Average Height in Iceland (Men & Women)

Iceland's average height today

Iceland is one of the smallest countries in the world height tables by population, but it has one of the tallest populations on Earth. In the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates used on this site, Icelandic men born in 1996 average 180.5 cm (5′11″) and Icelandic women 165.9 cm (5′5″). That puts Icelandic men 9th and women 15th out of 200 countries.

These values describe a birth cohort, everyone born in a given year and measured as an adult. The 1996 cohort reached 18 in 2014. NCD-RisC built its estimates from 1,472 population-based studies with measured, not self-reported, height for more than 18.6 million people, and pooled them in a statistical model. To see where a particular height falls against Icelandic averages, use the height percentile calculator.

Iceland is a good example of why the method matters. The model shares information among countries in the same region, which helps when a country has few surveys of its own. NCD-RisC states that in countries with limited data the uncertainty of the estimates is larger. A small island nation is exactly that kind of case, so the Icelandic figures are best read as a well-informed estimate with a margin of a centimeter or two, not a precise census.

Tall from the start: Iceland a century ago

Most countries in the NCD-RisC study were far shorter in 1896 than today. Iceland stands out because it was already near the top of the world a century ago.

The NCD-RisC paper notes that Swedish women born in 1896, at 160.3 cm, were the tallest of their generation, and that women were also taller than 158 cm in Norway, Iceland, the USA and American Samoa. Icelandic women of that cohort were roughly 18 cm taller than the shortest women in the world at the time, in Guatemala (140.3 cm).

Icelandic men of 1896 were also among the tallest. At 170.5 cm they ranked 6th of 200 countries in the site's data, behind only Sweden (171.9 cm), Norway (171.2 cm), the United States (171.1 cm), Estonia (170.9 cm) and Canada (170.7 cm). Icelandic women of that cohort ranked 3rd, after Sweden and Norway.

The fastest gains came early

Between the 1896 and 1926 cohorts, Icelandic men gained 6.1 cm and women 5.6 cm. That is a large jump for only 30 years: among all 200 countries, only six (Iran, Algeria, Egypt, Costa Rica, Jordan and Yemen) saw men gain more over the same three decades. It is also bigger than the gains Iceland saw in any later period. By the 1956 cohort men had reached 180.6 cm, and the line then flattened.

Across the whole century, Icelandic men gained 10.0 cm and women 7.3 cm. The women's figure is the fifth smallest gain of 41 European countries in the site's data, after Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and Austria. That is not because Icelandic women grew little, but because they started so tall.

Did Icelanders get shorter after 1976?

On paper, yes. The 1996 cohort is 0.8 cm shorter than the 1976 cohort for men and 1.7 cm shorter for women. For women, that is a bigger drop than in neighboring Denmark or Norway.

It is worth being cautious here. A measured study of 18-year-olds in Reykjavik in 2008–2009, listed by Pavel Grasgruber and colleagues in the journal Biology in 2022, recorded averages of 181.8 cm (6′0″) for 146 young men and 167.9 cm (5′6″) for 129 young women. Those young people were born around 1990, between the two NCD-RisC cohorts, and they were taller than the NCD-RisC estimate for 1996 by about 1.3 cm for men and 2.0 cm for women.

Several things could explain the mismatch:

• The Reykjavik sample is small and drawn from the capital, which may not represent the whole country.
• The NCD-RisC model relies on regional information where national data are thin, which can pull small countries toward their neighbors.
• NCD-RisC's credible intervals for small countries are wide, so a real difference of a centimeter or two is hard to detect.

The cautious conclusion is that Icelandic height leveled off after the mid-century cohorts, like the rest of northern Europe, and that the apparent decline is within the range of uncertainty.

Iceland's teenagers in the 2020 global ranking

NCD-RisC returned to height in 2020 with a study of children and adolescents in 200 countries, published in The Lancet. It found that in 2019, the tallest 19-year-old girls in the world lived in the Netherlands (170.4 cm), followed by Montenegro, Denmark and Iceland. Iceland was also named among the countries at the very top of the global ranks for 19-year-olds, alongside the Netherlands, Denmark, Montenegro and Estonia, whose children kept or widened their height advantage as they grew from school age to late adolescence.

The same study made a broader point that applies to Iceland. Much of northwestern Europe's height advantage was achieved before the late 20th century, and many of these countries had below-median height gains from 1985 to 2019. In other words, Iceland is a country that got tall early and has mostly held its position since.

