Wrestling weight classes for girls, women and everyone else

High school wrestling weight classes (NFHS)

The National Federation of State High School Associations publishes three sets for girls and three sets for boys. Each state association adopts one set per division. In the NFHS's own words, states "cannot adopt all three sets and cannot switch back and forth during the season." The framework has been in effect since July 1, 2023. Three state associations publish a girls' list that matches none of the three; they are below, list by list.

Girls' high school wrestling weight classes: the three NFHS sets

Those three rows are rendered straight out of the same certification engine that powers the making weight math and the app, so a number cannot be right in one place and wrong in another.

Which states use which girls' set

We read a girls' list for 43 jurisdictions, and 40 of them wrestle one of the NFHS sets: 25 the 14-class set, 13 the 12-class set and 2 the 13-class set, each in the latest document we read from its association. Each name below comes from that document, and each links to the state's page, which names the document, the season it covers and the day we read it.

• 14 classes (25): Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.
• 13 classes (2): Minnesota and Pennsylvania.
• 12 classes (13): Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The same picks sit beside each state's first girls' championship and how many girls wrestle there in high school girls wrestling by state, one table for all of them.

The states with a girls' list of their own

Connecticut, New York and North Dakota publish a girls' list that matches none of the three NFHS sets, so none of the tables above is theirs. Each list is printed here in full from the association's own document:

• Connecticut: 13 classes, the 12-class set plus 285. Source: CIAC wrestling information packet, 2025-2026, read September 29, 2026.
• New York: 13 classes, the 12-class set plus 94. Source: NYSPHSAA girls' wrestling championship page, 2026 individual champions, read September 29, 2026.
• North Dakota: 13 classes, the 13-class set with 250 in place of 235. Source: NDHSAA 2025-26 Girls Wrestling Regulations, read September 29, 2026.

Vermont prints no girls' list of its own. The VPA's 2026-27 wrestling rules run one state tournament, for male and female competitors, print no list of weight classes, and say "The National Federation rules will be used." For 2026-27, girls-only events are reported (VTDigger, August 11, 2026), and we found no VPA list of classes for them, so treat Vermont's girls' classes as unchecked. Where a girl there wrestles boys, the NFHS writes its boys' sets for "boys wrestling boys or girls wrestling boys".

For Delaware, District of Columbia, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia, we found no girls' list we could confirm. Read that as unchecked, not as evidence of any set. There, the association's wrestling handbook or weight management page carries the answer, and it is the only answer that counts for you.

Boys' high school weight classes

Same three-way choice, different numbers. From the same NFHS release:

Source for both tables: NFHS, separate weight classes for girls.

The 2026-27 change that is not a class change

For 2026-27 the NFHS raised the minimum body fat percentage for girls from 12 percent to 19 percent, rules 1-5-1 and 1-5-2. That does not move a single number in the tables above. It moves the lowest class you are eligible to certify into. At the same lean mass the new floor raises your computed minimum by 8.6 percent, and depending on where your old minimum fell, that is as many as two classes higher on the 12- and 13-class sets and three on the 14-class set, whose steps are the narrowest. Only at 100, or near the bottom of one of the wide classes at the top, can it leave your lowest class where it was. A girl whose old minimum was above about 216 pounds now computes above 235, the heaviest class in all three sets, which have no class above it (Connecticut's own list goes to 285 and North Dakota's own list goes to 250). It is also the reason every weight app built on the boys' 7 percent floor gives a girl an illegal target. The arithmetic is on the making weight page.

Youth and club girls' weight classes (USA Wrestling)

USA Wrestling publishes its own chart of age divisions and weight classes for girls and women, separate from its men's chart. These are its 2027 classes, read from the chart on September 29, 2026. The chart is dated by year and its birth years move with it, so check the year at the top before you enter.

16U and USA Junior share one list of 16 classes, and it is the NFHS 14-class high school set plus 95 and 207, so a girl whose state wrestles the 14 finds every one of her classes there. They are the two divisions of USA Wrestling's Junior and 16U Nationals at Fargo.

Local leagues, club tournaments and middle school programs may run their own brackets. We have read no state's middle school set, so this page names none; where an event publishes its own list, that list is the one that applies there. What to expect at the scale on the day is on the first tournament page.

Source: USA Wrestling, age group weight chart, the table headed "2027 - USA WOMEN'S AGE DIVISIONS and WEIGHT CLASSES".

College wrestling weight classes

NCAA and NAIA women wrestle 10 weight classes, NJCAA women 11, and NCAA men 10. NCAA and NAIA women wrestle the same 10, 103 to 207 pounds. The NJCAA, the junior college level, runs those 10 plus a 235 pound class. NCAA men wrestle from 125 pounds up to a heavyweight class of 183 to 285.

In a dual meet, a wrestler who weighs in for one class may be moved up to a heavier one, but anyone wrestling 207 must weigh at least 146 pounds (NCAA women's rule 3.4.2). The men's heavyweight class has the same kind of floor built into it: it starts at 183.

The NCAA crowned its first women's champions in March 2026 at Xtream Arena in Coralville, Iowa, with 180 qualifiers across those ten weights, and it is one National Collegiate championship in which Divisions I, II and III compete together rather than three separate tournaments. The NAIA determines its ten individual titles and a team title over two days under the USA Wrestling rulebook. The NJCAA's own 2025-26 championship page lists a champion at each of eleven weights, and the extra one matters: a girl who wrestles 235 in high school has a college class at 235 only at a junior college.

Look at the top of the women's list next to the girls' high school set: 160, 180 and 207 against 155, 170 and 190. The college classes are spaced wider, which usually makes the freshman year a matter of growing into a class rather than cutting to one. More on the programs themselves, division by division, on the colleges page, which carries the same women's table alongside the coach directory.

