173 cm in Feet and Inches
173 cm is
5' 8"
Exactly 68.1102 inches, rounded to 5' 8" — the whole inch a height is written in on a licence, a passport or a doctor’s chart. The fraction above that is real and never said out loud.
Conversion factor checked · How we check
Every way to write it
| Feet and inches | 5' 8" |
| Said aloud | 5 foot 8 |
| Total inches | 68.1102 in |
| Centimeters | 173 cm |
| Meters | 1.7300 m |
The centimeter figure is exact; the feet-and-inches figure is that number rounded to the nearest whole inch.
The heights either side
Where this height sits
Against the measured heights of US adults aged 20 and over, from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey — the same figures the CDC growth charts are built from.
- Men
- Taller than about 39% of US adult men, so shorter than the other 61%.
- Women
- Above the 95th percentile for US adult women — past the last figure the survey publishes.
A percentile is a rank within a population, not a judgement about one: the same centimetre reading lands at a different rank in a different country, and the survey measures without shoes in the afternoon, when people are up to a centimetre shorter than they were on waking.
Why the answer is rounded at all
An inch is exactly 25.4 millimeters, fixed by agreement in 1959 rather than measured, so every conversion here is exact until somebody asks for it in feet and inches. A round centimeter almost never lands on a whole inch: 170 cm is 66.93 inches, which is 5 feet 6.93 inches. Every official record — licence, passport, medical chart — rounds that to the nearest whole inch, and so does the figure at the top of this page. The exact number is in the table above, where it belongs.