Blood volume calculator
Enter sex, height and weight, get the estimated blood volume.
How is blood volume estimated?
With Nadler’s formula (1962): men BV = 0.3669 × H³ + 0.03219 × W + 0.6041; women BV = 0.3561 × H³ + 0.03308 × W + 0.1833, with height H in meters, weight W in kilograms and the result in liters.
Example
A man 1.78 m (5 ft 10 in) tall weighing 80 kg (176 lb): 0.3669 × 5.640 + 0.03219 × 80 + 0.6041 = 5.25 liters. A woman 1.65 m and 60 kg: about 3.77 liters.
Is the formula still used?
Yes — recent clinical papers, including work from the NIH Clinical Center on apheresis, still use Nadler’s equations to estimate total blood volume.
How accurate is it?
It estimates the volume for a typical person of that height and weight. Direct measurement is needed for an exact value.
How much is that in pints?
The calculator also shows US pints and quarts: 5.25 liters is about 11.1 pints.
How do height, weight and sex change the result?
Weight enters in a straight line: each extra kilogram adds 0.03219 liters for a man and 0.03308 liters for a woman. Height enters as a cube, so tall people gain more per centimeter: near 1.78 m a man gains about 35 mL for each extra centimeter, and near 1.65 m a woman gains about 29 mL. Sex shows in the coefficients and in the constant (0.6041 against 0.1833): at the same 1.70 m and 70 kg the formula gives 4.66 liters for a man and 4.25 liters for a woman. Because the formula uses only these three inputs, two people with the same height, weight and sex get the same answer whatever their body composition.
Worked example: a tall man and a smaller woman
Take a man 1.90 m tall weighing 95 kg. Height cubed is 6.859, and 0.3669 × 6.859 = 2.517. The weight term is 0.03219 × 95 = 3.058. Adding the constant 0.6041 gives 6.18 liters, about 13.1 US pints. A woman 1.60 m tall weighing 55 kg works out the same way with her coefficients to 3.46 liters, about 7.3 pints. The 2.7-liter difference between them comes from both size and sex.
Common mistakes with the blood volume formula
Putting height in centimeters into the cubed term: the formula needs meters, and 178 instead of 1.78 would return 2,069,228 liters. The calculator converts for you, but only if the unit selector matches what you typed. Typing pounds as kilograms: 176 lb typed as 176 kg returns 8.3 liters instead of 5.25 liters for the man in the example. Using the wrong sex formula, which changes the answer by several tenths of a liter. And reading the result as a measurement: it is the expected volume for a typical body of that size, and a measured value from a clinical test can differ.
Sources and related calculators
Sources: S. B. Nadler, J. U. Hidalgo and T. Bloch, “Prediction of blood volume in normal human adults,” Surgery (1962), the source of the height, weight and sex coefficients. Related: total body water calculator, body surface area calculator, lean body mass calculator and BMI calculator.
For general information only — not medical advice. Talk with your doctor or another health professional about your own health. How we check our calculators.