Weight Class and Bodyweight Interpreter

Which weight class a bodyweight falls in, for the IPF’s 2026 powerlifting classes and the IWF’s weightlifting categories both before and after the set that took effect on 1 August 2026. The federation and the edition are inputs, because the classes are neither the same nor fixed.

The two sports’ current classes side by side

What the IWF changed on 1 August 2026

A class that no longer exists: the IPF women’s 72 kg

Two sports, two rulebooks, and a set of categories that moved

This page is about the strength sports — powerlifting, the squat, bench press and deadlift, and weightlifting, the snatch and the clean and jerk. They are different sports under different bodies, the International Powerlifting Federation and the International Weightlifting Federation, and almost nothing carries from one rulebook to the other. Every figure below that belongs to an edition, a rulebook date or an Olympic cycle is printed with it, because both bodies revise them.

A weight class is the plainest fact in either sport and the one most often quoted from the wrong rulebook. The IPF’s men’s classes run 59, 66, 74, 83, 93, 105 and 120 kg with an open class above, plus a 53 kg class for Sub-Junior and Junior lifters only; the IWF’s men’s categories run 60, 65, 70, 75, 85, 95 and 110 kg with +110 above. Not one men’s limit is shared between the two sports. On the women’s side exactly two coincide — 57 and 69 kg — and the coincidence is worth nothing, because the classes either side differ and a 69 kg IPF lifter and a 69 kg IWF lifter are not in corresponding positions in their own fields.

The IPF defines its classes to the hundredth of a kilogram, and that is not pedantry. Its rulebook prints the 83 kg class as “83.0 kg Class from 74.01 kg up to 83.0 kg”, so the classes tile the scale with no gap only because a weigh-in is recorded to two decimals: 83.00 kg is in the 83 kg class and 83.01 kg is in the 93 kg class, and there is no bodyweight in between that the rulebook recognises. This page takes bodyweight to the same precision for that reason.

The IWF’s categories changed on 1 August 2026. Its Technical and Competition Rules & Regulations 2025, in the version dated 5 November 2025, prints section 1.2 as two columns — the categories in force when it was published and the categories effective from that date — and the accompanying annex does the same for junior, senior and youth. Five of the eight men’s categories moved and four of the women’s: the men’s 71, 79, 88 and 94 kg became 70, 75, 85 and 95 kg, and the women’s 48, 58 and 63 kg became 49, 57 and 61 kg. The open-topped categories did not move. Both sets are on this page, because a result from before the change is in the old set and the IWF’s own rule 8.9 ties a record to the category entered: “World Record(s) can only be broken in the bodyweight category and the age group where the athlete is entered”. A record in a category that no longer exists has nowhere to go.

The same happened in powerlifting, and the documents are less helpful about when. The IPF’s 2019 rulebook prints a women’s 72.0 kg class; its 2026 rulebook prints 69.0 and 76.0 instead, and the men’s classes are identical in both. Neither document dates the change, and this page does not guess a year — a weaker statement than a date, and the one the sources support.

On a tie the two sports do opposite things. In powerlifting the IPF’s 2026 rulebook says that “If two or more lifters achieve the same total, the lighter lifter ranks above the heavier lifter”, and only on an equal bodyweight too does “the lifter making the total first” take precedence. In weightlifting bodyweight does not break a tie at all. The IWF’s rule 6.8.2 ranks equal totals by who reached them earlier in the calling order, on the best clean and jerk, and its rule 8.11 gives a tied record to “the athlete who completed the lift first”.

What this page will not do. It will not tell you what to weigh. The classes here are a published fact about a rulebook and nothing more; which one a lifter competes in is a decision for them and their coach, and nothing on this page advises a weight cut, a bodyweight or a way of making one. There is no arithmetic here for losing weight, and there will not be.

Nor is a class a substitute for a bodyweight adjustment. Comparing lifters across classes needs a published coefficient: IPF GL points under the IPF, the Sinclair coefficient under the IWF, and Wilks and DOTS for the three other powerlifting formulas in live use. The bodyweight score comparison interpreter shows how often they disagree about two lifters in different classes.

