BMI Chart for Adults

The World Health Organization thresholds for adults 20 and over, any sex, used essentially worldwide.

Two footnotes. The boundaries are conventions, not cliffs — 24.9 and 25.1 are the same body. And several health bodies set lower cutoffs for people of South Asian, Chinese, and other Asian ancestry (overweight from about 23, obesity from about 27.5), where diabetes and heart-disease risk rises earlier. Ask your doctor which set applies to you.

Find your height and read across. The middle columns are the healthy band (BMI 18.5 to 24.9); the last column is where overweight begins.

Each band is nearly 20 kg wide at 170 cm — there is no single correct weight for a height, which is why a healthy weight for your height is a target zone, not a target number.

A category is a starting point, not a verdict.

• Underweight. Worth investigating, not celebrating — unintentional loss can point to thyroid problems, malabsorption, or an eating disorder, though some people are simply built light.
• Healthy weight. Lowest average risk, no guarantee: little muscle plus abdominal fat at BMI 23 still carries metabolic risk.
• Overweight. Where BMI is least informative — a muscular person and a sedentary one can share a BMI of 27. This is where waist-to-height ratio earns its keep.
• Obesity classes 1 to 3. Misclassification gets rare as BMI rises; risk of type 2 diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, and joint pain climbs with each class.

The blind spots share one cause: BMI divides weight by height squared and nothing else. It cannot tell muscle from fat, cannot see where fat sits — fat around the organs is far more harmful than fat on the hips — and ignores age, sex, and ancestry. It is not valid in pregnancy, and children use percentile charts. Pair it with a tape measure and, for the fullest picture, body fat percentage.

In every category, direction beats the snapshot: a BMI drifting up half a point a year says more than any single reading.

A notebook works: weigh at the same time of day, write the number down, recalculate every few weeks. The friction comes later — daily weight bounces a kilogram or two for reasons unrelated to fat, so the signal is a trend line, and nobody draws trend lines by hand twice.

The free Weight Journal app does the boring part: it calculates BMI for every weigh-in, in kilograms or pounds, plots both with a trend line through the noise, and tracks distance to a goal. It syncs with Apple Health and across your devices via iCloud — no account, no email — and exports to PDF, XLSX, CSV, or JSON for your doctor. Optional AI insights tell you what your history has actually been doing.

A chart tells you where you are today; a record tells you where you are heading.

There is no separate BMI chart for women — the formula and the adult categories are identical for both sexes — but heights cluster differently, so a chart is easier to read when it covers the range you are actually looking in. This one runs 155–175 cm. Find your height, then read across to see the weight at each BMI value; your own weight falls between two of them.

Weights are rounded to the nearest kilogram. The healthy band runs from the BMI 18.5 column to just below the BMI 25 column: at 165 cm that is 50 kg up to 68 kg, and at 170 cm it is 53 kg up to 72 kg. That span — around 18 to 20 kg at most heights — is the honest width of "healthy weight" at one height, and it is why a single reading a kilogram either side of a boundary means very little.

The same chart shifted up the height range, 165–190 cm. Same formula, same categories, same thresholds — only the rows differ.

At 180 cm the healthy band is roughly 60 kg to just under 81 kg; at 190 cm it is 67 kg to just under 90 kg. One caveat that matters more for men than women on average: muscle weighs more than fat for the same volume, so a heavily trained body can land in the overweight column with a low body fat percentage. If your weight is mostly muscle, BMI will overstate your risk — check body fat percentage or your waist instead of arguing with the table.

25.0 is the line where the overweight category begins, and it is the same line for women and men. It is not a diagnosis and nothing changes at 25.0 that was not already happening at 24.8 — it is the point where, across large populations, average health risk starts to rise measurably.

People ask why the threshold is not sex-specific when women and men are built differently. The answer is that the categories were set against health outcomes at population level, and the same BMI carries broadly similar risk in both. The difference in composition is real — at BMI 25 a woman typically carries more body fat than a man — but it does not move the threshold; it just means BMI alone answers less than you would like.

The useful response to a BMI of 25 is a second number rather than a diet. Waist-to-height ratio is the one to take: measure your waist and keep it under half your height. Someone at BMI 26 with a waist well under half their height is in a different position from someone at BMI 26 whose waist is over it, and the chart cannot tell them apart. Note also that several health bodies use lower cut-offs — overweight from 23 and obesity from 27.5 — for people of South Asian, Chinese and other Asian backgrounds, because risk rises at a lower BMI.

For adults, no. The categories are the same at 25 as at 75 — there is no official adult BMI chart by age, and a chart that gives you a different healthy range because you are older is not following any guideline.

Two genuine qualifications sit around that. In older adults, several large observational studies have found the lowest mortality at a BMI slightly above the adult healthy band, and in later life being underweight is generally the greater concern: unintentional weight loss, muscle loss and frailty carry more risk than a BMI of 26. That is a live area of debate, not a changed guideline, so the categories stand — but read a rising BMI in an 80-year-old differently from a rising BMI in a 30-year-old, and take unintentional loss to a doctor.

Under 20, BMI genuinely is read by age. Children's bodies change too fast for fixed thresholds, so a child's BMI is plotted as a percentile for their exact age and sex on growth charts: below the 5th percentile is underweight, 5th to 85th healthy, 85th to 95th overweight, 95th and above obesity. Never read a child's BMI off an adult chart — the adult numbers will mislabel them in both directions.