What Workbench Height Formulas Actually Produce

There are at least six widely circulated formulas for calculating the "correct" workbench height. They disagree with each other by as much as four inches. For a piece of shop furniture that most woodworkers will use for decades, that's not a rounding error. That's the difference between comfortable work and chronic lower back pain.

The disagreement isn't because some formulas are right and others are wrong. It's because they're answering different questions while pretending to answer the same one.

The Formulas and What They Produce

The most common formula: drop your arms to your sides and measure from the floor to your wrist crease. That's your bench height. For a 5'10" person with proportional arms, this typically produces a number around 33 to 34 inches.

The second common formula: measure from the floor to the first joint of your pinky finger with your arms hanging naturally. This runs about an inch lower - 32 to 33 inches for the same person.

The hand-plane-centric formula: stand with arms at your sides, make a fist, and measure to the bottom of your fist. This gives you a height optimized for applying downward pressure on a hand plane - typically 31 to 32 inches for our 5'10" example.

The European cabinetmaker tradition: bench height equals half the user's height plus one inch. A 5'10" person (70 inches) gets a 36-inch bench.

The Roubo tradition: waist height, approximately navel level. This produces benches in the 34-to-36-inch range depending on torso proportions.

The workbench manufacturer default: 34 inches. This number appears in mass-market plans, kit benchesthat come flat-packed, and workshop design articles written by people who have apparently decided that every woodworker is 5'8" with average arm length.

For someone who is 6'2", these formulas produce heights ranging from 33 to 38 inches. For someone who is 5'4", the range is 28 to 33 inches. The five-inch spread matters because the bench height determines the biomechanics of every operation performed on it.

Why the Formulas Disagree

The formulas disagree because different hand plane types and different operations require different body mechanics. And each formula was developed by someone who optimized for their primary operation.

Planing operations - pushing a jack plane along a board to flatten or smooth it - benefit from a lower bench. The stroke involves driving forward while applying downward pressure through the arms. A lower bench allows the arms to extend more naturally, engaging the legs and core for power rather than relying entirely on arm and shoulder muscles. The hand-plane optimized formula (fist height) produces the lowest bench because it prioritizes this forward-driving posture.

Joinery operations - cutting dovetails, fitting mortise-and-tenon joints, chopping with a chisel - happen at finer scale with the work closer to eye level. A higher bench keeps the work visible without hunching. The European and Roubo formulas produce higher benches because European cabinetmaking traditions emphasize joinery over planing in terms of time spent at the bench.

Assembly operations - gluing up panels, fitting components, dry-fitting carcases - involve working above and around the piece. Very low benches make assembly awkward because the woodworker ends up bending over the work. Very high benches make assembly awkward because clamp pressure has to work against body mechanics. Assembly favors a moderate height.

Carving operations - relief carving, chip carving, detailed sculptural work - demand the work at or near eye level, which means either a very high bench or a raised platform on a moderate bench. Carvers' benches look nothing like joiners' benches for this reason.

The formula that "works" depends entirely on which operation dominates the workflow. And for most woodworkers, the answer is a mixture of several operations, which means any single height is a compromise.

The Biomechanics of Getting It Wrong

A bench that's too high forces the shoulders upward during planing operations. The arms can't extend naturally, so the shoulder muscles engage to stabilize the elevated arm position. Over a half-hour planing session, this builds fatigue and tension in the trapezius and deltoid muscles. Over months and years, it can develop into chronic shoulder problems.

The body compensates for a too-high bench by flexing the wrists to angle the plane downward. This creates strain on the wrist extensors and the tendons running through the carpal tunnel. The same position that causes problems for office workers at poorly adjusted desks causes problems for woodworkers at poorly adjusted benches.

A bench that's too low reverses the problem. The woodworker bends at the waist to reach the work, loading the lower back with flexion stress. The lumbar spine was not designed for sustained flexion under load. A 15-degree forward lean while pushing a block plane might feel fine for ten minutes. After an hour, the erector spinae muscles are screaming. After a year, the discs are compressed in patterns that produce the specific type of back pain that makes bending over a bench painful even when you're not working.

