Desk Height Calculator

Your desk is almost certainly too tall

Run this calculator and you will probably get a number in the mid-twenties. Then go and measure your actual desk, and it will say 29 inches, because nearly every fixed desk ever sold says 29 inches.

That gap is the whole story of this page. Look at what this tool's own table recommends against the standard:

Work up the table and the picture is stark. A standard desk does not enter the recommended range at all until about 6'2", and even then only as the very top of it. It is properly, comfortably correct for a man around 6'4". And by 6'5" it has become the smallest desk that would be recommended.

Now set that against reality. The average American man is about 5'9", for whom the standard is two to four inches too tall. The average woman is about 5'4", and needs 24 inches. Her desk is 29. Every desk she has ever worked at has been four to six inches too tall, which in ergonomic terms is not a quibble, it is a different piece of furniture. And this is not an edge case: it describes roughly half the working population.

So if you have spent years assuming your neck and shoulders ache because of bad posture, some personal failing you ought to be able to sit through, consider the alternative: you have been reaching up to a surface built for someone half a foot taller than you, and doing rather well to cope. The number this tool just gave you is what your desk should have been.

Where 29 inches came from

Two answers, and the second one is the interesting one.

The polite answer is anthropometrics. The 28 to 30 inch standard has decades of body-measurement data behind it, and organisations like OSHA and the furniture standards body BIFMA have shaped how office furniture gets designed and tested. It is a genuine attempt to pick one height that serves the widest slice of a varied population, and one height is what mass manufacturing wants.

The honest answer is that it is a hand-me-down from writing. The 29-inch convention comes from mid-twentieth-century office furniture designed for people writing on paper, not typing on keyboards. Those are different jobs. When you write by hand you want the surface a bit higher, and you lean into it. When you type you want your forearms roughly level with the ground and your shoulders doing nothing at all, which needs a lower surface.

So the desk you are sitting at is the right height for a task most of us stopped doing decades ago, sized for a man taller than most of us, and it has survived because furniture standards move slowly and desks last a long time. It is nobody's fault. It is just furniture inertia.

What this is really measuring is your elbows

The tool asks for your total height, because that is easy to know, but height is a proxy. The thing that actually determines your desk height is your seated elbow height: how far your elbow sits above the floor when you are sitting properly.

All of this arithmetic is chasing one geometric condition, and once you know it you can check any desk anywhere without a calculator:

Your forearms should be roughly parallel to the floor when your hands are on the keyboard, with your elbows at about a right angle, close to your sides, and your shoulders down.

Anywhere in the 90 to 110 degree range at the elbow is fine, and the typing surface should be level with your elbows or a shade below. That is the whole rule. Every figure this tool produces is reverse-engineered from your height to land your elbows there.

What goes wrong when the desk is too high is worth spelling out, because it is not obvious and it is what most people are living with. If the surface is above your elbows, you cannot lower your arms to it. So you raise your arms to the surface instead, which means lifting your shoulders. And then you hold them there, gently shrugged, for eight hours a day, for years. The muscles across the top of your shoulders and up your neck never get to switch off. That is where a very large share of office neck and shoulder pain comes from, and the cause is not your posture. It is a height mismatch you have been unconsciously compensating for with muscle.

The two tells, and you will recognise at least one:

• You shrug. Your shoulders creep up towards your ears to reach the surface, and they stay there. This is why your traps ache.
• Your wrists bend backwards. Reaching up to a keyboard forces your wrists into extension, which is the posture most associated with wrist trouble.

Too low is a real problem too, and less common: you hunch forward and down to reach, which loads your lower back. But given that almost every desk is 29 inches, too high is the error nearly everyone actually has.

One caveat on the tool itself. Two people of exactly the same height can have noticeably different seated elbow heights depending on torso and limb proportions, and a height-based table cannot see that. Use the number to get close, then check yourself against the elbow rule and adjust.

A worked example

Someone 5'8", sitting. The tool returns:

Desk: 25 to 27 inches
Chair seat: 16 to 18 inches
Monitor: 47 to 49 inches

Now measure your desk. If it reads 29, as it very likely does, you have a two to four inch problem, and no amount of sitting up straight will solve it. The next sections are about what to do instead.

The same person standing gets a desk height of 41 to 43 inches, which is roughly sixteen inches higher, and is why standing desk converters have such a long throw.

The three numbers, and which one matters

You get up to three figures, and they are not equally important.

Desk height is the one that matters most, because it drives your shoulders and wrists, and those are the two things that will be sore in a year. Except that it is really a proxy too: what actually matters is the height of your keyboard. If you type on the desk surface, they are the same thing. If you have a keyboard tray, the tray height is the number to match and the desk can be whatever it likes.

Chair height is the one you can actually change, which makes it the most useful. Most office chairs adjust somewhere between 16 and 21 inches, and the lever is right there under you.

Monitor height is the one people get most wrong, and it is dealt with below, because the tool is not clear about what it is measuring.

