7 ways people deal with a leg-length difference, compared honestly
What each one costs, what it fixes, and where it stops.
If somebody has told you one of your legs is shorter than the other, you will already have been given advice, and a lot of it will have been vague. This is a plain comparison of the seven things people actually end up doing about a difference of roughly an inch, including the two that get recommended most and the one that hardly anybody mentions. We sell one of these. It is number seven, and the honest version of its case is at the bottom.
1. A lift built into one shoe by a cobbler
The standard answer, and a good one for a single pair. A cobbler opens the sole, adds material, and closes it up again. The result is properly made, invisible from most angles, and completely permanent. The catch is in that last word: it belongs to that shoe, it costs money each time, and you pay again for every pair you want levelled.
Best for one pair of shoes you wear constantly. Worst if you own several.
2. A full-length custom orthotic
Prescribed when there is more going on than a length difference — arch collapse, pronation, a gait that needs work. Made to your foot and correspondingly expensive. It can carry a small lift, but it fills the whole shoe, so it needs a roomy shoe and it usually cannot be swapped into a smart one. It is also the option most likely to be covered or partly covered where you are, which changes the arithmetic considerably compared with everything else on this list.
Right when a clinician says so. Overkill if the only issue is length.
3. A loose heel wedge from a chemist
Cheap, available everywhere, and the source of most of the complaints. Because it sits loose on the footbed with nothing holding it, it creeps forward as you walk, so you end up standing on its front edge. That is the thing people describe as changing how they walk, and it is why so many end up in a drawer.
Fine as an experiment to find the height. Poor as the answer.
4. Custom-made footwear
Made from scratch with the correction built into the last. The best possible result and the highest possible price, with a wait to match. Realistically this is where people end up when the difference is large or when there is a foot deformity involved as well.
For significant differences, with a clinician steering it.
5. Surgery
Lengthening or shortening procedures exist and are genuinely used, overwhelmingly for large differences and usually in younger patients. It is a serious operation with a long recovery, and no reasonable clinician offers it for an inch. It belongs on this list only so that the list is complete.
Not a consumer decision, and nothing we would ever comment on.
6. Strengthening work, or nothing at all
Plenty of people have a small difference, never learn about it, and are entirely fine. Where symptoms are mild, physiotherapy aimed at the hips and the mechanics around them is often the first thing tried, sometimes instead of a lift and sometimes alongside one. It is also the cheapest thing on this list by a distance. It is worth saying that a lift and strengthening work are not alternatives to each other; plenty of people are told to do both, and the lift is the part that changes things the same afternoon.
Ask before assuming you need hardware at all.
7. A heel lift that lives on the foot
The least discussed option, and the one that answers the specific complaint people have about number one. Instead of building the lift into a shoe, the wedge is moulded into a soft silicone cup that pulls onto your bare heel and grips it. It goes on with your socks in the morning and it is still there whichever shoes you put on that day — trainers, work shoes, boots. Because it is held by the cup rather than sitting loose, it does not creep forward the way number three does.
Best when you already know your height and want it in more than one pair. Not for differences much under an inch, which is smaller than anything we make.
Which of these is right
Genuinely, we do not know, and anybody selling you something who claims to know from a web page is not worth listening to. A leg-length difference is measured, not guessed, and the figure you should be matching is the one you were given by somebody qualified to give it.
What we can be useful about is the practical problem, because it is the one people write about most and the one nobody sells a solution to: the lift you already have is stuck inside a single shoe, which is why the rest of your shoes sit unworn in a cupboard. Moving the lift onto the foot solves that, and it solves nothing else.
Our smallest wedge is an inch. If your difference is much smaller than that, this is the wrong product and we would rather say so here than take the order. If it is around an inch or more, and the frustration is that you can only wear one pair of shoes, this is the option on the list that was built for exactly that.
See the lift that moves between every pair