How high should a TV be mounted?

Of all the things that go wrong with a wall mounted television, the most common is not a fixing or a cable. It is height. The screen is too high, it has been too high since the day it went up, and the person watching it has quietly got used to tipping their head back.

Where the centre of the screen wants to be

The target is simple. The centre of the screen wants to be close to your eye level when you are sitting in the seat you actually watch from. Seated, not standing. For most adults on most sofas that lands somewhere between 38 and 43 inches off the floor, and on a low modern sofa it can be lower still.

That is lower than the wall invites. An empty wall reads as something to fill, the space above a sideboard or a mantel looks like the obvious slot, and a screen hung at chest height looks slightly odd until there is furniture and a person in the room. Almost nobody regrets going low. A great many people live with a screen they have to look up at.

If you would rather not do the arithmetic, the height calculator on this site does it from your screen size and your own seated eye height, and it also works out the tilt a mantel forces on you.

How to work it out for your own sofa

Do this with the sofa where it will actually live.

Sit down properly, the way you sit in the evening rather than the way you sit for a photograph. Have somebody measure from the floor to the middle of your eyes. That figure is your target height for the centre of the screen.

Then work out where the bottom edge goes, because that is the measurement you will mark on the wall. Halve the height of the screen itself, not the diagonal, and subtract it from your eye level figure. A large panel is usually somewhere near 30 inches tall, so the bottom edge often ends up close to the top of a sideboard. That is correct, and it is why so many rooms look right with the screen sitting just above the furniture.

One more step. The bracket holds the screen away from the wall, and the mounting holes are rarely in the middle of the back, so the plate does not go where the centre line goes. Mark the centre line first, then set the plate to suit it.

Why above the fireplace is almost always too high

A mantel sits at a height set by the firebox and the hearth, not by anybody's eyes. Put a screen above it and the centre of that screen is usually well above seated eye level, often by a foot or more. The room looks tidy. The viewing angle is wrong.

Sometimes there is no alternative, and we mount screens above fireplaces regularly. When that is the plan, two things are worth knowing. The first is heat, which is a separate question and a real one above a working firebox. The second is that the angle is fixed by the geometry of the chimney breast, so the honest choice is between accepting it and putting the screen on a different wall.

What a tilting mount fixes, and what it does not

A tilting bracket angles the screen down, usually by something like 10 to 15 degrees. That does genuinely help. It points the panel at your face instead of over your head, it reduces the glare coming off a ceiling light, and on some screen types it improves contrast, because many panels lose a lot of their black level when viewed off axis.

What it does not do is lower the screen. Your neck still has to tip back to look at it. A tilt changes where the picture is aimed. It does not change where the picture is.

The real cost is your neck

Nobody notices the height for the first week. The set is new and the room looks smart. The cost shows up later, as an ache at the base of the skull after a long film, a habit of sliding down the sofa to get the angle, or a preference for watching on a laptop that nobody can quite explain.

Looking up for two hours is a sustained load on the muscles at the back of the neck, and unlike a bad chair there is no adjustment to make once the holes are drilled. That is the reason to spend ten minutes with a tape measure before anyone does. Get the height right and the mount becomes invisible, which is what a good one should be.