You have a percentage and no idea whether it is good. The tables you find give different answers, and the sheet in your hand may disagree with all of them. That is not any of them being wrong. Here is what the ranges are, where they come from, and why they do not agree.
For general health rather than sport, these are the bands you will see most often. Women sit higher than men throughout, and that is normal biology rather than a difference in effort.
The range used across exercise science is 20 to 32% for women and 10 to 22% for men.
Wide bands, deliberately. A single number would suggest a precision that does not exist here.
Take percent body fat off your sheet and put it in. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is kept.
Women carry more fat as a basic requirement, not as surplus. It sits in the breasts, around the hips and thighs, and around the organs, and it plays a part in hormone production and reproductive function. A woman at a man's healthy percentage is not lean, she is depleted.
Any table that gives one range for everyone is not worth reading.
Below a certain point fat is no longer spare. This is the level needed for organs, nerves and hormones to work, and going under it is a medical problem rather than an achievement.
Essential fat is usually put at roughly 10 to 13% for women and 3 to 5% for men. Those are rough averages, not a formal guideline.
In women, going down towards that floor usually stops periods and thins bone. That is the body saying the deficit has gone too far. It is worth seeing a doctor rather than making another change to your food.
Competitive athletes often sit below the general healthy range. That is a by-product of training volume and a sport that rewards it, held for a season rather than for life.
Athletic figures are commonly quoted around 14 to 20% for women and 6 to 13% for men. That is a rough average of what is seen in trained groups, not a formal guideline and not a recommendation.
Copying an athlete's percentage without an athlete's training and food is how people end up under-eating for months and losing the muscle they were chasing.
Body composition machines print their own healthy band, and it is usually narrower than the one used in exercise science. So the same reading can come back fine against one and high against the other, on the same day, for the same person.
InBody prints 18 to 28% for women, against the 20 to 32% used across exercise science. Neither is wrong. They are drawn from different reference populations.
Worth knowing before a number on a printout changes how you feel about yourself. If you sit at 30%, one source calls that healthy and the other calls it high, and neither has met you.
Body fat tends to rise with age even when weight holds, because muscle is lost gradually and fat replaces it. Many reference tables are banded by age for that reason, and a figure that reads high against a twenty-year-old's band can be unremarkable at sixty.
The more useful reading at any age is whether muscle is holding. That is the part you can do something about.
Two people at the same percentage can carry very different risk depending on whether the fat is under the skin or packed around the organs. Fat around the organs is the kind tied to blood sugar and heart problems, and a single whole-body percentage cannot tell you how much of yours is there.
If your sheet gives a visceral fat figure, it is an estimate rather than a measurement, but it is answering a more useful question than the headline percentage is.
Treat it as a starting position, not a grade. If it sits inside the general range, there is nothing here to fix. If it sits above, the useful goal is losing fat while holding muscle, which means eating enough protein and training against resistance rather than simply eating less.
And watch your own line rather than the band. Going from 34% to 31% is the result. Which side of someone's threshold you finished on is not.
Before holding your reading against any of these bands, it is worth knowing how precise the reading itself is. These machines do not measure fat. They send a small current through you, measure how much your body pushes back, and work everything out from that.
Bodivio reads an InBody sheet from a photo and charts every reading, so you can see the year rather than the day. Every figure it shows says where it came from, the same way this page does.
Have a lookThis explains what the numbers on a body composition sheet mean. It is not medical advice, a diagnosis, or a substitute for talking to a doctor or a dietitian.