Is 5'7 Short for a Man? Shorter Than Most Men, Taller Than Most Women

Yes, slightly. At 5'7 (170.2 cm) you're about two inches under the US median of 5'9, almost exactly the 25th percentile, so roughly three in four American men are taller (CDC, 2021–2023).

But nobody searches this at midnight for a census figure. You want to know what it costs you with women, and the search snippet skipped that part. Our answer: 5'7 is a paper problem, not a room problem. It costs you most where height is a typed number, like an app filter or a profile line, and much less once you're a person standing in front of someone. In that room, you're taller than about nine in ten American women.

This page turns up in about 25,000 Google searches a week, and the questions its readers click open most aren't about averages. They're Does 5'7 really hurt your dating life? and Can a 5'7 guy date tall women? So those come first.

Does being 5'7 hurt your dating life?

A little, and mostly on paper. The preference for taller men is real, but it shows up most where you're reduced to a number, and much less in who actually ends up together.

The best evidence for that gap comes from real couples, not surveys. In UK couples from the Millennium Cohort Study, the man was taller in 92.5% of pairs, against 89.8% if people had paired up at random with respect to height (Stulp et al., 2013). The preference exists. It moves outcomes by a few points, because the plain arithmetic of men being taller than women does most of the work.

Here is where it bites, and where it doesn't:

The paper is also rigged against honest men. When researchers checked 80 online daters' profiles against measurements, men stretched their height more than women did, the fibs were small but everywhere, and people further from average fudged more (Toma, Hancock & Ellison, 2008). Some of the 5'9 profiles next to yours are 5'8 on a tape measure.

Our height and attraction guide puts the edge of the measurable drag at roughly 170 cm: 5'7, almost exactly. You're standing on the line, not under it (our synthesis of the evidence, not a lab constant).

The honest limit: a filter is a filter. If her floor is 5'10, no posture tip gets you past it. Spend that energy on the much larger group whose bar you already clear.

Can a 5'7 guy date tall women?

Yes. And the group of women who are actually taller than you is smaller than it feels: the CDC's 90th percentile for US women is 67.1 inches, so only about one in ten stands taller than 5'7 barefoot. Among women in their twenties it's closer to one in six.

For women around your height, the evidence leans your way. Preference research finds that tall women want smaller height gaps than short women do, and Stulp's team saw the same pattern in real couples, if more weakly. A 5'8 woman who dates a 5'7 man isn't making a heroic exception.

What makes it work is mostly what you don't do:

• Don't police her shoes. Heels are her call. If you flinch, that's what she remembers, not the inch.
• Stand normally in photos. No tiptoes, no strategic step. Visible effort reads as insecurity.
• Answer the height question once, plainly. "Yep, 5'7." Then move on. A joke you make first is still an apology.

What should a 5'7 man focus on instead of height?

On everything your height gets read through: build, fit, posture and photos. When raters judged photos of men's bodies, estimated upper-body strength explained over 70% of bodily attractiveness; tallness and leanness were favoured too, and the three together reached 80% (Sell et al., 2017).

Height counted, honestly. But it was a far smaller piece than strength, and the only one you can't train. In order of payoff:

1. Shoulders and body fat. A broad, lean frame reads bigger at any height. Start with body fat and first impressions.
2. Clothes that fit. Shoulder seams on your shoulders, sleeves at the wrist bone, trousers with little break. Spare fabric is what makes a shorter man look short.
3. Posture. Ribs over hips, chin level. It reclaims height a desk slouch is stealing; it won't add any you don't have.
4. Photos that don't shrink you. Camera at or just below eye level, never above. Men already sense this: in 557 coded Tinder selfies, men's were shot from below more often than women's (Sedgewick et al., 2017). More in the dating app photos guide.
5. Drop the apology. A height joke you make first tells people there's something to joke about.

Two-minute self-check, right now. Open your main dating photo and ask:

• Is the camera above your eyes?
• Is anyone taller standing next to you?
• Is there spare fabric at your shoulders, sleeves or ankles?
• Are you slouching, leaning, or hiding your hands?

