Average Height in Israel (Men & Women)

Average height in Israel today

Israeli men born in 1996 average 176.9 cm (5′10″) and Israeli women 161.8 cm (5′4″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC). These are the figures used on this page and in our comparison tools. Out of 200 countries and territories in the dataset, that puts Israeli men 39th and Israeli women 63rd, so Israel sits in the upper third of the world for men and a little lower for women.

The gap between the sexes is unusually wide, at about 15 cm. One reason is visible in the numbers: men kept growing across recent cohorts while women stopped gaining in the 1980s. This page looks at why that might be, how the two main kinds of Israeli data (modelled estimates and army medical exams) differ, and how Israel compares with the rest of the eastern Mediterranean.

What the NCD-RisC numbers mean

NCD-RisC is a worldwide network of health researchers. Its 2016 height study in eLife pooled 1,472 population-based studies covering more than 18.6 million people born between 1896 and 1996. It used a Bayesian hierarchical model to estimate mean height at age 18 for each country and each birth cohort, meaning everyone born in a given year.

Grouping people by birth year rather than by survey year matters. As Our World in Data explains, adult height mostly reflects nutrition and disease in childhood and adolescence. So the "1996" figure describes people who grew up in Israel in the late 1990s and 2000s, not the whole adult population today. The model also reports uncertainty. For Israeli men born in 1996, the 95% credible interval runs from 174.5 to 179.3 cm, which is wider than the interval for many European countries. That matters when we compare it with the army data below.

To see where a particular height falls against these averages, try the height percentile calculator, or compare two people side by side with the height difference calculator.

A century of change: from 163 cm to 177 cm

The NCD-RisC series begins with people born in 1896, decades before the state was founded. The population of the territory has changed enormously since then through immigration, so the early estimates describe a different population from today's. With that caveat, the trend is still striking.

Men gained about 13.5 cm over the century and women about 9.8 cm. Most of the gain came in the cohorts born between the 1920s and 1970s. After that the curves flatten. In the year-by-year NCD-RisC data, Israeli women reach their highest estimated average with the 1986 cohort (161.9 cm), and the 1996 cohort is essentially the same. Men gain less than a centimeter between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts.

That flattening fits a pattern NCD-RisC describes for many high-income countries. Height gains slowed or stopped after several decades of rapid growth, as they did earlier in Northern Europe and in English-speaking countries. The study does not single out Israel, but the Israeli curve looks much like the plateau seen elsewhere.

Army medical exams: millions of measured teenagers

Israel has an unusual national source of height data. Most young people are examined before compulsory military service, and researchers have used these records in several large studies. Unlike phone or household surveys, they are measured heights, not self-reported.

The 1977–2020 registry

A nationwide registry study covered about 2.79 million adolescents examined between 1977 and 2020, of whom 41.6% were female. The examinees were usually 16 to 19 years old, with a mean age of 17.4. The study says height and weight were taken barefoot and in underwear by trained medics. Its tables report mean height by five-year period:

The authors describe a rise of about 1 cm in males and a stable height in females over the period. Male height peaked in the early 1990s and has hovered around 174 cm since.

Five decades of stature

A related analysis by Pinhas-Hamiel and colleagues, published as a 2019 conference abstract, covered 2,785,227 adolescents examined from 1967 to 2015. It found that mean height rose by 3.1 cm in males over five decades but did not change in females. Most of the male gain happened in the first 25 years, after which height stabilized. For more than half a million examinees, the team could also calculate an expected height from parental data. The gap between measured and expected height gradually narrowed in both sexes. They also found that obese young men were taller than their normal-weight and underweight peers, and concluded that excess weight did not limit growth.

Why army data and NCD-RisC differ

The army figures for young men, about 174 cm, are roughly 3 cm below the NCD-RisC estimate of 176.9 cm. Several things separate the two:

• Age. The army measures at about 17.4 years. NCD-RisC estimates height at 18.
• Who is examined. The registry paper notes that Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish women are under-represented because they are not obliged to serve.
• Method. NCD-RisC combines many sources in a statistical model, and its 95% interval for Israeli men reaches down to 174.5 cm.

