Ideal Weight for Men — the Band and the Formulas

US guidance gives men no separate weight table. The NHLBI and the NIDDK define healthy weight as a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9 for all adults, so the band below is the same one a woman of the same height gets. What is specific to men is the ten pounds every classic formula adds — and where that came from.

The band at men’s common heights

Height	Healthy weight	Devine’s single number
5 ft 6 in	115–154 lb	141 lb
5 ft 8 in	122–164 lb	151 lb
5 ft 9 in	126–169 lb	156 lb
5 ft 10 in	129–174 lb	161 lb
5 ft 11 in	133–179 lb	166 lb
6 ft 0 in	137–184 lb	171 lb
6 ft 2 in	145–194 lb	181 lb

Devine’s number lands inside the band at every height, but never in the same place: at 5 ft 6 in it sits two-thirds of the way up, and by 6 ft 2 in it has drifted further still. A “goal” that moves its own position depending on how tall you are is not describing a health target.

The extra ten pounds is a constant, not physiology

Devine takes the female baseline of 45.5 kg, adds 4.5 kg for men, and then applies exactly the same 2.3 kg per inch to both. The male premium is therefore identical at five feet and at six foot four — about 10 lb, flat.

If that gap were about body composition it would scale with body size, because a bigger frame carries proportionally more lean mass. It does not. Pai and Paloucek traced the constant back to Metropolitan Life height–weight tables, which reported men and women in separate columns because that is how the policies had been sorted. The equations copied the layout.

The taller you are, the less the formulas agree

Height	Hamwi	Devine	Robinson	Miller	Spread
5 ft 3 in	124 lb	125 lb	127 lb	133 lb	9 lb
5 ft 7 in	148 lb	146 lb	144 lb	146 lb	4 lb
5 ft 11 in	172 lb	166 lb	161 lb	158 lb	14 lb
6 ft 2 in	190 lb	181 lb	173 lb	167 lb	23 lb

Around 5 ft 7 in the four equations converge to within four pounds, and away from that point they fan out — twenty-three pounds apart at six foot two. They are straight lines with different slopes crossing near the middle of the data they were fitted to, which is exactly the flaw Peterson and colleagues described in 2016: linear equations cannot track a ratio in which height is squared.

When the band reads high for the wrong reason

The overweight line at 5 ft 11 in is 180 lb, a weight a great many trained men carry at low body fat. Height and weight cannot separate lean mass from fat mass, so the table will call that man overweight and be describing his squat numbers.

The check is a tape measure rather than another formula. The NHLBI pairs its BMI ranges with a waist threshold of 40 inches for men, and abdominal circumference is what the cardiovascular risk data is actually about. The gap between the two readings is covered in BMI vs body fat percentage.

For the equation behind the third column above, see the Devine formula; for the same band read for women, ideal weight for women.

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