Sources: the NCAA's 2026-27 women's wrestling rule book, rules 3.4.1 and 3.4.2, and the NCAA's first-championship explainer; the NAIA's 2025-26 rule modifications and the 2026 NAIA championship packet, with the full NAIA ten also in USA Wrestling's championship report; the NJCAA's 2025-26 women's championship page (it can take a moment to load its tables); and the NCAA men's 2025-26 and 2026-27 rules book, rule 3.4.1. We read the three rule books on September 29, 2026.

Olympic and international weight classes

United World Wrestling governs freestyle and Greco-Roman worldwide, and its categories are in kilograms. One correction to something repeated everywhere: Seniors, U23 and U20 share a single set of ten. Only U17 and U15 have their own. How a freestyle match is run and scored is on the freestyle rules page.

Women's freestyle: seniors, U23 and U20

The Olympic program takes six of those ten: 50, 53, 57, 62, 68 and 76 kg. The other four are contested at the World Championships and the ranking series, which is why a world champion at 55 or 65 kg has to change weight to chase a Games. Pounds throughout this section are our conversion at 2.20462, not a rule; the kilogram is the rule.

Women's freestyle: U17 and U15

The lightest category in each age group is a range rather than a limit, 36 to 40 kg at U17 and 29 to 33 kg at U15, so there is a floor as well as a ceiling: a wrestler under the bottom of that range does not make the bracket. USA Wrestling's own copy of these lists prints the lightest as 40 and 33 kg, the top of each range.

Men's categories, for completeness

Seniors, U23 and U20 again. The Olympic six are 57, 65, 74, 86, 97 and 125 kg in freestyle, and 60, 67, 77, 87, 97 and 130 kg in Greco-Roman. Every category above is from the current United World Wrestling international rules.

How wrestling weight classes work

A class limit is a number you weigh in at or under. What surrounds that number changes completely from one level to the next, and the differences are where wrestlers get caught out. Weight is one part of the rules: uniforms and hair are on the rules page, and points and periods on the scoring page. The words of the scale, from alpha weight to growth allowance, are in the glossary of wrestling terms.

• The weigh-in schedule is not the same sport to sport. United World Wrestling weighs in on the morning of your category, then weighs the finalists and repechage wrestlers again the next morning. In NCAA women's wrestling, weigh-ins are two hours or sooner before competition (rule 9.2.3), and on the second day of back-to-back team competition every wrestler gets a 1 pound allowance (rule 9.3.2). The NAIA adopts the same two rules by quoting the NCAA men's 9.2.3 and 9.3.2. In high school, NFHS Rule 4-5 opens weigh-ins no more than one hour before a dual meet and no more than two hours before the first session of each tournament day (as the Kansas State High School Activities Association's 2025-26 wrestling manual prints it), and a state may replace it: New York weighs in a dual meet between one hour and half an hour before it starts, as the 2025-26 girls' wrestling handbook of Section IX of the NYSPHSAA prints it. Weighing in on your period is its own question, answered on its own page.
• Allowances are event-specific, not universal. UWW allows a 2 kg tolerance at the World Cup, ranking series and international tournaments, and none at all at the second weigh-in. It allows no tolerance for the singlet either. The NFHS book gives two weight allowances. A growth allowance of 2 pounds "may be added to each weight class any time after the date of certification" (4-4-4). On consecutive days of team competition, the rule grants every wrestler 1 pound a day, up to 2 pounds, when the opponent has been given at least 48 hours' notice (4-5-5); that one is written as "shall", not "may". Your state association decides whether and when each allowance applies, and it can add conditions of its own. The state pages show the conditions we have read.
• At some levels the heaviest class has a floor as well as a ceiling. The top UWW women's category is 76 kg, and a wrestler must be over 72 kg to enter it, so the heavyweight bracket is a band rather than an open top. The NCAA women's dual-meet rule sets a 146 pound minimum at 207, and the NCAA men's heavyweight starts at 183. The NFHS high school sets print no such floor: the Maine Principals' Association's 2025-26 wrestling bulletin says "There is no longer a minimum weight for the 285-pound weight class. The NFHS rule that allows wrestlers to wrestle up one weight class will apply to all weight classes."
• A senior or U23 wrestler may move up. UWW lets them enter the next category above their weigh-in weight, and that option stops at the heaviest category. Younger age groups wrestle the category their weight falls in.
• Certification is a different question entirely. The table tells you what classes exist. It does not tell you which ones you are allowed to be in. In NCAA college wrestling that is set by a hydration test and then a body composition assessment. In high school it is a body composition assessment, and whether a hydration test comes first depends on the state: the Minnesota State High School League's 2025-26 wrestling modifications say "Hydration testing not required". Either way, the number your assessor issues always beats any number a website gives you.

The body fat floor at each level

High school and NCAA college both compute your lowest class from a body fat floor, and the four floors are not the same:

An NCAA women's wrestler is certified between September 1 and November 1 (rule 8.3.1), or, if she joins the team later, before her first competition (rule 8.3.2), by a member of her school's athletics medical staff (rule 8.2.6). Her lowest allowable weight is computed at 17 percent body fat, and her plan may take off no more than 1.5 percent of body weight a week (rule 8.3.10). A high school girl certifies at 19 percent, so at the same lean mass her college body fat floor, and the weight computed from it, sit below her high school one. Her college minimum wrestling weight is then the higher of that weight and her weekly descent line (the packet's step 6). The arithmetic is on the making weight page. Sources: the NCAA rule book above and the NCAA's 2026-27 women's weight management packet, read September 29, 2026. The high school boys' 7 percent is the NFHS rule as Iowa's association prints it for 2026-27.