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For healthcare professionals

Ideal Body Weight Calculator

Ideal body weight by the Devine formula depends only on height and sex. Adjusted body weight lies between ideal and actual body weight and was introduced for people with obesity. This tool shows both, with the working. It is written for clinicians, gives no dosing advice and is not a diagnosis.

Last reviewed: By the uncovermyrisk.com editorial team Educational only, not medical advice.

A medical emergency: call 911 now.General safety advice (not part of the published formulas). Do not wait for a calculation.

Sex, height and weight

For adults. Use measured height and weight. Nothing you enter leaves this page.

Units
Sex
Result appears here

What you will see

The ideal body weight by the Devine formula and, if you enter the actual weight, the adjusted body weight, with the working.

Educational only, not medical advice. Not a diagnosis. Decisions belong to the treating team.

Source

The Devine formula as printed by Briguglio M and colleagues, Frontiers in Nutrition 2023, and Min KL and colleagues, PLoS One 2018; adjusted body weight as printed by Mohamed AAA and colleagues, Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation 2026. All three are open access (CC BY). The tests check both formulas at 5 feet, above and below 5 feet, and that unequal weights are never displayed as equal.

Validated in

Adults. Briguglio 2023 used the Devine formula in a brief report on malnutrition equations for hip, knee and spine surgery research; Min 2018 used it in a retrospective study of 464 adults given colistin at a tertiary referral hospital; Mohamed 2026 is a review of indexing kidney function for body surface area.

Limits

The Devine formula uses only height and sex, so it says nothing about body composition. The under 5 feet form is the same straight line extended downward. Mohamed 2026 notes that, in most clinical and research settings, body surface area is calculated with actual body weight because adjusted body weight has no proven advantage. This tool gives no dose.

The formulas

Ideal body weight (Devine), with height in inches (Briguglio 2023) (Min 2018):

For heights under 5 feet, 2.3 kg is subtracted for each inch under 5 feet (Min 2018), which is the same formula. One inch is 2.54 cm.

Adjusted body weight = IBW + 0.4 x (actual body weight - IBW) (Mohamed 2026). It was introduced because, in people with obesity, actual body weight overestimates the metabolically active part of the body, and it lies between ideal and actual body weight (Mohamed 2026).

Worked example: a man 5 feet 10 inches tall (177.8 cm) has an ideal body weight of 50 + 2.3 x 10 = 73 kg. With an actual weight of 123 kg, the adjusted body weight is 73 + 0.4 x (123 - 73) = 93 kg.

Related tools

For body surface area from weight and height, see the body surface area calculator. To estimate kidney function from creatinine, age and weight, use the creatinine clearance calculator. Other bedside scores are listed under For healthcare professionals.

Sources

  1. Briguglio M, Wainwright TW, Lombardi G. Definition of malnutrition from routinely-collected data for orthopedic surgery research: the global leadership initiative on malnutrition (GLIM) tool and others. Front Nutr. 2023;10:1200049. doi:10.3389/fnut.2023.1200049. PMID 38024369. Open access (CC BY). Table notes (Devine equations for ideal body weight in men and women). pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10665468/
  2. Min KL, Son ES, Kim JS, et al. Risk factors of colistin safety according to administration routes: intravenous and aerosolized colistin. PLoS One. 2018;13(11):e0207588. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0207588. PMID 30462703. Open access (CC BY). Methods, Definitions (Devine formula above and below 5 feet). pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6248982/
  3. Mohamed AAA, van Londen M, Stevens J, Heerspink HJL, Gansevoort RT. Indexing for body surface area when assessing kidney function. Nephrol Dial Transplant. 2026;41(9):1595. doi:10.1093/ndt/gfag063. PMID 41860431. Open access (CC BY). Table 1 (Du Bois and Mosteller equations), worked examples (1.43 and 2.08 m2), the 1.73 m2 standard and drug dosing. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13518093/

Written and maintained by the uncovermyrisk.com editorial team. We do not have a medical reviewer; every claim links to its primary source above. Last reviewed: 2026-11-02. Spotted an error? See About.