Average Height in North Korea (Men & Women)

How tall are North Koreans?

North Korea is one of the hardest countries in the world to measure. The site's figures come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), which estimates average adult height for every country by birth year. For North Koreans born in 1996, the estimate is 172.0 cm (5′7.5″) for men and 159.0 cm (5′2.5″) for women, placing them 90th and 100th respectively among the 200 countries and territories on this site.

Those are reasonable mid-table numbers, close to the world averages for that cohort. They're also the most uncertain figures in this part of Asia. Almost everything independent researchers know about North Korean height comes from refugees, from United Nations nutrition surveys of children, and from comparisons with South Korea, a country that shares the same ancestry and was one nation until the 1940s. That shared starting point has made the Korean peninsula a natural experiment in how living conditions shape the human body.

This page explains where the estimate comes from, what refugee and child studies add, and why the different numbers in circulation don't agree.

Where the NCD-RisC estimate comes from

The NCD-RisC study, published in eLife in 2016, reanalyzed 1,472 population-based studies with measured height for more than 18.6 million people born from 1896 to 1996. It didn't accept self-reported height. Each country's estimate came from a Bayesian hierarchical model in which a country is informed by its own data if available, and by data from other years and from other countries, especially those in the same region.

That last part matters for North Korea. The paper explains that the model shares information more strongly when a country's own data are non-existent or weakly informative, and that estimates for countries with limited data, or with mainly local studies, have wider uncertainty. In practice, the North Korean curve is partly shaped by trends elsewhere in East Asia, where heights rose fast. The model's output is a credible estimate, not a direct measurement of a representative sample of North Koreans.

The century-long trend in the site data

In the 1896 cohort, people in what became North Korea were slightly taller than those in the south, especially women (by 6.9 cm). By 1956 South Koreans had pulled ahead, and the gap widened through the 1970s. South Korean women went on to record the largest height gain of any group in the NCD-RisC study, 20.2 cm over the century. North Korean women gained 9.9 cm and men 11.4 cm.

What refugee studies show

Height and living standards, 1930s–1980s

The most cited study is by Sunyoung Pak, Daniel Schwekendiek and Hee Kyoung Kim, published in the Economic History Review in 2011. They used the measured adult height of 6,512 North Korean refugees born from the 1930s to the 1980s as an indicator of living standards. Their main findings, as summarized by the Economic History Society:

• North Koreans born before the division of the peninsula were taller than their South Korean peers.
• Every North Korean cohort born afterwards was shorter than its South Korean counterpart.
• North Koreans experienced no meaningful secular increase in height during 60 years of communism.
• Higher educational status was associated with being about 1 to 2 cm taller.

The third point is the sharpest contrast with the NCD-RisC series, which shows North Korean men gaining 4.5 cm between the 1956 and 1996 cohorts. Refugees aren't a random sample of the population, since people who manage to leave may differ from those who stay, but the finding is consistent with what child surveys show.

Adult defectors

The Wikipedia table of national averages lists a measured average of 165.6 cm for men and 154.9 cm for women among North Korean defectors aged 20 to 39, from a 2005 sample of 1,075 people. Those adults were born roughly between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, so they overlap the cohorts in the table above. For men, the defector figure is about 4 cm below the NCD-RisC estimate for the 1976 cohort (169.7 cm); for women, about 3 cm below (157.7 cm). We record this as a significant disagreement between sources rather than resolving it.

Children, famine and stunting

North Korea's famine in the 1990s left a clear mark on children's growth. Height-for-age is the standard measure: a child more than two standard deviations below the WHO growth standard is classified as stunted.

The World Bank's series of stunting estimates for children under five shows how severe the problem was and how far it has eased:

Daniel Schwekendiek's 2009 paper in the Journal of Biosocial Science compared UN survey data collected inside North Korea in 2002 with South Korean national anthropometric data. It found that North Korean preschool children were up to 13 cm shorter and up to 7 kg lighter than children raised in the South, and that North Korean women weighed up to 9 kg less than South Korean women.

