Average Height in Norway (Men & Women)

How tall are Norwegians?

Norway has been one of the world's tall nations for well over a century. In the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates for the 1996 birth cohort, Norwegian men average 179.7 cm (5′11″) and Norwegian women 165.6 cm (5′5″). That ranks men joint 13th (with Sweden) and women 18th of 200 countries.

The surprise in Norway's numbers is not how tall Norwegians are today, but how tall they already were in the 1890s, and how little they have changed in the last few decades.

About the NCD-RisC estimates

The figures above come from NCD-RisC's 2016 study in eLife, which pooled 1,472 population-based studies with measured heights for more than 18.6 million adults, excluding self-reports because of their upward bias. A model estimated the average height each birth cohort reached at 18, from 1896 to 1996. Norway has an unusually deep record: NCD-RisC notes that data for people born between 1860 and 1895 existed for only six countries, and Norway was one of them (along with American Samoa, India, Japan, Switzerland and the United States). The researchers didn't use those early cohorts, but the fact that Norway measured its people so early says something about its statistical tradition.

A tall country even in 1896

NCD-RisC describes the tallest populations of a century ago as living in Central and Northern Europe, North America and some Pacific islands. Men born in Sweden, Norway and the USA in 1896 were the only ones above 171 cm, and Norwegian women of that cohort were among the few groups above 158 cm, alongside Iceland, the USA and American Samoa. The world average for men born in 1896 was 162.5 cm, so a Norwegian man of that generation was nearly 9 cm taller than the global norm.

Because Norway started so high, its century-long gain looks modest: 8.5 cm for men and 6.4 cm for women, compared with gains of 12 to 15 cm in countries such as Serbia, Croatia and Czechia. The fastest growth came early, between the 1896 and 1926 cohorts, when men added 4.4 cm and women 3.8 cm. Height peaked with the 1976 cohort at 180.0 cm for men and 166.6 cm for women. The 1996 cohort is slightly shorter, by 0.3 cm for men and a full 1.0 cm for women.

A widening gap between men and women

One consequence of men gaining more than women is that the height gap between the sexes in Norway has grown. In the 1896 cohort, Norwegian men were 12.0 cm taller than women, close to the global ratio of about 1.07 that Our World in Data says has held since the late 19th century. By the 1996 cohort the gap was 14.1 cm, larger than the roughly 12 cm global gap for that generation. The widening happened at both ends of the century: men outgained women by 0.6 cm between the 1896 and 1926 cohorts, and in the most recent period women's average fell 0.7 cm more than men's did. Norway is not alone in this; neighboring Sweden shows almost the same pattern, while in Finland the gap has stayed nearly constant.

130 years of conscript records

Norway's conscription system has produced one of the longest height series anywhere. In a 2020 open-access paper in Anthropologischer Anzeiger, titled "The end of the secular trend in Norway", Alexander Rybak and colleagues analyzed Statistics Norway data on military conscripts for eight sets of birth years, from those measured in 1877–1880 through to 2009–2011, broken down by county.

Their main findings:

• Overall gain: average height of Norwegian men rose by 10.9 cm between 1878 and 2010.
• Uneven growth: the increase varied by region. Finnmark in the far north gained more than 1 cm per decade, while Sør-Trøndelag gained only 7 mm per decade.
• Urban advantage: urban and densely populated counties grew taller faster than rural ones. The biggest gap between counties came in 1936, when city dwellers first overtook rural men, and the difference between the tallest and shortest counties exceeded 6 cm between 1936 and 1956.
• The end of the trend: the urban height advantage disappeared after 1996, the same point at which the secular increase in height stopped.

The authors tied the timing to Norway's history. The trend became clear after the 1905 dissolution of the union with Sweden and the First World War, and was strongest between 1936 and 1956, as Norway turned into an independent, wealthy, democratic state. When that transition stabilized, the growth faded, which the authors read as evidence that social and political conditions shape human growth.

What Statistics Norway reports today

Statistics Norway (SSB) published conscript heights by county in its Statistical Yearbook. The 2013 yearbook's table for 2012 gives these national averages:

Two things make this table unusual. First, it includes girls, because the online registration that replaced the old examinations covers both 17-year-old boys and girls. Second, the method changed: SSB notes a break in the series from 2011, when the old military medical examinations of men were replaced by self-reported data submitted online by 17-year-old boys and girls to the Norwegian National Service Administration. Earlier figures were measured; later ones are not.

