Ideal weight calculator: ideal body weight by height

Where the ideal body weight formulas came from

All four were built for clinical dosing, not for goal setting. Devine's 1974 formula existed to calculate drug doses; Robinson, Miller and Hamwi are refinements of the same idea. None was derived from health outcomes, and none has ever been validated as a target weight for an individual.

That history is the reason this page shows four answers instead of one. They disagree by several kilograms for the same person, and that disagreement is honest information: there is no single ideal weight to find.

Why ideal weight by height alone is not enough

Every one of these takes a baseline weight at five feet and adds a fixed amount per inch above it. Nothing else enters the calculation — not frame size, not muscle mass, not age, not what you weighed when you felt best. A powerlifter and a distance runner of the same height get the same answer.

They also behave badly below five feet, where the formulas were never meant to extrapolate, and the older ones encode assumptions about body composition from populations measured decades ago.

The recommended healthy weight range

The healthy BMI range at the bottom of the results is the more defensible target, and it is deliberately a range rather than a point. It spans several kilograms because the evidence does: mortality curves in large cohorts are flat across a broad band, not sharply minimised at one number.

If you want a single figure to aim at, a weight you have maintained comfortably before beats any formula on this page — it is the only one that accounts for your frame, your habits and what you can actually sustain. The BMI calculator shows where a given weight lands, and how to lose weight covers the rate that holds.