Notice that only the sitting option gives you a chair figure, which is correct, since standing does not involve one. It does mean the standing mode is quieter than it looks.

If you cannot change the desk, change the chair

Here is where the advice becomes practical, because you have just been handed a number you probably cannot act on. Your desk is 29 inches, it is not adjustable, and it is not yours to modify.

Fine. Move everything else instead. The trick is to stop treating the desk as the adjustable part and start treating yourself as the adjustable part.

1. Raise your chair until your elbows meet the desk properly. Not until your feet feel right. Set the chair by your elbows and the desk, and ignore your feet entirely for the moment. This is the step people get backwards: they set the chair by their feet, and then live with the shoulders forever.
2. Your feet are now dangling. That is expected. If your desk is four inches too tall and you have raised your chair four inches to compensate, your feet will not reach the floor. This is not a mistake, it is the consequence, and it has its own fix.
3. Put something under them. A footrest, a ream of paper, a shoebox, a stack of books. Anything solid and stable. Your thighs should be roughly level and your feet supported.

That third step is not optional, and skipping it is how people make things worse. Dangling feet tip your pelvis forward, flatten the natural curve of your lower back, and put the weight of your legs onto the front edge of the seat, compressing everything running through the back of your thigh. You would be trading a shoulder problem for a spine one. Nobody will see the box.

That three-step sequence is the single highest-value thing on this page, and it costs nothing. It converts a desk built for someone half a foot taller than you into a workable one.

One point of confusion worth clearing up. The chair figure this tool gives you, 15 to 17 inches for a 5'4" person, is the seat height that would be correct if your desk were the right height. It is not the number to aim at when you are compensating for a desk that is too tall. If you have followed the steps above, you will be sitting higher than the tool's chair figure, and that is correct. The footrest is what makes it correct. Do not chase the chair number at the expense of your elbows.

The other routes, if you want them, are a keyboard tray mounted under the desk surface, a properly adjustable desk, or, for a genuinely too-low desk, risers under the legs.

The monitor number is the one people ignore

Two things to know about this figure, and the first catches almost everyone out.

It is measured from the floor, not from your desk. For a 5'4" person sitting, the tool recommends around 44 to 46 inches, which sounds enormous until you realise it includes the height of the desk and everything under it. Read it as a distance from the carpet.

And the tool does not say which part of the monitor it means. Top of the screen? Centre? The height of your eyes? Those are several inches apart on a modern display, which is wider than the range it gives you. We have flagged that. In the meantime, the rule the number is trying to approximate is the one to trust:

• The top of the screen should be at or slightly below your eye level. Looking straight ahead with your head level, your gaze should land on roughly the top third of the display, and you should be looking very slightly downward at the rest.
• The screen should be about an arm's length away. Sit back, reach out, and your fingertips should roughly touch it.
• Tilt it back slightly, in the region of 10 to 20 degrees, so the screen faces your face rather than your chest.

Why this matters more than it sounds: your head weighs about five kilograms, and it sits on top of your neck like a bowling ball on a broom handle. Held upright it costs almost nothing, because the load runs straight down through the structure. Tipped forward, the muscles at the back of your neck have to hold it out on a lever, and the further forward it goes the harder they work. A screen that is too low tips your head forward all day, every day. That is the ache between your shoulder blades.

Too high is a real error too, and less common, but it makes you tilt your head back and dries your eyes out because you are holding them wider open.

Use the tool's figure to get in the neighbourhood. Then set the top of the screen at eye level and trust that.

Standing desks: the answer is alternating, not standing

Switch the tool to standing and the numbers jump substantially, because standing raises your elbows by roughly the length of your seated thighs. That 5'4" person needs about 38 to 40 inches standing against 23 to 25 sitting: a gap of some fifteen inches.

That gap is the case for a genuinely adjustable desk. It is also why a fixed standing desk has exactly the same flaw as a fixed sitting desk: it will be right for one height of person and wrong for everyone else.

Before you set your desk high and leave it there, the honest position on standing desks. Standing all day is not better than sitting all day. It is a different set of problems: leg and foot fatigue, lower back ache, and increased pressure in the veins of the legs. Swapping eight hours of sitting for eight hours of standing is not a win, it is a trade.

What the evidence supports is changing posture regularly. The benefit is in the movement between positions rather than in either position. So alternate through the day, and build up gradually rather than standing for four hours on day one, which is how people conclude standing desks are terrible. If you have an adjustable desk, its value is the adjustment. A desk left permanently at standing height is just a differently shaped fixed desk.

A few practical notes if you do stand. The elbow rule is identical, just measured standing: forearms parallel to the floor, shoulders down. An anti-fatigue mat makes a genuine difference, since standing on a hard floor is the actual complaint most of the time. And your monitor has to come up with the desk, which is the bit people forget: many standing setups get the arms right and leave the screen low, so you spend your standing hours craning down at it.

