Printable Foot Measuring Sheet

Measure your foot length, and its width, at home without a ruler. The sheet prints at true scale on US Letter or A4 paper, with two bank-card checks that show whether your printer has shrunk it.

Use US Letter in the United States and Canada, A4 almost everywhere else.

Print it at the right size

1. Open the PDF and print it at 100% or Actual size. Turn off "Fit to page", "Fit to printable area", "Scale to fit" or "Shrink oversized pages". Each of them shrinks the sheet a little, and a sheet printed 1.5% small reads a 27 cm foot 4 mm long, about half a size too big.
2. Check the scale with any bank card; cards are the same size everywhere, 85.6 by 53.98 mm. It should fit the box on the sheet exactly. Then lay it along the diagonal scale with one short edge on the heel line: its far end should reach the mark labeled "card", at 8.56 cm. A ruler held against the printed bars should agree too, tick for tick: 10 cm and 4 inches.
3. Do not measure with a sheet that fails the check. Even 1 mm out at the card moves a 27 cm foot about 3 mm.

If the card misses the mark

The page was scaled on its way to the paper. Most often the print dialog fitted it to the printer's margins. Look for a setting called Scale, Page sizing or Paper handling, and choose 100%, Actual size or Custom 100. In the printer's own preferences, turn off any "Fit to page" or "Reduce" option. Printing from a phone often fits the page to the paper with no way to turn it off, so use a computer if you can.

If the sheet still prints at the wrong size at 100%, your printer is scaling pages by itself. Read where the card's far end reaches on the centimeter scale, and print again at the custom scale in this table:

Then check the new print with the card again. The table works because the card lies along the same scale as your foot: if the card overshoots its mark by 1.5%, your foot overshoots by 1.5% too.

How to measure with it

1. Put the sheet on a hard floor, not a carpet. Wear the socks you will wear with the shoes.
2. Stand on it with the back of your heel exactly on the heel line and your foot pointing along the scale. A book stood upright on the heel line, against your heel, keeps it there.
3. Mark where your longest toe ends, which is not always the big toe, or have someone read the scale for you. Stand straight, with your weight on that foot.
4. Read the scale straight out from your mark, along its ticks. Because the scale runs on a slant, the numbers level with your mark across the page are not your length. Centimeters are on one side of the line and inches on the other, and both count from the heel line.
5. Measure both feet and use the longer. Feet are largest later in the day, so the afternoon or evening gives the safer result.
6. For width, mark both sides of the widest part of your foot while you stand on the sheet, then measure between the marks with the cut-out ruler along the bottom.

Why the scale runs along the diagonal

A typical man's foot is longer than a sheet of US Letter is tall, once the printer's margins are taken off. Along the diagonal the scale reaches 30.8 cm on US Letter and 31.9 cm on A4. Your foot can hang over the sides of the paper: only your heel and the tip of your longest toe need to be on it. For a longer foot, measure against a wall with a tape measure, as the measuring guide shows.

The measuring guide has a short video of the same method, and the wide-feet guide shows how to tell whether your feet are wide.