Estimate your standing reach from your height and wingspan, compare it against the average for your height, and see exactly what vertical it leaves you needing to touch the rim or dunk.
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Standing reach is the highest point you can touch, flat-footed, one arm stretched straight overhead. It takes about thirty seconds to measure — and it wipes out the single biggest source of error in any dunk or vertical jump number you will ever calculate.
Here is how: stand sideways against a wall, bare feet or thin socks, heels planted flat. Push your dominant shoulder as high as it will go and mark the wall at your fingertips. Measure floor to mark. Do not rise onto your toes, do not tilt toward the wall — both quietly buy you an extra inch or more, and that inflated number then poisons every result you build on top of it.
No wall handy? The calculator above will estimate it from your height, and sharpen that estimate further if you give it your wingspan too. An estimate is fine for a first look. It is not fine for deciding you are two inches from your first dunk.
The shortcut ratio is height × 1.33. A 6'0" player comes out to 72 × 1.33 = 95.8 inches — just under 8 feet. That is the number the calculator falls back on the moment you leave the reach field blank.
But an average hides a lot of individual variation. Two people can stand exactly the same height and still land three to five inches apart on standing reach, purely from differences in arm length, torso proportion, and shoulder mobility. That spread alone is bigger than the gap between dunking and not dunking.
Wingspan tightens the estimate considerably, because reach tracks arm length far more closely than it tracks height. Feed the calculator your wingspan and it nudges the height-based number by half the difference between your wingspan and your height — so a 6'0" player carrying a 6'4" wingspan picks up roughly two extra inches of credited reach.
Every dunk calculation starts at the rim and works down to your fingertips. The rim itself never moves — a fixed 120 inches — and the clearance you need above it is fixed too, set by the kind of dunk you are chasing. The only thing that actually moves is how high you can already touch. That is standing reach. Not height.
It is why a 5'9" player with long arms sometimes dunks over a 6'1" player with short ones. It is also why NBA scouts record standing reach at the Combine and treat the height on the roster sheet as close to decorative. Every inch of reach you pick up is an inch you no longer need from your vertical — a straight one-for-one trade.
| Height | Est. Standing Reach | Vertical to touch rim | Vertical to dunk |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5'4" (163 cm) | 85.1" (7'1") | 34.9" | 40.9" |
| 5'6" (168 cm) | 87.8" (7'4") | 32.2" | 38.2" |
| 5'8" (173 cm) | 90.4" (7'6") | 29.6" | 35.6" |
| 5'9" (175 cm) | 91.8" (7'8") | 28.2" | 34.2" |
| 5'10" (178 cm) | 93.1" (7'9") | 26.9" | 32.9" |
| 5'11" (180 cm) | 94.4" (7'10") | 25.6" | 31.6" |
| 6'0" (183 cm) | 95.8" (8'0") | 24.2" | 30.2" |
| 6'1" (185 cm) | 97.1" (8'1") | 22.9" | 28.9" |
| 6'2" (188 cm) | 98.4" (8'2") | 21.6" | 27.6" |
| 6'4" (193 cm) | 101.1" (8'5") | 18.9" | 24.9" |
| 6'6" (198 cm) | 103.7" (8'8") | 16.3" | 22.3" |
Reach is the number the whole dunk calculation turns on. These are the ones people ask most — measure your own reach and run it through the calculator above for an exact answer.
About 91.8 inches, or 7 feet 8 inches, which leaves a 5'9" player needing a 28.2-inch vertical to touch the rim and 34.2 inches to dunk one-handed.
Anything above 1.33 times your height is above average; NBA guards typically measure around 1.35 to 1.38 times their height thanks to unusually long arms.
Start from height × 1.33, then add half the difference between your wingspan and your height — so a 6'0" player with a 6'4" wingspan gets 95.8 + 2 = 97.8 inches.
There is no fixed figure — reach and vertical trade off one for one. A 96-inch reach needs a 30-inch vertical to dunk one-handed; a 102-inch reach needs only 24 inches.
NBA Combine measurements are taken both barefoot and in shoes, and shoes typically add one to two inches. For your own calculations it does not matter which you use, as long as you use the same footwear for your standing reach and for any jump touch you measure against it. Mixing the two inflates your apparent vertical by the thickness of the sole.
Wingspan is the distance from fingertip to fingertip with both arms held out horizontally. Standing reach is the height above the floor you can touch with one arm extended overhead. They are related — both are driven largely by arm length — but they measure different things, and only standing reach feeds directly into a dunk calculation.
For adults, barely. Arm length is fixed once you have finished growing, so the only movement comes from shoulder mobility and posture, which might be worth half an inch. For teenagers still growing it changes constantly, which is why a dunk target set at fourteen can look very different at seventeen without any change in vertical jump.
It is the ratio that best fits measured reach data across a wide range of heights, and it lines up with NBA Combine figures where a 6'0" player typically records a standing reach just under 8 feet. Some other calculators use "height plus 18 inches", which produces a noticeably shorter reach — about 90 inches for a 6'0" player — and therefore a higher, less accurate vertical requirement.
Yes. Set the Units field to "Centimetres (cm)" and give your height, standing reach and wingspan in centimetres. An average standing reach for a 183 cm player is about 243 cm.