Average Height in Syria (Men & Women)

How tall are Syrians?

The site's figures for Syria come from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), which estimates that Syrians born in 1996 average 170.4 cm (5′7″) for men and 158.6 cm (5′2.5″) for women. In the site's table of 200 countries and territories, Syrian men rank 109th and Syrian women 111th, close to the middle of the world on both counts.

These numbers come with an important caveat. The most recent cohort in the study, people born in 1996, were 14 or 15 years old when the Syrian civil war began in March 2011, and the war lasted almost 14 years before the fall of the Assad government in December 2024. Most of them had done the bulk of their growing before the conflict. The children who grew up during the war years aren't represented in any adult height estimate yet.

This article looks at what the estimates show, the long-term trend, the limited child-growth data available for Syria and for Syrian refugees, and how Syria compares with its neighbors.

What the NCD-RisC figures represent

Syria's series, like the rest of the NCD-RisC data, is organized by birth cohort, estimated at about age 18 and built from measured heights only. Men born in 1896 averaged 159.2 cm by that measure, and men born in 1976 reached 171.3 cm. The 1996 cohort, at 170.4 cm, is the first to come in below its predecessor, and women's averages stalled at 158.6 cm across the last two cohorts.

A Bayesian hierarchical model produced each country's curve, informed by that country's own surveys and by data from other years and from other countries in the same region. When a country's own data are limited, the model relies more on its neighbors and its estimates carry wider uncertainty. Syria's estimates should be read with that in mind, especially because national data collection has been heavily disrupted since 2011.

A century of change, 1896 to 1996

Syrians grew substantially taller during the first half of the century. Men gained 5.8 cm between the 1896 and 1926 cohorts and another 4.5 cm by 1956. Women gained 4.2 cm and then 3.8 cm. After that, gains slowed: men added 1.8 cm between 1956 and 1976, and women 1.0 cm.

Then the curve flattened completely. Women born in 1996 are exactly as tall as women born in 1976, at 158.6 cm, and men born in 1996 are 0.9 cm shorter than men born in 1976. Over the full century, men gained 11.2 cm and women 9.0 cm.

A regional pattern

The NCD-RisC paper describes this kind of late stall as a recent pattern in parts of the Middle East and North Africa. In some countries of Central Asia and the region, including Egypt and Yemen, height recently fell for men but not for women, whereas in others, such as Iran, both sexes continued to grow taller. Syria's figures fit the first group, though its decline is small: under a centimeter for men, with women flat.

The paper doesn't analyze Syria individually, and the reasons for a stall in any particular country aren't established by the estimates themselves. What Our World in Data emphasizes is the general mechanism: differences in height between generations largely reflect nutrition and health during pregnancy, childhood and adolescence.

Child growth before the war

Because adult height reflects childhood conditions, data on young children are the best guide to what future adult cohorts will look like. The standard measure is stunting: height for age more than two standard deviations below the WHO growth standard.

The World Bank's series of stunting estimates for Syrian children under five shows a fairly high and stubborn level before 2011:

Over nearly two decades, roughly a quarter to a third of young children were stunted, with no steady downward trend. That's consistent with the flat adult height curve for cohorts born from the 1970s to the 1990s. The series has no national estimate after 2010.

Rural differences in Aleppo province

A 2004 study by Sucharita Ghosh and colleagues, published in Ecology of Food and Nutrition, shows how much child growth could vary inside Syria even in peacetime. The researchers measured 541 rural children aged 2 to 10 from 207 households in Aleppo province, along with 199 urban children from a middle-income group, and compared them with the international growth reference then in use.

• In the "barley-livestock" livelihood group around Khanasser, in the drier southeast of the province, 23% of children were stunted.
• In the "irrigation" group near Afrin, in the northwest, stunting was 12.5%.
• Girls in the barley-livestock group had the highest rate, 28.3%.

The authors note that stunting and underweight in the poorer, drier livelihood groups were higher than the country-level estimates at the time, which they give as 20.8% stunting and 12.9% underweight among children under five. Their conclusion was that poverty and agricultural conditions shaped children's growth even within a single province.

