A monitor that sits too low is the most common problem on a home desk, and the one people are least likely to notice. You do not feel the height. You feel the neck ache four hours later and blame the chair.
Where the screen should sit
The usual guidance is simple enough to check in ten seconds. Sit as you normally would. Look straight ahead. Your eye line should land at or just below the top edge of the screen — not the middle of it, and not the bezel above it.
From there, your gaze travels slightly downward across the rest of the display, which is the direction your eyes are most comfortable holding for long periods. If you are tilting your head back to read the top of a document, the screen is too high. If your chin is dropping toward your chest, it is too low.
Why most setups are too low
Monitor stands are designed to be compact in a box, not correct on a desk. A typical stand puts the bottom of the panel 5 to 10cm above the desk surface, which suits a shorter person at a tall desk and almost nobody else. Laptops are worse: the screen is physically attached to the keyboard, so a comfortable typing height guarantees an uncomfortable screen height.
Working out how much lift you need
Sit down and have someone hold a ruler, or do it yourself against a wall:
- Sit in your normal working posture and note where your eye line lands on the screen.
- Measure the vertical distance from there to the top edge of the panel.
- That distance, roughly, is the lift you need.
Most people land somewhere between 7 and 12cm. That is squarely in the range a single riser covers. If you need more than about 15cm, a riser plus the monitor’s own stand adjustment is usually steadier than stacking.
What a riser buys you besides height
The height is the point, but the space underneath is the reason people keep them. A riser turns the footprint under your monitor — otherwise dead space — into somewhere the keyboard lives when you are not using it, or where a laptop sits closed, or where the clutter that accumulates at the back of a desk goes.
If you use two monitors, the thing to check is span rather than height: a riser needs to carry both panels without bowing in the middle, which means looking at the stated width and load rating rather than assuming.
Laptops are a separate problem
Raising a laptop fixes the screen and breaks the keyboard, because they move together. The answer is to raise the laptop to the right screen height and use a separate keyboard at desk level. That is what laptop stands are for, and it is why they are usually bought in pairs with a keyboard rather than on their own.
If you only ever work on the laptop for short stretches, a lower-angle stand that lifts it 5cm and tilts it toward you is a reasonable compromise. For a full working day, get the screen up and the keyboard down.