Two absences worth naming. The IWF’s annex also revises the YOUTH categories — youth men’s 56 kg becoming 55, the open-topped youth men’s +94 becoming +95, youth women’s 44 becoming 45 — and this page does not carry them, because six federation-and-sex combinations is already the edge of what a select can say clearly; they are in the annex, which is in the references. And the IPF’s Masters divisions are printed as Master 1 at 40 to 49, 2 at 50 to 59, 3 at 60 to 69 and 4 at 70 and over, with no separate Masters weight-class table anywhere in the text read and medals awarded “in each weight class across all age divisions” — so the classes above apply.

Frequently asked questions

Related calculators

References

1. International Powerlifting Federation. Technical Rulebook 2026, the file dated 01.03.2026, powerlifting.sport (read 15 Oct 2026; about 50,000 characters, truncated partway through section 6.3, so sections 7 to 10 — referees, jury, records and coaches — were not read). Source for: “Each competitor is allowed three attempts on each lift”; “The lifter’s best valid attempt on each lift counts toward his competition total”; “If two or more lifters achieve the same total, the lighter lifter ranks above the heavier lifter”, and on an equal bodyweight too, “the lifter making the total first will take precedence”; the bodyweight categories, printed as intervals to the hundredth (“83.0 kg Class from 74.01 kg up to 83.0 kg”); “the progression must be at least 2.5 kg between all attempts” and “the weight of the barbell must always be a multiple of 2.5 kg”, with a record bar “at least 0.5 kg in excess of the current record”; “Three unsuccessful attempts in any lift will automatically eliminate the lifter from the overall competition”; and the barbell — “Weight of the bar and collars are to be 25 kg”, collars that “Must weigh 2.5 kg each” and “Shall always be used”, the disc face values with their maxima and minima, the tolerance “within 0.25 percent or 10 grams of their face value”, and the colour code “10 kg and under – any color, 15 kg – yellow, 20 kg – blue, 25 kg – red”. The bar and disc diagrams and the knurling distances are images and were not read. The GL formula is not in this rulebook at all: it names an “IPF formula” for the best-lifter award and prints neither equation nor coefficients.
2. International Powerlifting Federation. Technical Rules Book 2019, powerlifting.sport (read 15 Oct 2026; about 60,000 to 70,000 characters, truncated at the referees section). Cited for one thing the 2026 rulebook cannot show: the women’s categories as they then stood, including a 72.0 kg class where the 2026 rulebook prints 69.0 and 76.0. The tie-break and three-attempt wording is identical in both editions, which is why this batch prints it as the rule rather than as the rule of one year. The year the women’s classes changed is not established by either document and is not guessed.
3. International Weightlifting Federation. Technical and Competition Rules & Regulations 2025, the file “as of 05 November 2025”, iwf.sport (read 15 Oct 2026; roughly 90,000 characters before the fetch truncated inside the Regulation to 3.3.3 tolerance chart, so later sections were not read). An absence worth naming: no “in force as from” statement appears in its readable text beyond its own 2025 title and the 1 August 2026 dates in section 1.2. Source for: the bodyweight categories of section 1.2, which print both the set in force at publication and the set effective 1 August 2026; ranking rule 6.8.2, under which equal results are separated by who achieved them earlier in the calling order and bodyweight does not break a tie at all, with “the athlete(s) who competed earlier in time” ranked higher across groups and rule 8.11 giving a tied record to “the athlete who completed the lift first”; rule 8.9, that “World Record(s) can only be broken in the bodyweight category and the age group where the athlete is entered”; and rule 3.3.3, specifying the discs as 25 kg red, 20 kg blue, 15 kg yellow, 10 kg green, 5 kg white, 2.5 kg red, 2 kg blue, 1.5 kg yellow, 1 kg green and 0.5 kg white, the men’s bar at 20 kg, the women’s at 15 kg and two collars at 2.5 kg each. The Sinclair formula is nowhere in the text read.
4. International Weightlifting Federation. Annex — IWF TCRR Modifications as of 05 November 2025, iwf.sport (read 15 Oct 2026; about 2,500 characters, all legible, no image-only content). The whole document is the bodyweight-category change, printed as two columns, “Current” and “From 01 August 2026”, for junior and senior men, junior and senior women, youth men and youth women. Its section 1.2.5 heads the Los Angeles 2028 categories and says of them, in its own words, “To be defined later by the IOC”, listing six men’s and six women’s classes that are a subset of the from-1-August-2026 set.