Average Height in Slovenia (Men & Women)

Slovenia's average height in brief

Slovenia is a small country with tall people. In the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates for adults born in 1996, Slovenian men average 179.8 cm (5′11″) and Slovenian women 166.1 cm (5′5″). That puts men 12th and women 11th of 200 countries, a rare case where both sexes rank almost identically. Its height places it between the very tall western Balkans and its somewhat shorter Austrian and Italian neighbors.

How the estimates work

NCD-RisC's 2016 study combined 1,472 population-based data sources with measured heights for more than 18.6 million adults, excluding self-reported figures because people tend to overstate their height. A Bayesian model estimated the average height that each birth cohort reached at 18. The 1996 value therefore describes Slovenians who turned 18 around 2014, not the average of all adults. Older Slovenians grew up in poorer decades and are shorter on average, which matters when comparing these figures with the Slovenian adult survey described below.

How Slovenians grew taller over a century

Men gained 12.4 cm and women 13.6 cm across the century. The growth was strong and fairly even: men added about 4 to 5 cm in each thirty-year span up to the 1956 cohort and another 2.8 cm by 1976. Since then the trend has flattened, with both sexes adding only 0.7 cm between the 1976 and 1996 cohorts. Our World in Data notes that men and women worldwide gained about 8 to 9 cm over the same century, so Slovenia's gains are above the global norm.

War, bones and the Balkan height trend

A forensic study offers a view of how men's stature in the region changed over the 20th century. Sarajlić and colleagues measured the long bones of 202 men killed in the Second World War on the territory of today's Slovenia and compared them with 243 men killed in the Bosnian War of the 1990s. The combined length of the femur and tibia was 4.13 cm greater in the later group, an average increase of 0.88 cm per decade. Because most height gain comes from longer leg bones, the authors read this as evidence of a significant rise in height across the Balkan population in the half-century after 1945.

Has Slovenia stopped growing taller?

The NCD-RisC series suggests the big gains are over, but it does not show any decline. Both men and women reached their highest averages in the most recent cohort, unlike several Western European countries where the 1996 cohort is slightly shorter than the 1976 cohort. Slovenian men added 2.8 cm between the 1956 and 1976 cohorts, then only 0.7 cm in the following twenty years. Women's gains followed the same shape, from 2.0 cm to 0.7 cm.

The children's data agree. The ACDSi analysis of 14-year-olds found only a borderline increase in boys' height between 1993 and 2013, and the upward trend in anthropometric measures that Đurić and colleagues reported across 1983–2014 was modest compared with the dramatic changes of the mid-20th century. As in most of Europe, Slovenian height now seems to be determined more by the timing of growth, with earlier puberty, than by large increases in final adult height.

Compared with the simple average of 41 European countries in the site data (178.4 cm for men and 165.1 cm for women), Slovenians are 1.4 cm taller for men and 1 cm taller for women, so they sit in the upper third of the continent rather than at its peak.

Measuring Slovenian adults today

For a long time, Slovenia had good data on children and conscripts but little on adult women. A research team based in Ljubljana set out to fix that. Robič Pikel and colleagues collected height and weight from 845 adult volunteers during home visits by trained interviewers between March 2017 and April 2018, and published weighted percentiles (3rd to 97th) for height, weight and BMI for both sexes. Their 2023 paper in Anthropologischer Anzeiger describes adults, and women in particular, as an understudied population, and discusses both the secular trend and the height people lose with age.

The same lead author, Robič Pikel, assembled an even longer record in a 2022 study. From a large anthropometric database she analyzed more than 3,400 men and almost 4,600 women aged 18 to 29 who were measured between 1950 and 2019, grouping them by decade. Her focus was body fat: estimated body fat rose from 12% to almost 15% in men and from 24% to more than 26% in women over the seventy years. Interestingly, several fat measures slowed down or even reversed after 2009, and she concluded that the Slovenian population "appears to be leaner" than other populations.

A decade-by-decade record of children: ACDSi

Slovenia has run a rare long-term monitoring study of children, the Analysis of Children's Development in Slovenia (ACDSi; ARTOS in Slovenian), which measures growth and motor development every ten years.