How Iceland compares with other tall nations

Grasgruber and colleagues compiled the tallest measured samples of young people in Europe for their 2022 paper. Iceland appears near the top of both lists.

In an earlier paper on Bosnia and Herzegovina, published in Royal Society Open Science in 2017, the same research group wrote that the Bosnian average of 181.2 cm was significantly surpassed only by the Netherlands, Montenegro and Iceland (181.8 cm). In that comparison, Iceland was the third tallest male population in their dataset.

Iceland and its neighbors

In the NCD-RisC data for the 1996 cohort, Iceland sits between the Netherlands and Denmark at the top and Norway and the United Kingdom below.

Icelanders have overtaken Norwegians since the 1890s, though the margin is less than a centimeter. Denmark, which started slightly shorter than Iceland, is now about a centimeter taller for both sexes. You can compare the full trend lines on the Denmark and Norway pages, or set Iceland against the world's tallest country on the Netherlands page.

Iceland and the genetics of height

Iceland has played an outsized role in research on why people differ in height. A 2008 paper in Nature Genetics by D. F. Gudbjartsson and colleagues was one of the early large genome scans for height, and its main sample was Icelandic.

The study scanned the genomes of 25,174 Icelanders, together with 2,876 Dutch people, 1,770 European Americans and 1,148 African Americans, and then checked selected variants in 3,024 Scandinavians and 5,517 Danes. It found 27 regions of the genome linked to adult height. The effect of each variant was tiny, between 0.3 and 0.6 cm per copy, and together they explained only about 3.7% of the variation in height. The genes nearby were involved in skeletal development and cell division.

That result helps explain a point made by Our World in Data. Within a well-fed population, most of the differences between individuals are genetic, but they are spread across a very large number of genes, each with a small effect. The jump of several centimeters in Icelanders born between 1896 and 1926 happened far too quickly to be genetic, and it fits the general pattern of improving childhood nutrition and health.

A 2026 paper in Human Genomics by Grasgruber's group looked at ancestry and height across 60 European-descended populations. It notes that the Yamnaya-related ancestry component, which the authors associate with taller stature, is most common in a northern belt running from Iceland and Ireland through Scandinavia to northwestern Russia. The paper also cites a preprint that predicted especially high genetic height in Icelanders, Englishmen and Scots. These are research hypotheses rather than settled findings, but they suggest that genetic background may help explain why Iceland was already tall when the rest of Europe was not.

Reading the Icelandic numbers carefully

Because Iceland's figures come from a small population, a few practical points help when comparing them with other countries:

• Use the cohort, not the headline. The 1976 cohort (181.3 cm and 167.6 cm) and the 1996 cohort (180.5 cm and 165.9 cm) differ by more than most neighbors' cohorts do. Saying "Icelandic men average about 181 cm" covers both honestly.
• Measured samples beat self-reports. The Reykjavik figures were measured with a stadiometer, as were all the NCD-RisC inputs. Self-reported heights in online lists tend to run higher and are not comparable.
• City samples are not national samples. A capital-city sample of young people can differ from the whole country in income and background.
• Small gaps are noise. Differences of under a centimeter between Iceland, Norway and Denmark are smaller than the uncertainty in any of the estimates.

Seen that way, the data are remarkably consistent: young Icelandic men measure roughly 180.5 to 182 cm and young women roughly 166 to 168 cm, depending on the source and year.

What Icelandic height means in practice

An average Icelandic man at 180.5 cm is just under 5′11″, and an average Icelandic woman at 165.9 cm is about 5′5″. The gap between them, 14.6 cm, is one of the larger sex differences in Europe in the site's data, partly because women's estimated height fell more than men's after the 1976 cohort.

A man of 183 cm (6′0″) is a little above average in Iceland, and a woman of 170 cm is tall but not unusual. Compare those heights on the 183 cm page and the 170 cm page.

Why Iceland is worth watching

Iceland combines a very tall population with very thin data. That makes it a useful test case for global height estimates, and it is why sources disagree by a centimeter or two. What they agree on is the big picture: Icelanders were among the tallest people in the world a century ago, grew rapidly in the first half of the 20th century, and remain in the global top ten for young men and close to it for young women.

For more countries side by side, visit the average height hub.