Average Height in Montenegro (Men & Women)

Montenegro's average height: two very different answers

Montenegro is the country where global height estimates and on-the-ground measurements disagree the most, and the gap is worth explaining up front.

In the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates published in 2016, which are the figures this site uses for every country, Montenegrin men born in 1996 average 178.3 cm (5′10″) and women 164.9 cm (5′5″). That places Montenegrin men 24th of 200 countries and women 27th: tall, but well behind the Netherlands.

Researchers who have measured young Montenegrins directly tell a different story. Since 2012, every major measured study has found young Montenegrin men averaging about 183 cm (6′0″) and young women about 168–169 cm (5′6″), figures that put Montenegro at or near the top of the world. NCD-RisC's own follow-up study in 2020 agrees with them, ranking Montenegrin 19-year-olds second in the world for both sexes.

The difference matters, so this page sets out both. The NCD-RisC values describe a birth cohort, people born in a given year and measured as adults, and they come from a model built on 1,472 population-based studies worldwide. The paper notes that countries with limited data have larger uncertainty. Montenegro, a small country with few historical national surveys, appears to be one of those cases. You can test any height against either set of numbers with the height percentile calculator.

The NCD-RisC century trend

In these estimates, Montenegrin men gained 11.8 cm across the century and women 12.7 cm, and the 1996 cohort is the tallest for both sexes. The model shows growth slowing after 1976, which is the main point of disagreement with field studies.

What direct measurements show

University students, 2012 and 2021

In 2012, Duško Bjelica and colleagues at the University of Montenegro published the first modern adult study in Anthropological Notebooks. They measured 285 university students using the protocol of the International Society for the Advancement of Kinanthropometry (ISAK):

• 178 men (average age 21): 183.21 cm
• 107 women: 168.37 cm

The authors noted that European anthropologists had recognized the unusual height of Montenegro's highlanders more than a century earlier, and that recent scientific data were sparse. A larger follow-up in Kinesiologia Slovenica in 2021 measured 713 students and found almost identical results: 183.23 cm for 370 men and 168.38 cm for 343 women.

University students are not a random sample of a country, so these numbers are not national averages. They are, however, strikingly consistent.

The 2013 national high school survey

The strongest evidence comes from a nationwide survey of high school students aged 17 to 20 carried out in 2013 by the University of Montenegro's Faculty for Sport and Physical Education in Nikšić. Pavel Grasgruber and colleagues reported the results in the journal Biology in 2022:

The adjusted figures, 182.9 cm and 168.8 cm, are the ones the authors use for comparisons. On that basis, they concluded that young men from Montenegro were the tallest 18-year-olds in the world, slightly ahead of Dutch 18-year-olds (182.4 cm). Dutch women remain taller, at 169.7 cm at 18 and 170.7 cm at 21.

NCD-RisC's 2020 adolescent ranking

NCD-RisC's study of children and adolescents in 200 countries, published in The Lancet in 2020, found that in 2019 the tallest 19-year-olds lived in the Netherlands, followed by Montenegro for both boys and girls. The study also noted that central European countries such as Montenegro and Poland achieved a substantial part of their height advantage since 1985, especially in boys, and it singled out Montenegrin boys for large height gains with little increase in body-mass index.

A century of Montenegrin height

Montenegro's highlanders have a long reputation for height, and the historical record backs it up.

The post-war Durmitor figure, recorded by the Czech researcher Valšík, was a value that, according to Grasgruber's team, the industrialized nations of northern and western Europe began to approach only in the 1950s and 1960s.

Six decades of army records

A 2026 study in Frontiers in Public Health by Stevo Popović and colleagues digitized the pre-recruitment medical records of the former Yugoslav People's Army in Montenegro, with approval from the country's Ministry of Defense. After excluding incomplete entries, it analyzed 83,274 young men examined between April 1979 and July 1987, mostly at about 18. Their average height was 176.76 cm, with the 1966 cohort the tallest (177.26 cm) and the 1965 cohort the shortest (176.04 cm). Height rose only slightly across those birth years, by about 0.05 cm per year.

