Convert height between centimeters and feet & inches (e.g. 178 cm = 5' 10"), plus meters and total inches.
Body • cm ↔ ft/in
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The US measures height in feet and inches while most of the world uses centimeters, so converting between them is one of the most common everyday lookups — for IDs, sports, dating profiles, medical forms and online shopping. 178 cm is 5 ft 10 in.
This converter switches between centimeters and feet-and-inches (and also shows meters and total inches), so you can enter either and instantly read the other. You can type heights like 5' 10".
Height conversion is arithmetically trivial and practically error-prone, because the imperial form is a mixed-radix number: feet and inches, with twelve inches to the foot. Treating 5 ft 10 in as "5.10" and multiplying is the classic mistake, and it produces an answer about 20 cm wrong. The reliable method is to reduce everything to a single unit — total inches — before converting, then to reverse the process with integer division and a remainder when going back. The inch is exactly 2.54 cm, so no precision is lost in either direction.
total inches = (feet × 12) + inchescm = total inches × 2.54Reverse: feet = ⌊total ÷ 12⌋, inches = total mod 12where:
Assumptions: Standing height varies by up to 2 cm through the day — spinal discs compress under load — so morning and evening measurements legitimately differ. Clinical measurements are taken without shoes against a stadiometer.
Convert a common height in both directions, avoiding the decimal trap.
Result5 ft 10 in = 177.8 cm
The mixed-radix trap appears whenever feet-and-inches are stored as a decimal. Spreadsheets are especially prone to it, because "5.10" is a perfectly valid number and nothing flags the error — the result is simply wrong by up to 11 inches.
Feet and inches are a coarser scale than centimetres, and the rounding runs in both directions. Five foot ten is exactly 177.8 cm, so a person recorded as 178 cm is not quite the same height as one recorded as 5 ft 10 in — the gap is small, but it is why converting a figure back and forth repeatedly can drift by a centimetre. Where a value is going into a record that will be converted again later, keeping the original unit alongside it avoids the accumulation entirely.
The measurement itself is less stable than either unit suggests. Spinal discs compress through the day, so most adults measure a centimetre or two shorter in the evening than on waking, and standing posture against a wall can account for as much again. Any single height figure therefore carries a real uncertainty comparable to the rounding, which is worth remembering before treating a one-centimetre difference between two records as a discrepancy.
Conventions differ across the documents that ask for the number. Medical and official measurements are taken without shoes and with the head in a defined position; sports and identification records are frequently not. A converted height is only as consistent as the procedure that produced it, so the useful habit is to note how a figure was measured rather than assume that two heights in the same units were arrived at the same way.