Buying guide

Best Shoes for a Tailor’s Bunion: 34 Shoes Measured Where It Presses

A tailor’s bunion sits at the widest part of your foot. Lab measurements of 34 shoes at that exact point, and what a wider fitting really adds there.

Spec analysis — not yet tested · Published September 2026

A bunionette is a bump on the outside edge of your foot, at its widest point. The usual advice is to buy a wider width, and it is half right. The lab measurements below show how much shoes really differ at that point, and how much a width letter adds.

What a bunionette actually is

A bunionette — a tailor’s bunion — is a prominence of the fifth metatarsal head, the bone at the base of your little toe. The fifth metatarsal drifts outward, the little toe drifts inward, and the knuckle left standing between them takes the pressure of the shoe wall on every step. The name comes from tailors, who sat cross-legged with the outside edge of the foot pressed into the floor.

Three things make it hurt, and only one of them is the bone. There is the bump itself; there is the soft tissue over it, which thickens into a bursa once it has been rubbed for long enough; and there is the skin, which answers persistent shear with a callus that then becomes its own pressure point. A shoe can change the second and third of those. It cannot change the first.

That is the whole reason footwear is the first thing anyone recommends for it — and the reason a shoe that is generally roomy can still fail you completely. Room in the wrong place does nothing. The fifth metatarsal head sits at the widest part of the forefoot, on the lateral side, and that is a specific place to need millimetres.

The number that decides it is not printed on the box

There is exactly one measurement that describes whether a shoe will press on a bunionette: the internal width of the shoe at its widest point, level with the fifth metatarsal head. No brand publishes it. What brands publish instead is a width fitting — D, 2E, 4E, “Wide”, “X-Wide” — which is a relative grading within that brand’s own last, not a dimension you can compare across brands.

An independent laboratory measures the interior. RunRepeat cuts shoes in half and publishes two forefoot widths: one at the big toe, taken 28.3 mm from the tip, and one at the widest point of the interior, across the ball of the foot. That second figure is the bunionette line, and we hold it for 34 of the 44 shoes on this site. Laid out beside the big-toe figure, it shows that the usual advice is half right.

The 34 shoes, ranked where a bunionette presses

The same measurements, charted at the big toe and kept current, live on our toe box width chart. This table is the bunionette view of them: every shoe we hold a lab figure for, ranked by the width at the widest point of the interior, which is the line your fifth metatarsal head meets.

Both widths are RunRepeat’s laboratory measurements of the same standard-width pair, read September 2026: the widest point across the interior at the ball of the foot, and the big toe 28.3 mm from the tip. Width fittings are the brands’ own published ranges and change by model year and by region. We have not measured any of these shoes ourselves.

The big-toe ranking is not the bunionette ranking

Most of what gets written about toe boxes is measured at the big toe, because that is the figure most often quoted. It is not where a bunionette sits, and across these 34 shoes the two rankings barely agree. At the big toe the shoes span 16.3 mm. At the widest point they span 5.2 mm, from 92.5 to 97.7. Most of the difference you can feel at the front of a shoe has closed by the time you reach the side of it.

The order changes, too. The Altra Torin 8 has the widest toe box at the big toe and sits joint 14th at the widest point, at 95.3 mm, with the Brooks Ghost 17, third narrowest at the big toe, 0.1 mm behind it. The ASICS GEL-NIMBUS 28 runs the other way: below the median at the big toe, second widest of the 34 at the widest point, at 97.6 mm. A foot-shaped last buys room where the toes splay; it does not automatically buy room where a bunionette presses, and those are different places on the shoe.

So if your bump is at the fifth metatarsal head, read the first column of the table, not a toe-box chart and not a brand’s reputation. The six widest shoes there are three ASICS, two HOKAs and the new Altra Torin 9. Three of the eight narrowest are New Balance shoes, from the brand best known for its wide fittings.

What a wider fitting buys a bunionette

Stepping up one full width letter buys roughly 3–4 mm across the ball of the foot on New Balance’s published chart, the only major brand that gives the figure in millimetres; ASICS says its steps are “usually only a couple of millimetres”. At the big toe that is small beside the 16.3 mm between the narrowest and widest shoes. At the widest point, where a bunionette sits, it is not. The whole field of 34 standard-width shoes spans 5.2 mm there, so one width step is worth about as much as moving from one of the narrowest shoes to one of the widest, and the two add together.

What a wide programme does not tell you is how wide the standard shoe is. The 23 shoes here that are sold in a 4E, 6E, X-Wide or Extra Wide fitting average 95.3 mm at the widest point in their standard width; the 11 that are not average 95.0 mm. At the big toe the wide-programme shoes are narrower, 72.4 against 74.9 mm, though most of that gap is the three Altras. Either way, a brand that sells a 4E is not selling you a wider shoe until you buy the 4E.

The clearest case is the New Balance 990v6. It is sold in five fittings, B, D, 2E, 4E and 6E, more than anything else here, and its standard-width pair has the narrowest toe box at the big toe of all 34, at 67.3 mm. At the widest point the same pair measures 94.1 mm, only 1.2 mm less than the Altra Torin 8. If the trouble is at the ball of the foot, the 990v6 gives you more fittings to go wide in than anything else here. If your toes are crowded, its standard last is the narrowest at the toes that we hold a figure for, and nobody has published a measurement of its wider fittings.

And the fitting lever is not offered to everyone

A width step is real and it is free — and it is not equally available. Counting the published width listings across all 44 shoes on this site: thirteen publish a 4E, and exactly two publish a 6E, the New Balance Fresh Foam X 1540v4 (D/EE/4E/6E) and the New Balance 990v6 (B/D/2E/4E/6E). Both list that 6E under men’s sizing only. On the women’s side there is no 6E anywhere on this site, and exactly one shoe publishes a women’s 4E — the ASICS GEL-CUMULUS 28, in a combined men’s and women’s listing. Three more offer a women’s “X-Wide” or “Extra Wide” without saying which letter that is: the HOKA Arahi 8, the HOKA Gaviota 6 and the Saucony Guide 19. For most women’s listings here the published ceiling is 2E.