One caveat worth stating: if you have circulatory problems, significant varicose veins, or existing back trouble, talk to a doctor before adopting a long standing routine rather than after.

The laptop problem

Worth a moment, because a laptop makes correct ergonomics impossible by design and most people now work on one.

The screen and the keyboard are fixed together. Put the keyboard where your hands want it and the screen is far too low, so you look down all day. Raise the screen to eye level and you are typing at your chin. There is no position that solves both. It is not a setup problem, it is geometry, and no amount of adjusting will fix it.

The only real answer is to separate them: put the laptop on a stand so the screen comes up to eye level, and use an external keyboard and mouse at elbow height. Any stand, any stack of books. The gap between the two is the entire problem, and separating them is the entire solution. It costs very little and converts a laptop into a proper workstation. If you work on a laptop for more than an hour or two a day, it is probably the highest-value thing on this page after the footrest.

The five-minute setup

In order, because the order matters. Each step depends on the one before it.

1. Chair height first. Sit back properly. Raise or lower until your elbows are level with the desk surface, shoulders relaxed and hanging.
2. Feet next. If they are not flat on the floor, put something under them. Now.
3. Keyboard and mouse. Directly in front of you, close enough that your elbows stay near your sides. Reaching forward for a mouse all day is its own injury.
4. Monitor height. Top of the screen at or just below eye level, arm's length away, tilted back a touch.
5. Then move anyway. The best posture is the next one. Get up every half hour or so.

That last point deserves more weight than everything above it. The research on desk work keeps pointing at the same thing: the problem is holding any position for hours, not which position it is. A perfect setup you never leave still leaves your muscles statically loaded all day. Standing up to fill a glass of water is worth more than another inch of adjustment.

Questions people ask

Why is every desk 29 inches, and why does it not fit me?

Convention, and a very old one. Fixed desks are almost universally 28 to 30 inches, most commonly 29, and by this tool's own table that only starts fitting at about 6'2" and is properly correct for someone around 6'4". If you are shorter, which most people are, it is one to five inches too tall for you. The height is a mid-century convention inherited from furniture designed for writing by hand, and it has outlived the task it was built for.

What desk height should a 5'8" person use?

About 25 to 27 inches seated, with a chair seat around 16 to 18 inches. Standing, about 41 to 43 inches. Since your desk is probably 29 inches, the practical move is to raise your chair until your elbows meet the desk and put a footrest under your feet.

My desk cannot be lowered. What do I do?

Raise your chair until your elbows are level with the desk, then support your feet on a footrest or anything solid. Set the chair by your elbows, not your feet; your feet get fixed afterwards. Treat the footrest as mandatory rather than optional, because dangling feet tip your pelvis and wreck your lower back.

I followed that and now I am sitting higher than the chair height you gave me. Is that wrong?

No, that is correct. The chair figure assumes your desk is already the right height. When you are compensating for a desk that is too tall, sitting higher than that figure is the whole point, and the footrest is what makes it safe. Your elbows are the target, not the chair number.

Is the monitor height measured from my desk?

No, from the floor, which is why the number looks so large. It refers to roughly where the top of the screen should sit rather than the middle. If in doubt, ignore the figure and set the top of the screen at or just below eye level, about an arm's length away.

Should I stand all day at a standing desk?

No. Standing all day trades sitting problems for standing ones: leg fatigue, back ache and pressure in the leg veins. The benefit is in alternating, so change position through the day and build up gradually rather than starting with a four-hour shift. Use an anti-fatigue mat, and remember to bring the monitor up with the desk.

Can I enter my height in centimetres?

Not currently, which we have flagged. The dropdown runs in feet and inches from 4'10" to 6'8". For now, 5'4" is about 163 cm and 6'0" is about 183 cm, and our Height Converter will do the sum exactly.

References

Where the figures come from, and one honest caveat. The height-by-height table this tool uses carries no published source, so this page treats it as a reasonable starting estimate rather than a standard, and checks it against the principles below rather than the reverse. Those principles, namely the neutral seated posture with shoulders relaxed and elbows at roughly 90 degrees, the work surface set at or just below seated elbow height, the requirement for feet to be supported flat, the positioning of the monitor so that the top of the screen sits at or just below eye level at about an arm's length, and the emphasis on changing posture rather than holding any single one, are standard workstation ergonomics guidance from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and from Cornell University's ergonomics programme. The 28 to 30 inch fixed-desk convention and its grounding in anthropometric data and furniture standards is described in the same body of guidance. All of it is a starting point rather than a clinical prescription: comfort across a working day is a better test than any table, and persistent pain is worth taking to a doctor or physiotherapist rather than to a calculator, since a desk is only one of the things that causes it.

1. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Computer Workstations eTool: Workstation Components and Good Working Positions. US Department of Labor.
2. Cornell University Ergonomics Web (CUErgo). Department of Design and Environmental Analysis, Cornell University.