Your BMI, the category the World Health Organization puts it in, and the part people actually came for: the weight range that counts as healthy for your height, in pounds. It also shows what BMI cannot see, which is most of what matters.
Your BMI
29.1
| Category | BMI | At your height |
|---|
What BMI cannot see
BMI is a screening number for populations, not a diagnosis for a person, and no category here says anything about your health on its own. It does not apply during pregnancy, and under 20 it is read as a percentile instead. If you want to know what your number means for you, that is a conversation with a doctor.
Cut-offs checked 2026-09-23.
Quick answer: BMI is your weight in kilograms divided by your height in metres squared, and the World Health Organization calls 18.5 to 24.9 the healthy range for adults, 25 to 29.9 overweight, and 30 and above obesity. For a person of 5’6″ that healthy range is about 115 to 154 pounds. It is a screening number for populations, and it cannot tell muscle from fat or see where the weight sits.
How to use it
Put in your height and weight — in feet and inches, centimetres, pounds, kilograms or stone, whichever is quicker. You get the number, the category, and the weight range that would put you inside the healthy band at your height. The table underneath shows every category in pounds for you, which is far more use than the same table in BMI units.
If you are of Asian heritage, the second button adds the WHO’s lower action points. They do not replace the classification; they sit alongside it.
What BMI is actually for
It was never designed to tell an individual anything. It comes from nineteenth-century work on the characteristics of populations, and it survives because it is cheap: two measurements anyone can take, which across a large group track health outcomes well enough to be worth collecting. That is a genuinely useful thing — and it is a different thing from telling you about your body.
The gap shows up in specific, predictable ways. A rugby player and a sedentary person of the same height and weight have the same BMI. Two people at 28 can carry it very differently, and the one carrying it around the middle is in the worse position — which is why a waist measurement adds more than another decimal place of BMI ever will. And the older you get, the more of any given BMI is fat rather than muscle and bone.
Why there are two sets of cut-offs
The familiar lines — 18.5, 25, 30 — were drawn largely on populations of European heritage. In 2004 a WHO expert consultation looked at the evidence that risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease rises at lower BMIs in many Asian populations. It did not change the classification; it identified additional public health action points at 23, 27.5, 32.5 and 37.5, and left each country to decide which to use. Several, including Japan, China and India, use lower national cut-offs today.
This page shows you both rather than picking for you, because which applies to a particular person is a question about their ancestry and their own risk factors — a conversation with a doctor, not a checkbox on a calculator.
The 5% that matters more than the category
People arrive at a BMI calculator wanting to know how far they are from “normal”, and the honest answer is that the category boundary is the wrong target. Public-health guidance keeps pointing at something nearer: losing 5 to 10% of your body weight measurably improves blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol, and it arrives long before any line on the table is crossed. For a person at 200 lb that is 10 to 20 pounds, not the 45 that would move the label.