Muscular fitness and size, 1983–2014

Đurić and colleagues used ACDSi data from 1983, 1993/94, 2003/04 and 2013/14, covering 18,730 primary and secondary school students. Anthropometric measures, including height and weight, trended upward across the decades, while overall muscular fitness declined. Leg power fell in every age group, and arm strength dropped sharply in children aged 6 to 14. The authors called for government action to reverse the decline in fitness.

Adolescents during the transition, 1993–2013

Slovenia went through a period of socio-economic transition between 1991 and 2013. Robič Pikel, Malus, Starc and Golja used ACDSi data on 1,221 adolescents measured at age 14 in 1993, 2003 and 2013 to see whether growth changed in that period. They found:

• A trend toward greater height in boys between 1993 and 2013, though it fell just short of statistical significance.
• A tendency toward earlier puberty, with the age of peak height velocity occurring earlier in more recent generations.
• A rising leg-to-height ratio in boys with every decade, while girls in 2013 had longer trunks than in 1993.

The authors interpreted the girls' result as a sign of earlier maturation: by 14, girls in 2013 were already in the trunk-growth phase that follows the leg-growth phase of puberty.

Speed, balance and coordination across four generations

A companion ACDSi paper by Sember and colleagues, published in 2023, looked at skill-related fitness in 16,678 children and adolescents measured in four rounds: 3,128 in 1983, 3,413 in 1993/94, 5,497 in 2003/04 and 4,640 in 2013/14. The researchers adjusted every comparison for body height, body weight and BMI, which is a reminder that children of each generation were not the same size. They found large but inconsistent changes in coordination, a small improvement in speed and a decline in flexibility, and they called for exercise programs focused on speed and coordination, especially for 15- to 19-year-olds.

Taken together, the ACDSi papers describe Slovenian children who became somewhat larger and matured earlier between the 1980s and 2010s, while their strength and some aspects of fitness declined. That pattern matters for interpreting height: a population can stop gaining stature while its body composition and fitness keep changing.

Slovenia compared with its neighbors

Slovenian men are 1 cm shorter than Croatian men, but Slovenian women are 0.5 cm taller than Croatian women. Against Austria, Italy and Hungary, Slovenians are clearly taller: by 2 to 2.5 cm for men and by 1.5 to 2.4 cm for women. The comparison with Austria is especially striking because the two countries share an Alpine border and long historical ties. Slovenian men born in 1896 were slightly shorter than Austrian men (167.4 cm versus 168.0 cm), but by the 1976 cohort Slovenian men had moved 1.2 cm ahead, and the lead grew to 2.4 cm by 1996 as Austrian height slipped slightly.

A smaller gap between the sexes than in the Balkans

Slovenia's gap of 13.7 cm between men and women is noticeably narrower than the gaps in its southern neighbors. In Croatia the difference is 15.2 cm, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where men average 180.9 cm and women 165.8 cm, it is 15.1 cm. Serbia, with 180.6 cm for men and 167.7 cm for women, has a narrower gap of 12.9 cm. Slovenia falls between these, and close to the Austrian gap of 12.8 cm. The figures show that "tall country" can mean different things: in Croatia and Bosnia it is mostly the men who stand out, while in Slovenia men and women hold almost identical world rankings, 12th and 11th.

Slovenia's tallest export: basketball

Slovenia's most famous tall person is basketball player Luka Dončić, listed on this site at 203.2 cm (6′8″). That is 23.4 cm above the average Slovenian man of his generation, which would put him far out in the tail of the national height distribution. Compare him with an average Slovenian man and woman in the height comparison tool to see the scale of the difference.

Practical context

An average Slovenian man, at 179.8 cm, is just under 5′11″, and an average Slovenian woman, at 166.1 cm, is about 5′5½″. Both are well above the world averages for their generation, by 8.5 cm for men and 6.6 cm for women. If you want to see where your own height falls relative to these figures, the height percentile calculator gives an estimate. For a broader comparison, the average height by country guide covers all 200 countries.

Summary

Slovenian men (179.8 cm) and women (166.1 cm) rank 12th and 11th in the world. Their height rose by more than 12 cm over the century before levelling off in recent cohorts. Slovenia stands out for the depth of its research: ACDSi has measured children every decade since the 1980s, a seventy-year database tracks young adults since 1950, and a 2017–2018 home-visit survey filled the gap on adult women. Together they show a population that grew taller, matured earlier and has recently stopped gaining height while changing in body composition.