Norwood Stage
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The Norwood scale is the standard way of describing male pattern hair loss, running from stage one, an untouched juvenile hairline, to stage seven, where only the horseshoe at the back and sides remains. Every clinic uses it, and every quote you receive will reference it.
It is a description, not a prediction. Its usefulness in a consultation is that it gives you and the surgeon a shared vocabulary for where you are now and, more importantly, an honest conversation about where you are going.
The stages in plain terms
Stages 1 to 2 are the mature hairline: a slight rise and shallow recession at the corners. This is not hair loss and does not need treating.
Stage 3 is the first genuine loss, with deeper temporal recession. Stage 3 vertex adds thinning at the crown.
Stage 4 has significant frontal recession and a crown area that is visibly thinning, with a band of hair still separating the two.
Stage 5 sees that band narrowing. Stage 6 is where it goes, and the front and crown join into one area.
Stage 7 leaves only the horseshoe, and the donor area itself is often reduced.
Why your final stage is the number that matters
A transplant planned for the head you have today, in someone whose pattern will continue to a stage six, produces an island. The grafts stay; everything around them goes.
So the planning question is not what stage are you, it is what stage will you finish at. Family history is the best available guide, particularly on both sides rather than just your mother's father, which is a persistent myth. Age of onset matters too: earlier loss tends to mean more extensive final loss.
A good surgeon plans the hairline and graft distribution against your likely final pattern, not your current one, and will say so. That is why they argue for conservative hairlines.
What each stage means for surgery
Stages 3 and 4 are the classic transplant territory: enough loss to be worth treating, enough donor to treat it, and a pattern with a defined edge.
Stage 5 and 6 need careful arithmetic. The area needing coverage may exceed what donor supply can reasonably cover at a convincing density, and the honest plan is often to treat the front well and leave the crown, or to combine a smaller transplant with scalp micropigmentation.
Stage 7 is rarely a good candidate for a conventional transplant, because the donor horseshoe is both small and often thinned.
At any stage, unstabilised loss in someone under thirty is a reason to wait and to get on medication first.
Thinking about a transplant?
The Start Here guide explains why medical treatment comes first, how much donor hair you actually have, and what a transplant can and cannot move.
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