Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator (WHR)

Waist-to-hip ratio is waist divided by hips, and it answers a question that no total figure can: not how much fat you carry, but where it sits. Enter sex, waist and hips below.

Apple and pear, expressed as a number

Everyone recognizes the two shapes. The ratio just makes them comparable.

When fat accumulates around the abdomen, the waist closes in on the hip measurement and the quotient climbs toward 1 — the apple. When it settles on hips and thighs, the hip measurement stays well ahead of the waist and the quotient falls — the pear. The reason clinicians care is that abdominal fat sits alongside the liver and the viscera, and that placement is far more strongly linked to cardiovascular and metabolic outcomes than the same amount of fat stored lower down.

The thresholds, and a caveat about them

Sex	Lower risk	Elevated risk
Men	Below 0.90	0.90 or above
Women	Below 0.85	0.85 or above

These are the values the research literature attributes to the World Health Organization and uses by default; a 2014 analysis in BMC Cardiovascular Disorders states them plainly as the cut-offs defining central adiposity.

The caveat is worth knowing before you treat your result as a verdict. Published papers do not apply a single set consistently — a 2025 comparison in Obesity Science and Practice used 0.95 for men and 0.80 for women and also called them WHO cut-offs. Those two conventions disagree by five hundredths in opposite directions for the two sexes, which is enough to reclassify a lot of people. Read your number as a position on a scale, and give more weight to which way it moves than to which side of a line it falls on.

Two measurements, two chances to be wrong

A ratio compounds error. Get the waist an inch too high and the hips an inch too narrow, and the result is off far more than either mistake alone.

• Waist — at the narrowest part of the torso, or level with the navel if there is no obvious narrowest point. Stand up, breathe out normally, do not suck in.
• Hips — the widest point across the buttocks, feet together. Not the hip bones.

Keep the tape level all the way around, take both measurements twice and average, and use the same landmarks every time.

What this ratio cannot tell you

It is blind to size. A 30 in waist with 36 in hips and a 40 in waist with 48 in hips both give 0.83, and those are not the same body. That is why the raw waist keeps its own threshold — the NHLBI flags more than 40 inches (102 cm) in men and more than 35 inches (89 cm) in women as raising the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

The complementary reading is the waist-to-height ratio, which scales the waist to your frame and carries a single boundary for both sexes. Together, distribution plus amount describes abdominal risk better than either does alone, and better than BMI does at all. For the share of your body that is fat rather than the shape it makes, the body fat percentage calculator is the other instrument.

All three are screens. An elevated value is a reason to talk to a clinician, not a diagnosis.

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