How to measure shoe size at home

Measuring a foot at home needs a sheet of paper, a pencil and a ruler. Trace both feet, measure each tracing from the back of the heel to the tip of the longest toe, measure across the widest point, and work from whichever foot comes out longer. Everything after that is conversion.

What do you need?

Four things, all of which are probably already in the house.

• A sheet of paper larger than your foot. Two sheets taped end to end work if a single sheet falls short.
• A hard, flat floor. Carpet lets the paper shift and lets the foot spread unevenly under load.
• A pencil you can hold upright. A pen works, but a pencil is easier to keep vertical against the skin.
• A ruler or tape marked in millimetres as well as inches. Millimetres are easier to read to the nearest step in size.

Wear the socks you would actually wear with the shoes. A thick winter sock adds a few millimetres of girth and can change which width letter you land on, even though it barely changes the length.

How do you measure foot length?

1. Tape the paper down — put one edge against a wall, on a hard floor, so the sheet cannot slide while you stand on it.
2. Stand with your heel against the wall — put your full weight on that foot. A loaded foot is longer and wider than a foot held in the air, and shoes are worn loaded.
3. Trace around the foot — hold the pencil vertical, tip against the skin, and go slowly around the outline. A pencil tilted outward adds millimetres on every side of the tracing.
4. Mark the heel and the longest toe — draw one straight line across the back of the heel outline and another across the tip of the longest toe, both square to the length of the foot. The longest toe is not always the big toe.
5. Measure between the two lines — that distance is your foot length. Write it down in millimetres, not in fractions.
6. Repeat on the other foot — on a clean part of the paper, with the same pencil angle and the same socks.
7. Size from the longer foot — feet are rarely a matched pair. The shorter foot copes with a shoe fitted to the longer one; the longer foot does not cope with a shoe fitted to the shorter one.

If someone can trace for you, let them. Reaching around your own foot tips the pencil outward and lengthens the outline in exactly the direction you cannot detect afterwards.

How do you measure foot width?

Width is taken at the ball of the foot: the widest span, across the joints behind the big and little toes. On the tracing, find the two furthest-apart points and measure straight between them, square to the length line you already drew.

A tape wrapped around the ball of the foot gives a girth, not a width. Both numbers are used in shoe fitting and they are not interchangeable. If a brand's chart asks for a circumference, wrap the tape; if it asks for a width, measure flat on the tracing. Read the column heading before you compare your number to anything in it.

When should you measure?

Measure at the end of the day. Feet swell over hours of standing and walking, so an evening measurement is the larger, more demanding one, and it is the size the shoe has to cope with at its worst.

Measure again if it has been a few years. Foot length and width shift with age, weight change, pregnancy and injury. The size you wore at twenty is not a permanent fact about you.

How do you turn a measurement into a shoe size?

Take the longer foot's length, compare it against a published conversion chart, then check that result against the specific brand's own chart before ordering. The increments involved are small, which is the whole argument for careful tracing.

One full size is a third of an inch, about 8.5 mm. A half size is half of that, about 4.2 mm. A pencil held at a slant can cost you that much on its own, which is why the vertical pencil and the second attempt are worth the extra minute.

The conversion tables live at the shoe size chart, with the width letters broken out at the shoe width chart. If you are ordering across borders, the international conversion chart covers the scale changes between the US, UK and EU systems.

What does a width letter mean?

US width letters do not run on a single ladder. The men's and women's charts are centred on different letters and cover different ranges, so the same letter is not the same width on both; the men's and women's width ladders are set out separately. D is the usual default for men's shoes and B for women's, which is why most pairs on a shelf carry no width marking at all: they are the default and nobody prints it.

A width letter is not a fixed number of inches. It is defined relative to the length, so a D at a small size is a physically narrower shoe than a D at a large size. That is also why sizing up to gain room across the ball works badly. You gain a fraction of width and a full third of an inch of length you did not ask for, and the heel starts slipping.

Why does the same size fit differently between brands?

Because the number on the box describes the last the shoe was built on, and lasts differ. Two brands can print the same size on shoes with different toe shapes, different instep heights and different amounts of room beyond the longest toe. Your foot has not changed between the two boxes. What changed is how much of the shoe is foot space.

This is the same problem that runs through clothing, where a letter size means whatever the brand decides it means. We wrote that up at vanity sizing, and the single case people ask about most is covered at does Nike run small.

The practical position: a foot measurement is a fixed fact you can carry from brand to brand, and the brand's own chart is the translation layer. Neither one on its own is enough.

How much room should the shoe have?

Shoe length and foot length are different numbers, and the gap between them is a design decision each brand makes. Some publish that allowance, most do not. Rather than apply one rule of thumb across every brand, take your foot measurement to the brand's own size guide and use the allowance they specify. If they publish none, treat the first pair as a fitting and keep the return window in mind before you wear them outside.

What can ShirtMath do with this?

Not shoes. ShirtMath measures shirts. You photograph a shirt laid flat next to a scale card, the scanner returns its flat measurements, and those measurements are matched against published garment specifications across the catalogue. Roughly half of scanner readings land within an inch of a tape measure; sleeve opening and bicep are the least reliable; anything the reader cannot resolve confidently is left blank rather than guessed. That is documented at methodology.

A photograph alone cannot tell you your shoe size. That needs either a size you already know fits or a foot measurement like the one above, because a photo carries no scale and no last. The shoe pages here are reference material: the charts, this method, and nothing that pretends to scan. Saying so is the honest state of the product rather than a hint about what is coming.

What a known size or a real foot measurement does do is give any sizing tool something solid to work from. It is the same principle the shirt scanner runs on: a measured number beats a letter on a label. If you want to see how that reasoning is applied to footwear identification, what shoes are these sets out what a photo can and cannot settle.

Common questions

Where to go next