Enter your height to see a healthy-weight range and, for reference, the classic "ideal body weight" figures used in clinical settings. Think of these as a rough guide, not a number you have to hit.
How it works
The main figure is a healthy-weight range, worked out from a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9 for your height (weight = BMI × height in metres squared). Below it are two well-known "ideal body weight" (IBW) formulas — Devine and Robinson — which were originally created to help calculate medication doses, not to set a personal weight goal. They use your height and sex to estimate a single reference weight.
Please read these numbers gently. BMI and IBW are blunt, population-level tools. They can't see your muscle, bone density, body composition, or health markers, and two people at the same weight can be in very different health. Athletes and people with more muscle often read as "overweight" on BMI while being perfectly healthy. There is no single "ideal" weight that's right for everyone of a given height.
Your health is about far more than a number on a scale — how you eat, move, sleep, and feel matters more. If you're thinking about your weight, a doctor or dietitian can look at the whole picture with you, without the diet-culture pressure.
Common questions
Is there really an ideal weight?
No single number, and treating the output as a target is the main way this kind of calculator misleads. Formulas such as Devine and Hamwi were built for drug dosing, not for health goals, and they take no account of muscle, frame or age. Read the result as a wide reference range.
Why does BMI work badly for women over 50?
It cannot distinguish muscle from fat, and it says nothing about where fat sits. Menopause shifts fat toward the abdomen while the number on the scale may not move at all — so BMI can stay flat while visceral fat, the part that drives cardiometabolic risk, rises.
What measures more than weight?
Waist circumference, because abdominal fat carries the metabolic risk; grip strength and how easily you rise from a chair, because muscle predicts independence later; and blood pressure, lipids and HbA1c, because those are what weight is a proxy for in the first place.
Is it healthy to weigh less as you age?
Not automatically. After about 65, being slightly above the standard BMI range is associated with better outcomes, and unintentional weight loss is a warning sign rather than an achievement. Preserving muscle matters more at this stage than reducing the total.