Comparing that baseline with the 2013 survey suggests that young Montenegrin men grew by roughly 6 cm between those born in the 1960s and those born in the mid-1990s. Grasgruber's 2022 paper reaches a similar conclusion from recruits in the capital, Podgorica, estimating a gain of about 1.7 cm per decade.

Interestingly, the NCD-RisC estimate for the 1956 cohort (175.5 cm) and the army data for the 1960s cohorts (176.8 cm) are not far apart. The divergence opens up only for later cohorts, where measured data show continued rapid gains and the 2016 model shows a plateau.

Why the estimates diverge

Several published observations help explain why a global model and local measurements land 4 to 5 cm apart:

• Sparse historical data. The 2026 army-records study notes that evidence for the second half of the 20th century in Montenegro was fragmented and mostly limited to local or regional studies, which prevented a reliable national assessment of long-term trends. A model with few national inputs leans more on regional patterns.
• Shared regional information. NCD-RisC's model deliberately shares information among countries in the same region. That is a strength for data-poor countries, but it can pull an unusual country toward its neighbors.
• Recent, fast growth. The 2020 NCD-RisC study found that Montenegro gained much of its height advantage after 1985. A trend that steep, concentrated in the most recent cohorts, is exactly what a model built on older surveys is likely to miss.

None of this means the NCD-RisC estimate is careless. It is the best figure available on a consistent basis for all 200 countries, which is why this site uses it. But for Montenegro specifically, the measured studies are more direct evidence of how tall recent generations are.

Arm span and foot length studies

The University of Montenegro studies were designed partly to offer an alternative way of estimating height for groups of people whose standing height is hard to measure. In the 2012 study, men's arm span exceeded their height by an average of 2.50 cm, while women's arm span was 0.24 cm shorter than their height. The authors found these relationships differed substantially from other populations, so they recommended separate prediction equations for Montenegrins. The 2021 study did the same with foot length, which averaged 26.85 cm in men and 24.13 cm in women.

Regional differences inside Montenegro

The 2013 survey revealed large differences within this small country. Boys from the mountain municipalities of Kolašin and Šavnik averaged 185.5 cm, while boys from Cetinje, a former Montenegrin capital, averaged 181.3 cm, a gap of 4.2 cm. The tallest band continues across the border into Herzegovina and the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, forming what the researchers call a nucleus of extraordinary stature in the Dinaric Alps.

Grasgruber and colleagues argue that environmental explanations struggle here, because people in the richer coastal region around Podgorica are much shorter than those in the remote mountain areas.

The contrast with Albania, to the south, is even sharper. According to the Albania Demographic and Health Survey 2017–2018, young Albanian men aged 17 to 25 averaged 174.4 cm, which the Biology paper notes is 8.5 cm below their Montenegrin peers. The drop in male height between Kukës in Albania and Kolašin and Šavnik in Montenegro was about 13 cm over roughly 50 km.

Genes, diet and wealth

Montenegro's height is hard to explain by wealth alone. The 2022 paper notes that Montenegro's GDP per capita in 2013 was more than three times lower than that of the Netherlands (14,870 against 49,242 US dollars). Our World in Data stresses that height differences between countries usually track nutrition and living standards, so a population this tall at this income level is unusual.

Grasgruber's group argues that genetics is a large part of the answer. Their 2026 paper in Human Genomics reports that across Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, male height rises in step with certain ancient "Paleo-Balkan" ancestry components and Y-chromosome lineages, and it describes Montenegro as an outlier even within that region. These are hypotheses from one research group. The same researchers also see room for further growth: their 2022 paper describes the trend in dietary protein quality as most optimistic in Croatia and Montenegro.

Montenegro and its neighbors

Using the NCD-RisC estimates, Montenegro trails its Dinaric neighbors:

The measured column reverses the ranking. For Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Albania, the NCD-RisC and measured figures agree within about a centimeter. Montenegro is the outlier, at 4.6 cm. Compare the full profiles on the Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia pages.

What Montenegrin height means

If the measured figures are right, the typical young Montenegrin man is about 6′0″, the same as the typical young Dutchman, and a young woman is about 5′6″ to 5′7″. For context on that height worldwide, see the 183 cm page, and use the average height hub to compare Montenegro with any other country.