Average Height in South Korea (Men & Women)

South Korea's average height today

South Korean men born in 1996 average 174.9 cm (5′9″) and South Korean women 162.3 cm (5′4″), according to the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC) estimates used across this site. That ranks South Korea 52nd of 200 countries for men and 57th for women, ahead of Japan, China and North Korea in the same dataset and level with Taiwan to within half a centimeter.

The ranking alone undersells the story. South Korea has one of the most dramatic height histories anywhere. In the NCD-RisC study, South Korean women showed the largest gain in adult height of any population in the world over the 20th century, and South Korean men were among the biggest gainers too. This guide covers that century of change, what Korea's own national body-measurement surveys show, the contrast with North Korea, and why the gains have now slowed.

How the estimates are made

NCD-RisC's 2016 study in eLife pooled 1,472 population-based data sources with measured height for over 18.6 million adults in 200 countries and territories. It estimated the average height at age 18 for everyone born between 1896 and 1996, using only measured heights because self-reported height is biased.

The key word is cohort. The 174.9 cm figure describes Koreans born in 1996, who reached adulthood around 2014. It is not an average of all Korean adults alive today. That distinction matters a great deal in South Korea, where people in their 60s grew up in very different conditions from people in their 20s.

A century of extraordinary growth

Across the century, men gained 15.1 cm and women 20.1 cm in this site's series. The published NCD-RisC paper puts the women's gain at 20.2 cm (with a 95% credible interval of 17.5 to 22.7 cm) and the men's at 15.2 cm (12.3 to 18.1 cm). Korean women born in 1896 averaged just 142.2 cm, which would put them below 4′8″; their great-granddaughters born in 1996 average more than 5′4″.

Because women gained more than men, the gap between the sexes shrank. Our World in Data highlights South Korea as an example of exactly this: men were about 18 cm taller than women a century ago, and the difference narrowed to about 13 cm. In the site data, the gap was 17.6 cm for the 1896 cohort and 12.6 cm for the 1996 cohort.

The steepest climb came in the middle of the century. Between the 1926 and 1956 cohorts, men gained 5.3 cm and women 7.5 cm. Between 1956 and 1976, men gained another 3.9 cm. Our World in Data describes height as a measure of childhood living standards, shaped by nutrition and disease, and South Korea's curve tracks its transformation from a poor, largely agricultural country into a high-income one.

Before the 20th century: the Joseon baseline

How tall were Koreans before modernization? A study led by anatomy professors Hwang Young-il and Shin Dong-hun at Seoul National University's College of Medicine, reported by The Korea Herald in 2012, estimated height from the thighbones of 116 adults who lived between the 15th and 19th centuries, during the Joseon dynasty.

The study estimated averages of 161.1 cm for men and 148.9 cm for women. It also found that height barely changed from the early 15th century to the late 19th century, then rose sharply from the early 20th century as the country modernized and industrialized. Hwang told the newspaper that insufficient calories or illness during childhood leads to shorter stature.

Skeletal estimates carry more uncertainty than modern measurements, and 116 individuals is a small sample. Still, the Joseon figures sit close to the NCD-RisC estimates for the 1896 cohort for men (159.8 cm), which supports the picture of a long plateau followed by rapid change.

Korea's own measurement surveys

South Korea runs one of the world's most detailed national body-measurement programs. The Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS), a government agency, has carried out a national body-measurement survey every five to seven years since 1979, recording far more than height alone.

The 2010 round

The sixth survey, reported by Korea JoongAng Daily, measured 14,016 people aged 7 to 69 between March and November 2010, across 136 measurements including height, sitting height and chest size. It found average heights of 174 cm for men and 160.5 cm for women, and reported that average height had stayed essentially unchanged since the 2003 survey. The same round found that 15.7% of women in their 20s were underweight, up from 11.5% in 2003.

The 2022 adult results

According to The Korea Herald, KATS's 2022 results for adults aged 20 to 69 put men at 172.5 cm and women at 159.6 cm, which the agency said was 6.4 cm and 5.3 cm taller than 40 years earlier.

