How to Find Your Ideal Weight for Your Height

Quick Answer

There is no single ideal weight, which is why this tool shows several. The classic formulas, Devine, Robinson, Miller, and Hamwi, each estimate a target weight from your height and sex, and they disagree by a few kilograms because they were built at different times with different numbers. Alongside them sits the modern BMI healthy range for your height. Read the formula average as a central anchor and the BMI range as the realistic band around it, and pick a point inside that band that suits your build. As an ideal body weight calculator, a healthy weight calculator, and a target weight calculator, it shows the Devine formula, the Robinson formula, and the Hamwi formula beside the wider healthy weight range and the healthy weight for height. Understanding a target weight quoted by a clinician gets easier once you can see the formulas behind it.

How the Formulas Work

Every classic ideal-weight formula shares the same shape: a base weight for someone five feet tall, plus a fixed amount added for each inch above that. Devine, the best known, uses 50 kg for men and 45.5 kg for women, adding 2.3 kg per inch. The others simply pick different bases and per-inch amounts, which is why their answers spread out. None of them uses anything beyond height and sex, so they are fast to compute but blunt: two people the same height get the same estimate regardless of frame or muscle.

Why They Disagree

The formulas were created for different eras and uses, several of them to help calculate medication doses rather than to define fitness. Hamwi, from the 1960s, tends to sit highest; Miller, from the 1980s, tends to sit lowest; Devine and Robinson land in between. Seeing all four at once is the point. A single number pretends to a precision that does not exist, while a spread of a few kilograms tells the truth: your target is approximate.

Use the Range, Not the Point

The modern approach skips the single-number formulas in favour of the BMI healthy-weight range, which spans every weight giving a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 at your height. It is deliberately wide because healthy bodies come in different builds. Any weight inside that band is reasonable, and where you aim within it depends on your frame, muscle, and how you feel and perform, not on a formula from decades ago.

Examples

Man, 180 cm. For example, to find an ideal weight for a height like this, Devine returns about 75 kg while the four formulas spread from roughly 72 kg to 78 kg.

Woman, 165 cm. For example, the formula average lands near 57 kg, and the BMI healthy range for the same height runs from about 50 kg to 68 kg.

Reading them together. For example, weighing the ideal weight formulas versus the BMI healthy range shows the single numbers all fall inside the wider band, so the band is the safer target.

Common Mistakes