About

Why I built it

When Army Directive 2026-13 replaced the tape test with the waist-to-height ratio in July 2026, the standard changed overnight — but the internet didn't. Calculators built on the abolished method kept ranking, kept being shared, and Soldiers were left preparing against rules that no longer exist, for an assessment that affects careers.

I built this site to be the opposite of that lag: one place that implements only the current standard — Army Directive 2026-13 and the measurement protocol in HQDA EXORD 182-26, Annex A — taken directly from the official Army publications. That includes the parts quick calculators skip: height recorded to the nearest half inch, each of the three waist readings rounded down to the nearest half inch before they are averaged, and the recorded ratio truncated — never rounded — to three decimals, so 0.549888 records as 0.549 and meets the standard, exactly as the EXORD's own worked example shows.

The retired tape tests are still here, clearly labelled as history, because old records still need reading. But nothing on this site presents a retired method as if it were the current standard.

About the author

Ian Welkins

Independent web developer · Houston, Texas

I'm Ian Welkins, an independent web developer based in Houston, Texas. I build small, single-purpose calculator websites — tools that do one job, show their working, and ask for nothing: no sign-up, no accounts, nothing to install.

This site is researched, built and maintained by me personally. I work from the official Army publications — the directive, the EXORD, the regulation — and every figure the calculators produce traces to a source named on the page it appears on. There is no team and no content farm behind it: the code, the writing and the corrections all come back to one person. One boundary is worth stating plainly on a site like this: nothing here is medical advice, and no result here is an official determination. I publish the standard and the arithmetic; your unit makes the call.

The same person stands behind these profiles:

• GitHub — my projects and code
• Dev.to — notes on building these tools
• About.me — all my sites and profiles in one place
• Gravatar — my verified profile

Spotted something that doesn't match the current directive? Tell me through the report-an-error page — I read every report myself and fix what's wrong. For anything else, the contact page is the way to reach me.

A note on AI

I use AI tools as drafting and coding assistants, the way many independent developers do now — for first drafts of text and for code. On a site that republishes a military standard, the line matters, so here it is exactly: the standard itself is not generated, summarised or interpreted by AI. It is transcribed from Army Directive 2026-13 and HQDA EXORD 182-26, Annex A, and I verified the calculators against those documents, including the EXORD's own worked example and its Figure B-1 maximum-waist table, row by row. What AI helps with is the drafting around that verified core — and anything it drafts is checked against the source documents before it is published. If you find a discrepancy between this site and the directive, the report-an-error form reaches a person — me — and the directive wins.

How the numbers are sourced

Nothing on this site is reconstructed from memory or copied from another calculator. The WHtR calculators implement the standard in Army Directive 2026-13 with the measurement and recording rules of HQDA EXORD 182-26, Annex A — including its official maximum-waist screening table (Figure B-1), which this site's computed maxima were checked against row by row, and its worked recording example (0.549888 records as 0.549 and meets the standard). The retired material keeps its own provenance: the one-site equations from Army Directive 2023-11, verified against the directive's published sample calculations (a man of 210 lb with a 35 in abdomen at 17%; a woman of 165 lb with a 30 in abdomen at 26%), the screening tables transcribed from Table B-1 of AR 600-9, and the Hodgdon equations of the retired multi-site method, tested against published worked examples. The full method, including how corrections are handled, is set out in the editorial policy.

Sources used across the site include the Army.mil announcement of Army Directive 2026-13, the EXORD implementing guidance, AR 600-9 and the directives that amended it, and the Army Resilience Directorate's ABCP pages. Where a fact could not be verified against a source of that standing, it was left out — the female page's deliberately general pregnancy section is an example.

What the site is not

This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any government body, and nothing here is an official determination of anything. Every result is computed by the published rules; only your unit's assessment — its measurers, its equipment, its procedures — decides whether you meet the standard. The site gives no medical advice: body composition questions with a health dimension belong with your medical provider, and administrative questions about your own case belong with your chain of command.

If you are a recruit rather than a serving Soldier, the same caution applies in a friendlier form: these tools will show you honestly where you stand against the standards, but enlistment decisions are made at MEPS under the rules in force that day — confirm current requirements with a recruiter.