That is why a good many people with a bunionette end up buying men’s sizing. It works for girth and costs you heel hold, because a men’s last is cut with a proportionally larger heel and more instep volume — roughly a size and a half down from a women’s size is the usual conversion, and a lace-lock or a heel-grip pad is the usual answer to the slip. It is a trade worth making deliberately rather than discovering halfway through a shift. And on the evidence of the table above it is a real move, not a consolation prize: at the widest point, a wider fitting of a shoe that is already wide there is as much room as you will find off the shelf.

What to check, in order

What to stop wearing

• Anything that tapers to a point. A pointed last moves the widest part of the shoe behind the widest part of your foot, so the fifth metatarsal head meets a wall that is already narrowing.
• Stiff, unlined leather over the bump. It will not stretch where you need it to and it transmits every step to the prominence.
• Shoes you plan to “break in”. A bunionette is a pressure problem; a shoe that hurts in the shop is applying that pressure now and will keep applying it.
• Anything held on by your toes — backless slides and flip-flops make the foot grip to keep the shoe on, which splays the forefoot against the sides on every step.

What the research actually supports — and where it stops

Footwear is not a fringe recommendation here. The most recent review of the condition, published in 2026, states plainly that conservative management — footwear modification and orthoses — is the recommended first-line treatment for a bunionette.

The same sentence carries the caveat, and we would rather print it than bury it: “no long-term studies have demonstrated sustained symptom relief with non-operative modalities.” First-line does not mean proven. It means it is what is tried first, because it is reversible, cheap and low-risk — not because a trial has shown it lasts.

Where the evidence runs out

• Nobody has trialled a shoe against a shoe for this condition. There is no comparison of lasts, widths or materials in bunionette patients. Everything on this page above the research section is mechanism and measurement, not trial evidence, and we would rather say so.
• That review is a narrative review, not a systematic one — its authors searched PubMed, Scopus and Embase to July 2025 and synthesised, but did not pool data or grade certainty. Most of its weight is on surgical comparison, where it also finds “the lack of high-quality prospective trials prevents definitive conclusions”.
• The measurements here are one laboratory’s, on one pair each, in a standard width. 34 shoes is enough to show that fittings and real width diverge; it is not enough to rank brands, and we have not tried to.
• No threshold exists. Nobody has published how many millimetres of toe box a bunionette needs. We can tell you which shoes are wider. We cannot tell you how wide is wide enough for your foot, and anyone who gives you a number for that is inventing it.

When footwear stops being the answer

See a foot and ankle specialist rather than another shoe shop if the skin over the bump breaks down or ulcerates, if there is redness, warmth and swelling that does not settle overnight, if you have diabetes or any neuropathy and notice any skin change over the prominence, or if pain persists in shoes that genuinely fit. Surgery for a bunionette is a real option with real complication rates — the 2026 review reports 11% for distal osteotomies rising to 22% for proximal — which is an argument for taking the footwear attempt seriously first, and for having the conversation with a surgeon rather than with us.

Questions patients ask

Is a bunionette the same as a bunion?

Same mechanism, opposite side of the foot. A bunion is the first metatarsal head on the inside; a bunionette is the fifth on the outside. They can occur together — when they do, the forefoot is splayed at both edges and the shoe has to be wide across the whole ball of the foot rather than roomy at one end. Our bunion guide covers the first-toe side.

Will a wider shoe make the bump go away?

No. The bone position does not change with footwear. What changes is the pressure over it, and therefore the bursitis, the callus and the pain. That is worth having, and it is not the same as correction.

Do bunionette splints or toe spacers work?

There is no evidence they alter the deformity. A spacer between the fourth and fifth toes can stop them rubbing, and a soft pad can take load off the prominence — both are symptom management, and neither needs to be sold as anything more.

Is stretching the shoe worth it?

A cobbler can spot-stretch a leather upper over a specific prominence, and for a dress shoe that is often the most practical option available. It does not work on knit or engineered mesh, which simply relaxes back.

Why does it hurt more in some shoes at the same width?

Because width fittings are graded within a brand’s own last, and the lasts themselves differ: by 16.3 mm at the big toe across the shoes in the table above, and by 5.2 mm at the widest point, against 3–4 mm for a width letter. Two shoes both labelled 2E can differ by more than the step from D to 2E.

What happens next on this page

Every figure here is somebody else’s measurement, clearly labelled as such. When a bunionette-relevant shoe goes on our own bench it gets weighed, measured with calipers at the widest point of the interior, worn, and given an Orthotic Volume Rating — and only then does it carry a score or the seal. Until that happens this page stays in the spec-analysis tier and says so at the top. How we test →

Sources

1. Colò G, Fusini F, Marcolli D, Testa A, Leigheb M, Surace MF. Tailor’s bunion (bunionette): current concepts and outcomes of open versus minimally invasive surgery. Musculoskeletal Surgery. 2026;110. doi:10.1007/s12306-025-00941-6
2. RunRepeat laboratory measurements of toe-box width at the big toe (taken 28.3 mm from the tip) and at the widest point of the interior, for all 34 shoes, read September 2026. Individual figures are linked to each shoe’s page in the table above.
3. Brand-published width fittings, taken from each manufacturer’s current product listing, September 2026.

Nothing on this page is medical advice or creates a doctor–patient relationship. A painful bunionette with skin breakdown, or any skin change over the prominence in someone with diabetes or neuropathy, needs to be seen in person.

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