Height Comparison

How to use the tool

1. Pick a unit system: US units (feet and inches) or metric units (centimetres).
2. Choose How many persons? from 2 up to 20. A row appears for each one.
3. Optionally type a name for each person and mark Male or Female. Anyone left without a name is listed as Person 1, Person 2 and so on.
4. Enter each height. In US units use two boxes: feet, then inches (decimals such as 5 ft 10.5 in are accepted). In metric use a single centimetre box.
5. Press Compare heights. Every person needs a height, otherwise the tool asks you to fill it in or to reduce the number of people.

Direct links keep your entries, so you can bookmark a comparison or send it to someone and add more people later.

How the difference is calculated

Behind the scenes, every height is held in centimetres. Feet and inches are first converted to a total number of inches and then to centimetres using 1 inch = 2.54 cm, rounded to one decimal place. The difference is the absolute gap between the two values, so it never comes out negative and the order of the people does not matter.

gap (cm) = | height A − height B |For US units the gap is converted back: inches = gap ÷ 2.54.

Metric example: 163 cm and 190.5 cm differ by 27.5 cm. The tool shows the metric gap with up to one decimal place, for example 27.5 cm, or 20 cm when it is a whole number.

US example: 5 ft 3 in and 5 ft 10 in are 160.0 cm and 177.8 cm after conversion. The gap of 17.8 cm is 7.0 inches, shown as 0′7″. Larger gaps are split into feet and inches: someone 6 ft 3 in beside someone 5 ft 0 in is 38.1 cm taller, which is 15 inches and appears as 1′3″.

Because heights are rounded to a tenth of a centimetre before the subtraction, the result can differ very slightly from subtracting inches directly. Two people half an inch apart, for instance 5 ft 3 in and 5 ft 2.5 in, convert to 160.0 cm and 158.8 cm. The 1.2 cm gap is 0.47 inches, which rounds to zero inches, so the tool reports 0′0″.

Reading the results

With two people you get a single line, Height difference. With three or more, the tool lists the difference for every pair, in the order person 1 with everyone after them, then person 2 with everyone after them, and so on. The number of pairs for n people is n × (n − 1) ÷ 2.

Below the pair list a table repeats each person's name, gender and height, and shows how far each person is below the tallest member of the group. The tallest person is marked with a dash.

Quick conversion table

These are common heights in both unit systems, computed with 2.54 cm per inch and rounded to one decimal place. Use them to sanity-check an entry.

For any other value, the height converter converts between centimetres, metres, feet and inches in both directions.

Getting accurate input

• Measure barefoot, standing straight against a wall, with the heels together and the head level, and read the height at the top of the head.
• Measure everyone at a similar time of day. People are slightly taller in the morning than in the evening, often by a centimetre or more, because the spine compresses during the day.
• Use the same method for everyone. A comparison of one self-reported height with one measured height says less than two measured ones.
• Self-reported heights tend to be rounded up a little, so a small gap between two people is within the noise.

To see how a single height ranks against the population of the same age and sex, use the height percentile calculator. To estimate a child's adult height, try the height calculator.