War, displacement and food insecurity

The war changed living conditions for almost everyone in Syria. According to the World Food Programme, years of conflict, economic collapse and repeated shocks have left only 18% of the population food secure. More than 7 million people (7.2 million, of a population of 24.4 million) face acute food insecurity, and approximately 5.54 million people remain internally displaced. WFP also reports that more than 1.6 million returnees have arrived in Syria since December 2024, many to communities where homes, infrastructure and services were destroyed.

WFP's nutrition work focuses on pregnant and breastfeeding women and young children, the groups whose nutrition matters most for growth. It has also supplied fortified wheat flour to bakeries, helping about four million people get affordable bread.

No national survey of child height inside Syria appears in the World Bank series for the war years, so there's no reliable figure for how stunting changed during the conflict. That gap itself is a consequence of the war.

Syrian refugee children

Some of the clearest recent evidence on Syrian children's growth comes from outside the country. A 2024 study in the Journal of Biosocial Science analyzed Syrian refugee children under five in Türkiye, using the 2018 Turkey Demographic and Health Survey's Syrian migrant sample. Its findings:

• Financial assistance significantly reduced stunting among refugee children, after controlling for economic, maternal, child, environmental, health and feeding characteristics.
• Household income from work was an even stronger predictor of lower stunting.
• Children's nutritional well-being may improve when forced migration leads to a stable host country, and adaptation over time also appeared to help.

The study doesn't measure adults, but it suggests that the long-term height of Syrian children depends heavily on where they ended up and how well their families could support themselves.

Syria and its neighbors

NCD-RisC estimates for Syria and the surrounding region (1996 birth cohort):

Syria is level with Iraq and close to Jordan, but about 4 cm shorter than Lebanon and Turkey for men. The contrast with Lebanon is notable because the two countries' populations had very similar heights in the 1896 cohort: Lebanese men averaged 160.7 cm, against 159.2 cm for Syrians. By 1996, Lebanese men had pulled 4 cm ahead.

Iran is the clearest regional success story in the NCD-RisC paper: Iranian men recorded the largest gain of any male population in the world over the century, 16.5 cm. Syria's 11.2 cm gain for men is substantial by world standards but far behind Iran's.

Century gains compared

Looking at how much each country's men grew between the 1896 and 1996 cohorts puts Syria's record in perspective:

Syria and Iraq started and finished in almost the same place. Turkey, Lebanon and Israel gained 2 to 3 cm more over the century, and much of the difference opened up among people born after 1956, when Turkish and Lebanese heights kept climbing while Syrian heights leveled off.

The gap between Syrian men and women

Syrian men born in 1996 are 11.8 cm taller than Syrian women, a little below the gap of about 12 cm for the world as a whole. The gap was 9.6 cm in the 1896 cohort, widened to 12.7 cm by the 1976 cohort as men gained faster, and then narrowed slightly because men's average fell while women's held steady.

Our World in Data shows that men are taller than women in every country, but that the size of the gap changes over time and differs widely between countries. In South Korea, for example, it shrank from 18 cm to 13 cm over the century as women gained more than men. In Syria, the gap has stayed within a fairly narrow range.

Putting Syrian heights in context

An average Syrian man born in 1996 stands 170.4 cm, about 5′7″, slightly below the 171 cm global average for men of that cohort reported by Our World in Data. An average Syrian woman, at 158.6 cm, is about 5′2.5″, just below the global female average of 159 cm.

You can check how a particular height compares using the height percentile calculator, convert it on the cm to feet page for 170 cm, or browse every country on the average height hub.

Syria's height record has two chapters. The first, covering people born up to the 1970s, is one of steady gains as living standards improved. The second, covering people born since, is one of stagnation even before the war, with stunting stuck around a quarter of young children. The third chapter, for the generation that grew up during the conflict and displacement of 2011 to 2024, hasn't been written yet. It will depend on surveys that can measure Syrian children and young adults across the country and in the countries where many of them now live.