Shoe Width Chart: Which Brands Offer Real Width Fittings

Length is only half of fit. A shoe the right length that pinches across the foot is too narrow, not too small, and sizing up to fix it gives you a shoe that slips at the heel. 14 of the 35 brands here publish genuine width fittings.

Width fittings by brand

Availability varies by model: a width offered on one shoe may not exist on another from the same brand.

A letter does not mean the same thing everywhere

Width letters are not a shared standard. A D is the standard men's fitting in most American sizing, but a D is Danner's wide fitting in women's. Clarks uses G as its standard men's fitting, while on the generic UK letter scale a G reads as wide. Sperry does not use letters at all, selling S, M, W and XW instead. Carrying a width letter from one brand to another is unreliable in the same way carrying a size number is.

US and UK width letters: what they usually mean

This is the convention, not a rule any brand has to follow: the meanings most American and British makers start from. Where a brand publishes its own fittings, as the 14 above do, the brand's chart wins.

The number in front of a letter counts it: 2E is EE, 3E is EEE and 4E is EEEE, and 2A is AA. A women's B and a men's D are each the standard, which is why one letter can be standard in one chart and wide in the other. How far apart the fittings sit is not standardized either: New Balance, the one brand here that publishes widths for every size, puts its men's 9 at 10 to 11cm across the forefoot from B to 4E, steps of 0.3 to 0.4cm.

How to measure foot width

Measure straight across the widest part of your forefoot, from one side to the other, with your weight on it: a straight-line width, not a measurement taken around the foot. As a sanity check, an average adult forefoot is roughly 9 to 11cm across; if your figure is much above that, it is a circumference rather than a width. Measure both feet and use the wider one. The wide-feet guide goes through it step by step, with New Balance's widths by size to tell whether your foot is wide.