Clothing Size Converter

This page converts tops, women’s and men’s, live across US, UK, EU and letter sizes. Bottoms run on a completely different offset (European trousers sit sixteen above the US waist, against thirty for women’s tops), so those live on the clothing size by garment type page along with the France, Italy and Japan columns. Both pages use the German EU scale, so they agree.

Clothing sizes vary between countries and even between brands. These are approximate standard conversions.

Women’s Tops and Dresses:

Men’s Tops:

General conversion offsets:

• Women’s: UK = US + 4, EU = US + 30
• Men’s: EU = US + 10, because the European number is the chest in centimetres divided by two

That last rule is the one worth remembering, because it makes the European system make sense instead of looking arbitrary. A man with a 96 cm chest takes EU 48. His US size is 38, which is the same chest in inches. The two systems measure the identical thing and only disagree about units.

The halving story is a good explanation and a poor calculator, though, so do not lean on it at the top of the range. An inch is 2.54 cm, not 2, so adding ten to the US number and doubling the EU number are two different sums that only happen to agree around S and M. Compare the chart above: EU 53 doubled is 106 cm, while the L row lists a 107 to 112 cm chest, and by XXL the doubled figure comes out around five centimetres light. The offset EU = US + 10 is the one that holds all the way up, because it is how the sizes are actually labelled. Read the doubling as a rough sanity check on a size you have never worn, not as a conversion.

How to measure yourself

You need a soft tape and about a minute. For the chest, run the tape around the fullest part, under the armpits, with your arms down and without puffing out. For the waist, measure at the natural crease when you bend sideways, not where your jeans happen to sit, and keep a finger’s width of slack. For the neck, measure at the base where a collar sits and add half an inch, or the shirt will fit like a tie.

Women’s sizes are the ones that need a warning. The numbers 0 to 20 are not measurements of anything: they are arbitrary labels that have drifted downward for decades, so a modern US 8 corresponds to a considerably larger body than a US 8 from the 1960s. That drift is why one brand’s 8 fits and another’s does not, and why the only figure worth trusting on a label is the centimetre or inch measurement in the brand’s own chart. Retailers publish those charts precisely because the size number cannot be relied on.

Men’s numeric sizes are better behaved. A 40 jacket really is a 40 inch chest, near enough, which is why the men’s conversions above hold up across brands far better than the women’s ones do.

Note: Always check the brand’s specific size chart. Sizes vary significantly between manufacturers, and vanity sizing means two garments labelled the same can differ by two full sizes.