How high should a TV be mounted?

Screen centre at seated eye level — for a standard sofa, that's roughly 105 cm from the floor. That single rule, applied through each size's own geometry, is why bigger TVs mount lower, not higher: a 65 inch's bottom edge lands at 64.5 cm, while an 85 inch's lands at 52.1 cm, because the larger panel's extra height grows upward from the same fixed centre.

Get your exact bottom-edge height for any size and eye line.

Measure your eye height first

Sit where you'll actually watch from and measure floor to pupil, not floor to seat cushion. A standard sofa seat runs 43–45 cm, which typically puts seated eye height around 100–110 cm. A dining chair or a bar stool sits higher, around 115–125 cm. Everything below scales directly off whichever number is actually yours.

The height chart, by size

Screen height computed from exact 16:9 geometry (diagonal × 1.2453 cm), bottom edge worked back from a screen centre held at eye level:

Your own 65 inch or 75 inch size has its full breakdown on its own page, including width and depth alongside this height figure.

Why the bottom edge drops as the size goes up

The centre is anchored to your eye level and doesn't move; only the screen's own height changes with size, growing by about 0.62 cm per inch of diagonal on each side of centre. A bigger screen's extra height has to go somewhere, and since the centre is fixed, it goes down as much as it goes up — pushing the bottom edge closer to the floor the larger the panel gets. The commonly quoted "42-inch rule" (screen centre at 106.7 cm) is the same idea in a different unit system, close enough to the 105 cm figure here that either works as a starting point.

The fireplace problem, in degrees

A mantel typically forces the bottom edge up to somewhere around 130–150 cm, well above where ergonomics alone would put it. Take a 65 inch mounted with its bottom edge at 140 cm: its centre lands at 180.5 cm, which is 75.5 cm above a 105 cm eye line. At a 2.7 m sofa distance, that works out to roughly a 15.6° upward gaze; at a closer 2.0 m, roughly 20.7°. Every additional 10 cm of mounting height adds roughly another 2° at typical sofa distances.

Ergonomics guidance for close-up, prolonged screen work — ANSI/HFES 100, the standard covering computer workstations — generally recommends keeping a display at or below eye level rather than allowing any upward angle at all. That standard is written for a desk monitor viewed from arm's length for hours at a stretch, not a TV watched from several metres away for an evening, so it can't be applied to a fireplace mount as a strict pass/fail rule — but the direction of its guidance is worth taking seriously: the higher above horizontal your gaze sits, the more of a compromise the position is, and a mantel-height mount is a real compromise, not a null one.

A tilt mount does not fix your neck

A tilt bracket changes the screen's own angle, which affects glare and how square the picture looks from below — it does not move where the screen's centre physically sits in the room. The angle from your eyes up to that centre is fixed by the mounting height alone; tilting the panel down doesn't lower the point in space you're looking at.

Bedrooms are a different posture

Sitting up in bed puts your eyes noticeably higher than sitting on a sofa — roughly 110–120 cm, from a mattress top around 55–65 cm plus the torso height of someone sitting upright against a headboard. A bedroom TV can reasonably sit a little higher than a living-room mount for that reason, and often wants a slight downward tilt to compensate. See watching from a bed for the full working.

On a stand instead

A panel's bottom sits roughly 5–8 cm above the top of its feet, so a standard 45–55 cm media console puts a 65 inch's centre at roughly 90–108 cm — close enough to a seated eye line that standard console heights work without any special calculation, which is exactly why stand-mounted TVs rarely need this whole exercise the way a wall mount does.

Before you drill

Confirm a stud behind the bracket, or use masonry fixings rated for the wall type if there isn't one. Get the VESA mounting pattern from the model's own spec page rather than assuming — it varies by size and by manufacturer. Check the bracket's load rating against the panel's actual weight, not an estimate. Plan the cable route before the bracket goes on the wall, since running cable afterward usually means taking it back off. And if the TV is going on a stand rather than the wall, check anti-tip guidance for freestanding furniture — CPSC and equivalent regulators elsewhere publish this specifically because an unsecured TV on a stand is a genuine tip-over risk with children in the house.

Try it on your own wall