Ideal Weight for 5 ft 7 in — 119 to 159 lb

At 5 ft 7 in the healthy weight band runs 119 to 159 lb (about 54 to 72 kg). Overweight starts at 160 lb and obesity at 192 lb. That band is 40 pounds wide, and its width is the most useful thing on this page: two people at this height can differ by nearly 40 pounds and both be inside the same category.

Enter 170 for 5 ft 7 in — the field is in centimeters.

The arithmetic for 67 inches

Sixty-seven inches squared is 4,489, so weight = BMI × 4,489 ÷ 703:

BMI	Weight at 5 ft 7 in
18.5	118.1 lb → 119
22.0	140.5 lb
24.9	159.0 lb
25.0	159.6 lb → 160
30.0	191.6 lb → 192

Forty pounds is the answer, not a rounding error

People arrive at a page like this wanting one number, and the honest reply is a range that spans nearly a fifth of a body weight. That is not vagueness. The band exists because the association between weight and risk is flat across it — the NHLBI does not publish a preferred point inside 18.5 to 24.9, and neither does the NIDDK.

The 2016 replacement equation from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition was built on the same premise. Rather than one ideal weight, it returns your weight at whatever BMI you name, and its authors state outright that no single ideal weight holds across all conditions. At 5 ft 7 in its US form gives 141 lb for BMI 22 and 160 lb for BMI 25.

The formulas split by sex; the health range does not

Every classic equation subtracts weight for women. At 67 inches:

Formula	Men	Women	Gap
Hamwi (1964)	148 lb	135 lb	13 lb
Devine (1974)	146 lb	136 lb	10 lb
Robinson (1983)	144 lb	134 lb	10 lb
Miller (1983)	146 lb	138 lb	8 lb

The four agree within about four pounds inside each column, which is remarkable given they were published across two decades — and unsurprising once you know they were all regressions on the same Metropolitan Life insurance tables. Robinson’s paper says so in its methods. The sex gap is inherited from those tables, which listed men and women separately; it is not a finding about health risk, and the NHLBI band at this height is identical for both.

Where inside the band to aim

If you need a single figure for a goal, take one from your own history rather than from the middle of a table — a weight you have actually maintained for a year, if it falls inside 119 to 159 lb, is far better evidence than an average of insurance data from 1959. And pair it with waist size, which the BMI chart cannot show and which tracks abdominal fat directly.

For the full origin story of the four equations above, see the ideal weight calculator. A shorter reader can check 5 ft 3 in.

This content is informational and does not replace evaluation by a health professional.