Every yes is height you're giving away. If you'd rather not grade your own photo at 1 a.m., the test takes about a minute: your height goes in as one input next to your build, training and photos, and the analysis runs before you pay. The full report, $5 one-time, reads how the photo lands at first glance and ranks the levers you can actually move. It never lists height as a weakness, because height isn't a lever.

Where does a 5'7 man stand next to 5'6, 5'8 and 5'9?

At the bottom edge of the middle half. In the CDC's measurements of American men aged 20 and over, the 25th percentile is 66.9 inches and the median 69.0, so 5'7 (67 inches) isn't average height for a man in the US. It's where average starts.

Percentiles between the CDC's published cut-points are interpolated, so treat them as ±2.

Two things make 5'7 feel shorter than the table says. Younger men are taller: among men in their twenties, 5'7 sits nearer the 20th percentile. And you compare yourself with the tallest man in the room, not the median one. The height comparison tool shows the gap at real scale.

Your own number moves, too: in a small study, stature varied by 19.3 mm (about ¾ inch) across the day, over half of it lost in the first hour after getting up (Tyrrell et al., 1985). Measure barefoot in the afternoon; that's the height a date meets.

Is 5'7 short in Asia? India, the Philippines and Japan compared

Not in much of it. Among 19-year-old men in 2019, average height was about 166.5 cm in India and 165.2 cm in the Philippines, so 5'7 is above average there. In Japan (172.1 cm) it's within 2 cm of average (NCD-RisC, The Lancet 2020).

These are 19-year-olds, who run taller than the all-ages US figures above. And "Asia" isn't one answer: more than 10 cm separates the Philippine and Chinese averages. If you're 5'7 in Manila or Mumbai, you're taller than the average young man around you.

If you typed "5.7 feet": as a decimal, that's 5 ft 8.4 in (173.7 cm). Most people who write it mean 5 ft 7 in, the height this page is about.

The bottom line

Is 5'7 short for a guy? Yes, a little: about the 25th percentile in the US, close to average in Japan, above average in India and the Philippines. Its real cost is on paper, and the fix there is honesty plus better photos, not inches. In person you're taller than most women you'll meet, and the read is built from far more than the tape measure.

Your height doesn't decide your first impression. It's one input into a read that forms fast and mostly from things you can change. See how your photo reads: about a minute, and the analysis runs before you pay anything.

If height has started to feel like something to fix, with daily measuring or surgery threads, read the limb-lengthening statistics first and say it out loud to someone you trust. That's anxiety talking, not data. For the wider picture: the height dating data and the full short men's strategy.

Studies referenced

• Fryar, C. D., Gu, Q., Afful, J., Carroll, M. D., & Ogden, C. L. (2025). Anthropometric reference data for children and adults: United States, August 2021–August 2023. Vital and Health Statistics, Series 3, No. 50. CDC PDF
• NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (2020). Height and body-mass index trajectories of school-aged children and adolescents from 1985 to 2019 in 200 countries and territories. The Lancet, 396(10261), 1511–1524. PubMed
• Stulp, G., Buunk, A. P., Pollet, T. V., Nettle, D., & Verhulst, S. (2013). Are human mating preferences with respect to height reflected in actual pairings? PLoS ONE, 8(1), e54186. PubMed
• Toma, C. L., Hancock, J. T., & Ellison, N. B. (2008). Separating fact from fiction: An examination of deceptive self-presentation in online dating profiles. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(8), 1023–1036. PubMed
• Sell, A., Lukaszewski, A. W., & Townsley, M. (2017). Cues of upper body strength account for most of the variance in men's bodily attractiveness. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 284(1869), 20171819. PubMed
• Sedgewick, J. R., Flath, M. E., & Elias, L. J. (2017). Presenting your best self(ie): The influence of gender on vertical orientation of selfies on Tinder. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 604. PubMed
• Tyrrell, A. R., Reilly, T., & Troup, J. D. (1985). Circadian variation in stature and the effects of spinal loading. Spine, 10(2), 161–164. PubMed