorter today than in 1985.

🧮 Estimate your child's adult height

The gap between countries is settled before age five

This is the least intuitive thing in the data. You would expect the gap to open at puberty, when the growth spurt arrives. The opposite happens: most of it is already in place before a child starts school.

A Dutch 19-year-old boy is 6.9 cm taller than an American one. At age five he was already 5.9 cm taller — 86% of the final difference. Against Guatemala the pattern holds: 12.6 cm of the eventual 19.4 cm, or 65%. The next fourteen years, growth spurt included, only add the remainder.

This fits what is known about growth: the first thousand days — pregnancy and the first two years — are the window where nutrition, repeated infection and birth weight leave a mark that is largely not recovered later. A normal growth spurt multiplies what is already there; it does not make up for what was missing before.

Where height rose most — and where it fell

Between 1985 and 2019 the map moved a great deal. East Asia saw the largest documented jump: China added 8.1 cm for boys in 34 years, and South Korea added 6.1 cm for girls. No genetic process could produce changes of that size in that time — this is nutrition and public health.

The other side is just as telling. 22 countries have shorter boys today than three decades ago, and 17 the same for girls, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Pacific.

Full table: 199 countries

Mean height at age 19 in 2019, and how much it changed since 1985. Search for a country, filter by region, or sort by any column.

Unweighted mean across the 199 countries: 173.1 cm for boys and 161.0 cm for girls. This is not the world average — every country counts equally here, regardless of population.

What this means if you're worried about your child's height

Not much, and that's worth saying plainly. These are population means: inside any of these countries there are healthy adults of 155 cm and of 195 cm. A national average describes a country; it does not assess a child.

The WHO growth charts your pediatrician uses are a different thing altogether. They were built from children raised under optimal nutrition and health conditions in six countries, and they describe how a child grows when nothing limits their potential. That's why a child can sit at the 30th WHO percentile and be perfectly proportionate to their own population's average.

What a pediatrician watches is not which percentile your child is in today, but whether they hold their own trajectory over time. A child steady at the 15th percentile rarely causes concern; one who falls from the 50th to the 15th in two years gets looked into, even while still inside the "normal" range.

Methodology

Source. NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), a pooled analysis of 2,181 population-based studies with 65 million participants, published in The Lancet in 2020. It is the standard reference in growth epidemiology.

What is measured. Mean height at age 19, used as a proxy for adult height: by that age growth has finished for practically the whole population. Figures refer to the cohorts measured in 2019 and in 1985.

What we did. We downloaded the per-country files from NCD-RisC's open repository, extracted the age-19 rows for 1985 and 2019, and took the difference. No adjustment or smoothing was applied. South Sudan is absent because it has no published file in this series, which is why the count is 199 rather than 200.

Limits. Each figure carries an uncertainty interval that we leave out of the table for readability; in countries with fewer underlying studies that interval can reach a couple of centimetres. The unweighted mean of the table is not the world average, since it is not weighted by population.

Frequently asked questions

This content is informational and educational. It does not replace assessment by a pediatrician or other health professional.

Keep reading

• Why is my child short if I'm tall?
• How tall will my child be as an adult?
• My child dropped a percentile — is that normal?