The 2022 averages look lower than the 2010 ones, but they aren't directly comparable. Age ranges and the mix of generations differ between rounds, and an average across ages 20 to 69 always includes people born decades before the young adults described by NCD-RisC. That's also why both KATS figures are below this page's headline of 174.9 cm for men born in 1996.

Children and teenagers

KATS's 2023 youth study, which measured 1,118 South Koreans aged 7 to 19, compared its results with a study from 2011 to 2013:

The biggest differences are in middle school, which fits another finding from the same study: peak growth now comes about two years earlier than ten years ago, at ages 14 to 15 for boys and 13 to 14 for girls. Earlier growth makes 13- and 14-year-olds look much taller than their predecessors, while the gain by the end of high school is smaller, 2.2 cm for boys and 1.9 cm for girls.

Has growth stopped?

Mostly, yes. NCD-RisC found that the rise in South Korean men's height began to flatten for men born in the 1980s. In the site data, men born in 1996 are only 1.6 cm taller than men born in 1976, after a gain of 3.9 cm over the previous 20 years. Women gained 1.8 cm over the same final stretch, also a slowdown.

The 2010 KATS round's finding that average height had changed little since 2003 points the same way. Childhood undernutrition is now rare: World Bank data put stunting among children under 5 at between 0.9% and 2.5% in the estimates from 2003 to 2020. With so few children held back by poor nutrition or illness, a country's average height tends to level off near the limit set by its population's genetics, which is the pattern seen earlier in Japan and much of Europe.

South Korea, North Korea and the neighbors

The two Koreas share a population history but took very different economic paths after the peninsula was divided, which makes them a natural experiment for height. A study by Sunyoung Pak, Daniel Schwekendiek and Hee Kyoung Kim in The Economic History Review analyzed the adult height of 6,512 North Korean refugees born from the 1930s to the 1980s. North Koreans born before the division were taller than their South Korean peers, but every cohort born after the division was shorter, and North Koreans showed no meaningful increase in height over 60 years of communist rule. The authors cautioned that it's unclear whether refugees represent the North Korean population as a whole.

The NCD-RisC model estimates North Korean men born in 1996 at 172.0 cm and women at 159.0 cm, a gap of 2.9 cm and 3.3 cm with the South. Data from the North are scarce, so treat those estimates with extra caution.

The comparison with Japan is the most striking. NCD-RisC notes that South Korean men are now taller than Japanese men, partly because Japan's rise stopped for people born after the early 1960s while Korea's continued for another two decades. South Korean men born in 1996 are 4.1 cm taller than Japanese men and 3.1 cm taller than Chinese men of the same cohort, though China's average is still rising according to the study.

Why Korean height figures disagree

Search for "average Korean height" and you'll find numbers anywhere from about 172 cm to 175 cm for men. Most of them are correct; they simply measure different groups of people at different times.

The NCD-RisC estimate is the highest because it describes only the youngest cohort, born after most of the century's gains had already happened. The KATS adult figure averages in people born as early as the 1950s, when Korean men averaged under 170 cm in the NCD-RisC series. A figure without an age range attached is hard to interpret, so check who was measured before comparing.

The refugee study adds another dimension: within the same population, education mattered. Pak and colleagues found that higher educational status was linked to a consistent height advantage of about 1 to 2 cm among North Koreans, a reminder that national averages can hide differences between social groups.

Practical context

A South Korean man of average height for his cohort stands at about 175 cm, which you can explore on the 175 cm page. A woman of 162 cm is about 5′4″.

Height is only one of the dimensions KATS tracks, and body proportions have shifted along with stature. The 2010 survey reported longer legs among people in their 20s than among older adults, with women in their 20s having legs about 2 cm longer than women in their 50s. Korea JoongAng Daily framed the results as Korean bodies becoming more "Westernized," meaning longer-legged and slimmer. The same survey reported that the share of people who were overweight or obese had fallen in every age group since 2003, with the biggest drop among people in their 50s and 60s.

If you follow K-pop, the group pages in the K-pop hub list idols' heights next to these national averages. To place your own height against South Korean men or women born in 1996, try the height percentile calculator.