That matters when comparing them with NCD-RisC. The SSB average for girls (167.1 cm) is 1.5 cm higher than the NCD-RisC estimate for Norwegian women (165.6 cm). Some of the difference could reflect the known tendency of people to overstate their own height, which is exactly why NCD-RisC excluded self-reports. The boys' figure (179.9 cm) is close to the NCD-RisC value for men (179.7 cm).

Regional differences in the 2012 figures

The same SSB table shows clear county differences. Finnmark, the northernmost county, had the shortest boys (177.3 cm) and girls (164.3 cm). Aust-Agder in the south had the tallest boys (180.6 cm) and girls (167.8 cm). The gap between the tallest and shortest county was 3.3 cm for boys and 3.5 cm for girls, much smaller than the more than 6 cm gap Rybak and colleagues found in the mid-20th century. Finnmark's position is notable because it was also the county with the fastest long-term growth, so it has narrowed, but not closed, its gap with the south.

Norwegian children: the Bergen Growth Study

Norway's current child growth references come from the Bergen Growth Study. Júlíusson and colleagues measured a stratified random sample of 7,291 children aged 0 to 19 in 2003–2006, and combined it with birth data on 12,576 children from the Medical Birth Registry of Norway. Compared with the earlier references from the 1970s and 1980s, length and height for children up to age 4 were similar, but mean height during the pubertal years increased by up to 3.4 cm for boys and 2.5 cm for girls. Mean height was similar to, or slightly higher than, other recent European references. The Norwegian Department of Health endorsed the new charts.

Has Norwegian height stopped rising?

Different studies give somewhat different answers, and it's worth setting them side by side:

• Larnkjær and colleagues (2006), reviewing conscript data after 1990, concluded that height in Scandinavia and the Netherlands had reached a plateau at 179 to 181 cm.
• Rybak and colleagues (2020) found the secular trend ended around 1996.
• NCD-RisC (2016) estimates Norwegian men born in 1996 at 0.3 cm below the 1976 cohort, and women 1.0 cm below.
• Holmgren and colleagues (2019), comparing populations used for national height references, found that adult height kept increasing in people born from the 1950s to the 1990s. For Norway, the gain was 4 mm per decade for women and 15 mm per decade for men, the fastest male rate in the Nordic countries.

The last result sits awkwardly with the others, and the difference is probably about samples. Holmgren's team compared reference populations from different eras, while NCD-RisC models every measured national study and the conscript data cover nearly all young men. The overall weight of evidence points to a plateau in final adult height, with perhaps a small continued gain in some groups.

Norway among the Nordic countries

Norway, Sweden and Finland are essentially tied for men. Danish men are 1.7 cm taller and Icelandic men 0.8 cm taller. For women, Norway is at the bottom of this group, 1.6 cm below Denmark, although the differences between Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland are all under half a centimeter.

The ranking has shifted over the century. Norwegian women born in 1896 (159.2 cm) were taller than women in Denmark (157.1 cm) and Finland (153.9 cm), and second only to Sweden. Today they are marginally the shortest of the five, because they gained only 6.4 cm while Finnish women gained 12.0 cm.

Self-reported heights across Europe

An older comparison points the same way. Cavelaars and colleagues compiled self-reported heights of adults aged 20 to 74 from national surveys in ten European countries between 1987 and 1994. Men and women were on average tallest in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, and shortest in France, Italy and Spain. In every country, people with less education were shorter than those with more, by 1.6 to 3.0 cm among men.

Norwegian height in everyday life

An average Norwegian man, at 179.7 cm, is just under 5′11″, and an average Norwegian woman, at 165.6 cm, is about 5′5″. Norway's best-known tall athlete, footballer Erling Haaland, is listed on this site at 195 cm (6′5″), more than 15 cm above the average man of his generation. You can put Haaland next to an average Norwegian man and woman in the height comparison tool, or check how your own height ranks with the height percentile calculator.

Summary

Norwegian men average 179.7 cm and women 165.6 cm, ranking 13th and 18th in the world. Norway was already one of the tallest countries in the world among people born in the 1890s, which is why its century-long gain is smaller than that of many European countries. Conscript records show men's height rising by 10.9 cm between 1878 and 2010, with the trend fading after 1996, and Statistics Norway's 2012 figures, now self-reported, show only modest differences between counties. For comparisons with all 200 countries, see the average height by country guide.