Narrow, regular or wide?

Measuring your width

1. Stand on a sheet of paper on a hard floor, heel against the wall, weight on the foot.
2. Mark both sides of the widest part, the ball of the foot just behind the toes, with the pen held upright.
3. Measure straight across between the marks, at right angles to the foot’s length.

Or measure with a photo: it measures length and width together. The foot width guide explains every width letter and scale. No tape measure? Print the foot ruler.

How the calculator decides

A width letter only means something at a given length: a D in a US 12 is wider than a D in a US 7. So the calculator first finds the size your length gets on a brand’s chart (the size whose foot length covers yours), then takes the fitting whose foot width is nearest yours. The line between two fittings is halfway between their widths.

For your category and letter we use New Balance’s chart, the one chart we found that prints a foot width for four US width letters: men’s B, D, 2E, 4E at US 6–16, and women’s 2A, B, D, 2E at US 5–13. Its fittings are 3–4 mm apart, and two letters apart. For children we use Birkenstock’s kids chart, which gives a narrow and a regular range for each size; a foot clearly wider than regular counts as wide.

Brands don’t agree on how wide “regular” is. For a 27.0 cm foot, New Balance’s standard D (its men’s US 9) is 104 mm wide and HOKA’s regular (its men’s US 10) 106 mm, 2 mm wider. For a 25.0 cm foot, New Balance’s standard B (its women’s US 8) is 88 mm wide and HOKA’s regular (its women’s US 8.5) 94 mm, 6 mm wider. That’s why the result lists each brand separately.