Ideal weight calculator
Your healthy weight range across four established medical formulas — a range, not a single magic number.
Please enter your height.
Formulas estimate weight from height and sex only — they can’t see your muscle mass, frame size, or body composition, which is why a muscular person can be “over” every formula while being extremely healthy. Treat these as reference ranges, not verdicts. For what your weight is actually made of, measure body composition instead. Not medical advice.
What’s My Ideal Weight? Why the Honest Answer Is a Range, Not a Number
Type “ideal weight for 5’10” male” into a search engine and you’ll get a suspiciously precise answer — 160.1 pounds, perhaps, delivered with decimal-point confidence. Here’s what that precision hides: there are at least four established medical formulas for ideal weight, and they disagree with each other by 10 pounds or more for the same person. None of them knows how much muscle you carry, how wide your frame is, or what your weight is actually made of.
That doesn’t make ideal weight calculators useless — it makes them useful differently than most people expect. A well-built one gives you a realistic reference range and, more importantly, teaches you what the number can and can’t tell you.
👉 See yours now: the calculator at the top of this page runs all four classic formulas at once — Robinson, Miller, Devine, and Hamwi — plus the healthy BMI weight range for your height, so you see the full honest picture instead of one cherry-picked number.
Where These Formulas Actually Came From (It’s Not What You Think)
Here’s the origin story ideal-weight articles rarely tell: these formulas weren’t designed as wellness targets. Most were created for drug dosing.
| Formula | Year | Original purpose | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hamwi | 1964 | A quick bedside rule for physicians estimating patient weight targets | Runs heaviest for taller men |
| Devine | 1974 | Estimating “lean-ish” body weight to dose medications safely | The standard still used in pharmacology today |
| Robinson | 1983 | A refinement of Devine using better population data | The most commonly cited modern formula |
| Miller | 1983 | Another Devine refinement from the same era | Tends to run lightest |
The Devine formula in particular remains genuinely important in medicine — when a hospital calculates your dose of certain drugs, it may well be running this 1974 equation. But “a good input for calculating antibiotic doses” and “the weight you should personally aim for” are very different claims. The formulas only see two things about you: height and sex. Everything else — your muscle, bone density, frame width, age, ethnicity — is invisible to them.
Why the Formulas Disagree (and What to Do About It)
All four formulas share the same skeleton: a base weight for a 5-foot person, plus a fixed increment per inch above five feet. They disagree because each research team chose slightly different bases and increments from different datasets. For a 5’10” man, that spread produces roughly 155 to 165 pounds — a 10-pound disagreement zone for the exact same person.
The sane response isn’t to pick your favorite formula. It’s to treat the spread itself as the answer: if all four formulas place you between 155 and 165, then that band — give or take the limitations below — is your formula-based reference zone. Landing anywhere inside or reasonably near it matters far more than hitting any individual number.
The Healthy BMI Range: A Blunter but More Honest Tool
Alongside the four formulas, our calculator shows the healthy BMI weight range — every weight that puts your BMI between 18.5 and 24.9. For a 5’10” person that’s roughly 129 to 174 pounds: a strikingly wide band compared to the formulas’ narrow answers.
That width is a feature, not a bug. Population research links this BMI band to the lowest health risks, and its very breadth communicates something true: healthy human bodies at a given height come in a wide range of weights. A slim-framed runner at 135 lb and a broad-shouldered lifter at 170 lb can both be squarely healthy at 5’10”. Any tool that pretends otherwise — that hands them both the same 160.1-pound “ideal” — is manufacturing precision that doesn’t exist.
The Muscular Person Problem (Where Every Formula Breaks)
Every height-based tool — the four formulas and BMI alike — fails the same edge case: it cannot distinguish a pound of muscle from a pound of fat. A 5’9″ recreational lifter at 190 lb exceeds every formula and lands in the “overweight” BMI zone while carrying 14% body fat and excellent metabolic health. Meanwhile a 5’9″ sedentary person at a formula-perfect 155 lb can carry low muscle and high visceral fat — the “skinny fat” profile — with real hidden risk.
This is why the single most useful upgrade from asking “what should I weigh?” is asking “what is my weight made of?” — a question our body fat calculator answers with a tape measure in two minutes. Weight is one number; fat mass versus lean mass is the actual health story. If the two tools disagree about you — formulas say “over,” body fat says “fit” — trust the body fat measurement.
A Worked Example: Two People, Same Height, Different Truths
Adam and Ben are both 5’10” (178 cm). The four formulas give both men the same range: 155–165 lb, healthy BMI range 129–174 lb.
Adam, 182 lb: lifts four days a week, body fat ~15%. He’s 17 lb “over” the formula average and near the BMI ceiling — and completely healthy. Cutting to 160 lb would cost him hard-earned muscle for zero health benefit.
Ben, 158 lb: formula-perfect weight, sedentary, body fat ~26%. His scale number passes every test while his composition tells a riskier story.
The takeaway: the right move for Adam is nothing — and for Ben it’s resistance training and adequate protein at maintenance calories, not weight loss. Identical heights, identical “ideal weights,” opposite prescriptions. That’s why composition beats the scale.
If You Do Have Weight to Lose: Turning the Range Into a Plan
For many people the calculators agree with the mirror: there’s genuine fat to lose, and the reference range provides a sane long-term direction. The playbook from there is the one that runs through this whole site. Set a moderate 300–500 calorie deficit from your true maintenance number — find it with the TDEE calculator. Protect your muscle with resistance training and a high protein intake from our protein calculator, so the weight you lose is actually fat. And aim your trajectory at the nearer edge of your healthy range, not the bottom of it — the leaner target can be renegotiated once you’re there. For the complete strategy, see our Metabolism & Weight Loss guides.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the ideal weight for my height?
There is no single number — there’s a range. For most heights, the four medical formulas span about 8–12 pounds, and the healthy BMI band spans 40+ pounds. Use the calculator above to see your full picture, and treat anywhere within the healthy BMI range — with decent body composition — as a legitimate answer.
Which ideal weight formula is the most accurate?
“Accurate” is the wrong frame — none of them was validated as a personal health target; most were built for drug dosing. Robinson is the most commonly cited for general reference, and Devine remains the pharmacology standard. But the honest answer is that the spread across all four is more informative than any single formula’s output.
Does age change my ideal weight?
The classic formulas ignore age entirely, but research suggests slightly higher weights are associated with better outcomes in older adults — partly because extra reserves protect against illness-related weight loss, and because preserving muscle matters increasingly with age. For adults over 65, the lower end of the healthy BMI range is generally not the target to chase; maintaining muscle is.
Is BMI useless if I’m muscular?
Not useless — misapplied. BMI works reasonably as a population screening tool and for people with typical muscle mass. It fails specifically for muscular individuals, some athletes, and in masking “skinny fat” profiles. If you train seriously, judge yourself by body fat percentage and waist measurements rather than BMI.
How fast should I move toward my ideal range?
Sustainably: roughly 0.5–1% of body weight per week, which for most people means 0.5–2 lb. Faster than that generally means you’re losing meaningful muscle along with fat, arriving at your “ideal weight” with a worse body composition than the number suggests. The scale target and the composition target should arrive together.
Written by the RegenStep Editorial Team and reviewed for factual accuracy. Formula reference values follow the published Hamwi (1964), Devine (1974), Robinson (1983), and Miller (1983) equations; BMI ranges follow standard health-authority classifications. This article is educational only and not medical advice — ideal weight varies with individual health circumstances your doctor can assess and these formulas cannot.