Standing desk height calculator

Check the number against your own body

These figures come from population averages relating limb length to overall height. Two people of the same height can have noticeably different leg lengths, so treat the number as a starting point and let your elbows settle it.

The standing elbow test. Stand at the desk in the shoes you actually wear indoors, let your arms hang, then bring your forearms up to horizontal. Your fingers should rest on the surface without your shoulders lifting. If you have to shrug, the desk is too high; if you lean down into it, too low. Shoes matter more here than they do seated — an inch of sole is an inch of desk height.

The screen is the half everyone forgets

Raising the desk raises the keyboard and the screen together, which is why a desk set correctly for standing often still leaves you looking down. Your eyes sit higher relative to the desk standing than seated, so the screen needs to come up further than the surface did — for most people 20 to 25 cm between the two presets.

A monitor arm solves this in one movement. A fixed riser cannot: set it for sitting and you crane downward all afternoon, set it for standing and you look up all morning.What the screen height should be and how to reach it.

Before you buy: does it actually go that high?

Standing desks are sold on their range, and the top of that range is where the cheap ones give up. A frame that stops at 47 inches is fine for most people and useless if you are tall — and unlike a desk that is too low, no accessory fixes it. Risers under the legs take the sitting preset up by exactly the same amount.

Put the maximum from the listing into the field above and this page will tell you whether it clears your number. Do that before ordering, not after.

Standing all day is not the goal

The evidence for standing desks is not that standing is good and sitting is bad. It is that holding any one position for hours is the problem, and a desk that moves lets you stop doing that. Someone standing rigidly for six hours has swapped one static posture for another and added sore feet.

Start at roughly fifteen minutes an hour, standing for work that suits it — calls, reading, email — and sitting for work that needs stillness.What the research actually shows, including the claims that did not survive scrutiny.

Questions people ask

How high should a standing desk be for a 5 ft 10 in person?

About 44 inches (110 cm) to the desk surface, measured floor to top. The rule behind that number is your standing elbow height: stand tall, let your arms hang, bring your forearms to horizontal, and the surface should meet your fingers without your shoulders lifting.

Do most standing desks go high enough?

Not for everyone. A common budget range is 28 to 47 inches, which stops short of the standing height for anyone over roughly 6 ft 2 in. Check the maximum against your number before you buy, not after — it is the one specification that cannot be worked around with an accessory.

Is a standing desk actually better for you?

Standing still all day is its own problem, not a cure for sitting still all day. The benefit that holds up is changing position, which is why the useful output of this page is two presets rather than one height. Alternate, and stop before your legs start complaining.

Where should the monitor go when I stand?

Higher than when you sit, by roughly the difference between your standing and seated eye heights — usually 20 to 25 cm. A monitor arm handles this in one movement. A fixed stand set for sitting will have you looking down through all of your standing hours, which defeats the point.

How long should I stand for?

Start with 15 minutes an hour and let it grow from there. People who go straight to half a day standing usually have sore feet by the second afternoon and abandon the desk entirely, which is worse than never having stood at all.

Where to go next

• The seated desk height calculator — the same arithmetic aimed at a desk that does not move, including what to do when it is too tall.
• What standing desks actually do — the health claims, sorted into the ones that hold up and the ones that do not.
• Your desk height is probably wrong — for the fixed desk you are standing at now.