Growth references · CDC data
Height Percentile Calculator Ages 2–19, boys & girls
Enter your athlete's age, sex, and height, and see where that measurement falls in the CDC Growth Charts (2000) reference population — the same public-domain data and LMS method pediatric growth charts are built on. Percentiles describe the reference population, not any individual child.
How the calculation works
The CDC publishes LMS parameters — a skewness (L), median (M), and spread (S) value for each age and sex. Your entry is converted to a z-score with the published formula and then to a percentile. That is the entire computation, and it runs in your browser: the page carries the public CDC parameter table with it, and nothing you type ever leaves your device.
Displayed percentiles are capped at the 1st and 99th — beyond that, the honest answer is "outside the reference range," not a more extreme-sounding number.
Prefer a table for one age?
Every page has the full percentile table for boys and girls, the reference curves, and what that age looks like on them.
Common questions
What does the percentile actually mean?
It describes the reference population, not your child: a height at the 70th percentile means about 70% of kids measured at that age and sex were at or below that height. Our guide to reading percentile charts covers it in two minutes.
Why does the calculator ask for sex?
The CDC publishes separate reference curves for boys and girls because the measured distributions differ, especially through the teenage years. Using the matching curve is what makes the percentile meaningful.
What about children under 2?
The CDC charts we use begin at age 2. Younger children are measured differently (lying down, as recumbent length) under a separate standard that this calculator does not include, so it won't return a result below age 2.
Is one measurement enough to know anything?
Not much on its own. Measured consistently over a season, the same number becomes a record — and the pattern in that record is what pediatricians and coaches can actually work with.
Where these numbers come from
Every value on this page is computed by My Athlete from the CDC Growth Charts (2000), published by the National Center for Health Statistics and in the public domain. We use the charts' own published LMS (Lambda-Mu-Sigma) parameters and method — no estimates, no blended sources, nothing invented. The reference population is the U.S. reference population underlying the CDC Growth Charts (2000); it describes measured distributions, not targets. How we build these tables →
Source: CDC Growth Charts (2000), National Center for Health Statistics — cdc.gov/growthcharts. Data coverage: ages 2–20. Use of these data does not imply endorsement by CDC, NCHS, HHS, or the U.S. government. · Page last reviewed: August 26, 2026
One number tells you where they are today.
The part that actually matters is the same measurement, repeated over a season — the record of measured change over time. That's what My Athlete keeps, across 18 sports, alongside every assessment your athlete does.