Why women stopped gaining first

Both datasets agree that Israeli women stopped getting taller earlier than men. In the army registry, young women measured 161.9 cm at the end of the 1970s and 162.2 cm four decades later, a difference smaller than the rounding in most surveys. The 2019 analysis adds a detail worth noting: underweight young women were consistently at or above the height expected from their parents' heights, by 3 cm or more, and in the first two decades they were over 2 cm taller on average than obese young women. The researchers did not claim to know why female height stalled. Their abstract reports the pattern by weight group but does not test causes. The NCD-RisC model reaches the same conclusion by a different route, with women born in 1976, 1986 and 1996 all estimated within 0.1 cm of each other.

Neither number is "wrong". The army records are the best direct measurement of Israeli teenagers. NCD-RisC is the best like-for-like basis for comparing countries, which is why we use it on this page.

Immigration and the closing height gap

Israel's population was built by immigration from very different places, and early height studies reflect that. A 1991 study by Laor, Seidman and Danon in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health examined computerized draft records for about half a million recruits aged 17 to 18 who were born between 1950 and 1971. The largest origin groups in the sample were Morocco (27.4%), Romania (22.0%), Iraq (17.5%) and Yemen (11.4%), followed by Poland and Israel (7.8% each).

Three findings stand out:

1. Height differed markedly between origin groups at the start of the period.
2. In the Israeli-born reference group, height rose by about 1.1 mm per year in males and 0.8 mm per year in females.
3. The groups that started shortest grew fastest, so the differences between them narrowed.

An earlier study, published in Human Heredity in 1983 by Tartakovsky, Carel and Luz, compared 1,411 men and 961 women from the adult Jewish population. Native-born Israelis were significantly taller than immigrants, and the difference held across age groups and types of work. The authors linked the gap to better socioeconomic and environmental conditions for people raised in Israel, and noted that the same pattern appears in other countries that take in many immigrants.

These studies cover specific populations and periods, so they cannot describe every community in Israel today. They do show how quickly childhood conditions can change average height within one or two generations.

Israel compared with its neighbors

Using the same NCD-RisC birth-cohort data, Israel is the tallest country in its immediate region for men:

The women's ranking is closer. Lebanese and Cypriot women are slightly taller on average than Israeli women, and the gap between Israeli and Turkish women is only 1.3 cm. Measured against Europe, Israeli men are about the same height as men in Spain (176.6 cm) and a little shorter than those in Italy (177.8 cm). Both countries have their own pages under average height by country.

Some neighbors are moving in the opposite direction. In the NCD-RisC series, Egyptian men born in 1996 are almost 4 cm shorter than those born in 1976, and Syrian men are about 1 cm shorter. Israeli men gained slightly over the same span.

What the averages mean in daily life

An Israeli man of 176.9 cm is just under 5′10″, about 0.9 cm short of the 5′10″ (177.8 cm) mark. The average Israeli woman is just under 5′4″. In the army registry the standard deviation of height was about 6.8 cm for young men and 6.2 cm for young women, so most young Israelis fall within roughly 7 cm of the average either way.

Two cautions apply to any national average. First, it describes a birth cohort, so older Israelis, especially immigrants who grew up elsewhere, may be noticeably shorter or taller than the figure suggests. Second, averages say nothing about an individual's health. A child who seems short or tall for their age should be assessed by a pediatrician using growth charts, not compared with national means.

Key takeaways

• Israeli men born in 1996 average 176.9 cm and women 161.8 cm (NCD-RisC), ranking 39th and 63rd of 200.
• Height rose by about 13.5 cm for men and 9.8 cm for women across the cohorts born from 1896 to 1996, then levelled off.
• Measured pre-service exams of about 2.8 million teenagers show young men near 174 cm and young women near 162 cm, with little change since the early 1990s.
• Studies from the 1980s and 1990s found the height gap between origin groups and between native-born Israelis and immigrants was closing.
• Israel has the tallest men in the eastern Mediterranean in this dataset, while its women are on a par with those in Lebanon and Cyprus.