In a 2011 review of Schwekendiek's book on North Korea's socioeconomic history, Stephan Haggard of the Peterson Institute summarized its estimate that preschool boys in the post-famine period were 4 to 8 cm shorter than South Korean boys, and girls 3 to 8 cm shorter. The book catalogs 25 anthropometric and nutritional surveys carried out since 1987, inside the country or among refugees.

Disputes about the data

Haggard's review also shows how contested North Korean data are. Haggard and his co-author had speculated, in their book Famine in North Korea, that some figures from a pivotal 2002 survey might have been fabricated by North Korean counterparts, given surprisingly low malnutrition measures just after the famine. Schwekendiek ran reliability tests and rejected that view, but, according to Haggard, neither the author nor the World Food Programme was willing to share the underlying data for replication. Any figure for North Korea should be read with this in mind.

Reports from the 2000s

A 2004 Los Angeles Times report by Barbara Demick, from the Chinese border city of Yanji, described the human side of these numbers. It cited a 2003 WFP and UNICEF report finding that chronic malnutrition had left 42% of North Korean children stunted. South Korean anthropologists who measured refugees in Yanji found that most teenage boys were under 5 feet (152 cm) tall and weighed under 100 pounds, while the average 17-year-old South Korean boy was 5′8″ (about 173 cm).

The same report said, citing defectors, that the North Korean military had dropped its minimum height requirement of 5′3″ (about 160 cm) because it couldn't find enough recruits who met it. Defectors and aid workers also described schools promoting hanging exercises and basketball in the hope of making children taller. These accounts come from people who left the country and can't be independently verified, but they were reported by a reputable newspaper and fit the survey evidence.

One people, two growth paths

What makes Korean height data so valuable to researchers is that the starting point was shared. The South Korean anthropologist Chung Byong Ho, who worked on the Yanji study of refugee children published in the Korea Journal in December 2003, told the Los Angeles Times: "We Koreans are genetically homogenous, but we are not really the same anymore." The same report noted that, before partition, people in the north were if anything slightly taller, which matches both the refugee study and the 1896 figures in the NCD-RisC series.

Because the two populations share ancestry, the gap that opened after the 1940s can't plausibly be explained by genes. The economic historians behind the refugee study treated height as a stand-in for living standards precisely because reliable income and consumption statistics for North Korea don't exist. In their regression, which also accounted for birth decade, regional origin and occupation, high educational status was associated with only about 1 to 2 cm of extra height.

The pattern in children is consistent with that reading. The largest measured gaps between the Koreas are among preschool children who lived through or just after the famine, when food shortages were most severe, and stunting rates have fallen steadily in later surveys. If those children grew into shorter adults, the full effect will show up in birth cohorts after 1996, which no international estimate covers yet. A new national measurement survey, ideally with independent access, would be needed to settle how tall North Koreans born in the 1990s and 2000s actually are.

North Korea among its neighbors

Here's how the NCD-RisC estimates compare across the region (1996 birth cohort):

On the model estimates, North Koreans are level with Chinese and slightly taller than Japanese. If the refugee-based figures are closer to the truth, North Koreans would instead sit several centimeters below all of these neighbors. The NCD-RisC paper notes that South Koreans are now taller than the Japanese and that Chinese men and women have also overtaken the Japanese, a reshuffling driven by fast growth in income and nutrition.

Making sense of the numbers

The NCD-RisC figure of 172.0 cm for men born in 1996 is useful for a like-for-like comparison with every other country, and it's the figure this site uses in the height comparison tool and the height percentile calculator. But for North Korea in particular, it's best read as an upper-bound modeled estimate. The direct evidence, from refugees and from children measured during and after the famine, points to shorter stature and much slower growth than the model suggests.

Our World in Data explains why the Korean case is so instructive. Most of the variation in height within a population is genetic, but differences between generations and between countries mainly reflect nutrition and health in childhood. The two Koreas started from the same population and diverged sharply in diet, income and health care. Their height difference is one of the clearest measures of that divergence.

To see these averages side by side with any height, try the height difference calculator, or browse all countries on the average height hub.