The "correct" height produces a posture where the arms work at or slightly below elbow height, the wrists remain neutral, and the back stays relatively straight during the dominant operation. This means different heights for different operations, which means any single fixed-height bench is a compromise between operational demands and anatomical limits.

What Experienced Woodworkers Actually Do

Survey data from woodworking forums and guild membership polls shows a distribution of bench heights that clusters in two zones: 32-34 inches for hand-tool-primary workers and 34-36 inches for power-tool-primary workers who use the bench mainly for assembly and machine support.

The split makes physical sense. Hand-tool workers spend more time planing, where lower is better. Power-tool workers spend more time at the bench doing assembly and joinery layout, where higher is more comfortable. The bench height reflects the work pattern, not the woodworker's height alone.

Some experienced woodworkers run multiple bench heights. A low bench for planing operations. A higher bench for dovetailing and detail work. This sounds excessive until you calculate the cost of chronic back pain versus the cost of a second bench surface. A sheet of plywood on adjustable-height sawhorses serves the second height for most operations.

Others use thick bench-top mats or removable platforms to effectively raise the work surface for detail operations. A 2-inch thick sacrificial board placed on a 33-inch bench creates a 35-inch work surface for joinery without permanently committing to either height.

The Height Nobody Talks About

Most bench height discussions focus on the bench user's experience. Almost none discuss the bench height relative to clamping.

Clamping a workpiece in a face vise for edge work - edge jointing with a bench plane, for example - positions the work at vise jaw height, which is typically the bench height. The woodworker then planes along the exposed edge, which sits at bench height or slightly above it.

But clamping a board flat on the bench for face planing adds the board's thickness to the working height. A 3/4-inch board on a 34-inch bench creates a 34-3/4-inch working surface. A 2-inch slab on the same bench creates a 36-inch surface. The bench height optimized for thin stock becomes too high for thick stock on the same bench.

This is partly why the old formulas produce lower numbers than feel intuitive. They assumed thicker stock. A period bench built when lumber routinely started at 2 inches thick needed to be lower to maintain comfortable working height after the stock was placed on it. Modern woodworkers primarily working 3/4-inch stock from the lumber yard are effectively working at bench height rather than bench-plus-stock height, which shifts the ideal bench height upward.

The 34-Inch Default

Most commercially available workbenches ship at 34 inches. This number appears to have originated as a compromise that causes the least number of people the most problems - which is a polite way of saying it was chosen because it produces moderate discomfort for everyone rather than severe discomfort for anyone.

At 34 inches, a 5'6" person works at a bench that's slightly too high for comfortable planing but acceptable for joinery and assembly. A 6'1" person works at a bench that's too low for comfortable joinery but functional for planing. Neither person is working at their optimum, but neither person is in pain after the first hour. It's the bench-height equivalent of a one-size-fits-most garment.

The popularity of 34 inches as a default has also created a self-reinforcing standard. Plans are written for 34-inch benches. Accessories are designed for 34-inch mounting heights. Workshop layout guides assume 34-inch bench surfaces. Building at a different height feels like going against the grain of the entire hobby infrastructure, even when the body clearly indicates a different number.

The Variable Nobody Can Formula

Footwear changes effective bench height by an amount that surprises people who haven't thought about it. Barefoot to work boots is a two-inch range. The bench that's perfect in sneakers is noticeably too tall in bare feet and noticeably too short in steel-toes.

Floor surfaces matter too. Standing on a concrete slab is different from standing on an anti-fatigue mat, which is different from standing on a wooden shop floor built over a crawl space. The compliance of the floor surface changes standing posture, knee flexion, and effective reach height.

The honest conclusion from examining all the formulas, biomechanical research, and accumulated workshop experience: workbench height is a personal parameter that depends on body proportions, dominant operations, typical stock thickness, footwear, floor surface, and individual tolerance for postural compromise. The formulas provide starting points. The body provides the final answer.

The people who got this right built their bench, used it for a month, and then cut the legs down or added blocks under them based on what their shoulders and back reported. The formulas disagreed with each other because the question doesn't have one answer. The body always knows which compromise it can live with. The formulas are just guesses about what the body will say.