Why height changes the answer
A step count on its own doesn't set a distance; it's steps times step length, and step length scales with leg length, which scales with height. Hoeger et al. measured step length across a range of walking and running speeds and found it averages about 41.5% of height for men and 41.3% for women, published as "One-Mile Step Count at Walking and Running Speeds" in ACSM's Health & Fitness Journal (2008). A 5'2" walker and a 6'2" walker covering the same 10,000 steps end up roughly a mile apart, because the taller stride eats more ground per step.
This calculator multiplies that estimated step length by the step count entered (or divides a distance by it, in reverse) rather than assuming everyone takes about 2,000 steps to cover a mile, a number that only holds near the population-average height.
Worked examples
A 5'9" (69in) man walking 10,000 steps: step length = 69 × 0.415 = 28.635in. Distance = 10,000 × 28.635 ÷ 63,360 (inches per mile) ≈ 4.52 miles.
A 5'4" (64in) woman covering the same 10,000 steps: step length = 64 × 0.413 = 26.432in, giving 10,000 × 26.432 ÷ 63,360 ≈ 4.17 miles, a third of a mile less than the man above at the same step count, purely from the height difference.
Reverse direction: how many steps cover 5 miles for that same 5'9" man? Steps = 5 miles × 63,360in ÷ 28.635in ≈ 11,063 steps.
The '10,000 steps ≈ 5 miles' rule only fits average height
That rule of thumb comes from roughly 2,000-2,200 steps per mile, which lines up with a step length around 28-31in, close to the U.S. average adult male height (68.9in) but noticeably longer than the average adult female stride (about 26.2in at 63.5in height, CDC NHANES 2021-2023). Below-average height compounds over thousands of steps: a half-inch-shorter step length changes a 10,000-step walk by roughly 0.08 miles, so the gap between a short and tall walker's actual distance for the same step count is real, not rounding noise.