Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator

Your waist-to-hip ratio is your waist circumference divided by your hip circumference, measured in the same unit. The WHO treats it as a marker of abdominal fat distribution, with separate cut-offs for men and women.

The ratio describes proportion, not size. It compares two circumferences and reports how girth is distributed between them; it says nothing about how large either measurement is on its own, and nothing about what the body is made of. Both figures come off a tape measure: the waist at the midpoint between the lowest rib and the top of the hip bone, the hips at their widest point around the buttocks, both in the same unit. The default entries are a waist of 80 against a hip of 100, and that division gives 0.80. Keep the same hip and enter a waist of 85 and the result is 0.85; a waist of 90 gives 0.90; equal measurements give 1.00. The two figures in the table beside the calculator, 0.85 for women and 0.90 for men, are the points from which the WHO table records a substantially increased risk across a population — a convention for describing groups, not a statement about the person holding the tape. Read the result to two decimal places and against the row for your own sex, since the cut-offs differ while the arithmetic does not. And keep in mind what a quotient cannot show: it is blind to absolute size. If both measurements grow or shrink in the same proportion, the ratio stays exactly where it was, so an unchanged number does not mean nothing has changed.