How tall is Levi Ackerman?

Levi Ackerman's height: 160 cm, and it never changes

Levi Ackerman, the Survey Corps captain known as humanity's strongest soldier, is listed at 160 cm (5′3″) and 65 kg in the original Attack on Titan Guidebook, on page 256 of the combined English edition. The same profile gives his birthday as December 25 and his birthplace as the Underground beneath the capital.

Unlike Eren and Mikasa, Levi doesn't get a new figure after the four-year timeskip. He is already an adult when the story opens, and the later Kodansha books don't revise his height. The 160 cm in this site's data therefore applies to every arc of the series, from his introduction through the final battles.

That fixed number makes Levi one of the easiest characters in the series to compare. It also makes him one of the most compared, because 160 cm is short for an adult man almost anywhere.

Why Isayama made humanity's strongest soldier small

Levi's size was a deliberate design choice, not an accident of the art. Wikipedia, citing the Attack on Titan Character Encyclopedia, reports that Isayama gave Levi a stature similar to Rorschach from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen. He also gave Levi an obsession with cleanliness as a deliberate contrast to Rorschach's filth. Levi's name, according to Isayama's 2010 blog, came from a person in the documentary Jesus Camp.

Fan translations of a 2014 interview in the Japanese magazine FRaU, cited by the Attack on Titan Wiki, add two more influences on Levi's short height. One is Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy (Mighty Atom in Japan), a small hero of enormous strength. The other is Kyūzō, the quiet master swordsman in Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. We give these as reported in fan translations rather than as an official English source, but they fit the design. Each is a compact figure whose skill outclasses much bigger opponents.

The contrast is the point. In a series full of 15-meter Titans and soldiers like Erwin (188 cm) and Reiner (188 cm), the strongest human fighter is one of the smallest. Levi's fighting style, built on speed, spinning cuts and precise use of the vertical maneuvering equipment, also suits a compact body with a low center of gravity.

Levi versus the Survey Corps and the 104th

The table below uses this site's guidebook-sourced character data and shows how far each character stands from Levi's 160 cm. For Eren and Mikasa, it uses the post-timeskip heights, and the 850 heights are noted below.

Even the 15-year-old Eren of 850, at 170 cm, was 10 cm taller than his captain, and Mikasa matched that. Erwin, Levi's commander and closest ally, stands 28 cm above him, so Levi's eye line falls around Erwin's shoulder. Their scenes together are some of the clearest examples of the series using height to make one character look imposing and the other contained.

Levi's rivalry with Zeke Yeager, the Beast Titan, is a size mismatch in both forms. In human form Zeke stands 23 cm taller. As the Beast Titan he is 17 m tall in this site's data, more than ten times Levi's height. The Attack on Titan character hub puts the whole cast on one chart.

The Ackerman family and height

Levi, Mikasa and Levi's uncle Kenny belong to the Ackerman bloodline. The series explains that bloodline as giving its members extraordinary strength and combat instincts. Isayama has said, in material summarized on Wikipedia, that the three share the bloodline, but that their protective behavior toward others is simply their nature rather than a product of it.

Height clearly isn't part of the inheritance. Mikasa is 16 cm taller than Levi after the timeskip, and even before it she stood 10 cm above him. Levi's small size is better explained by the story's account of his childhood. He grows up in the Underground, a sunless district under the capital, in poverty after his mother dies. The series doesn't connect his height to that childhood explicitly, and we don't want to overstate it. In real life, though, chronic undernutrition in childhood is one of the best-documented causes of shorter adult height. The NCD-RisC study cited on this site traces how improvements in childhood nutrition and health raised average heights by more than 10 cm in many countries over the 20th century.

What 160 cm means for a real man

At 160 cm, Levi is short by modern standards nearly everywhere. In the CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for 2021–2023, the 5th percentile for US men aged 20 and over is 162.2 cm. Levi is below that, so about 96 out of 100 American men are taller. The height percentile calculator gives the exact figure for his height and age group.

Compared with Japan, he is about 11 cm below average. The NCD-RisC estimates on this site put the average Japanese man born in 1996 at 170.8 cm. He is about 20 cm below the German average of 179.9 cm, which is relevant because the names and setting of Attack on Titan have a strongly Central European flavor. In the series' own world, Levi is visibly small next to nearly everyone, which is how he is drawn.

Plenty of real people are 160 cm, and plenty of famous men are shorter than the average. In the site's data, rapper Tory Lanez is listed at 160 cm, and comedian Kevin Hart at 158 cm, 2 cm shorter than Levi. Tom Cruise, at 170 cm (see his height page), would stand 10 cm taller than Humanity's Strongest. You can see all of the site's 160 cm entries on the 160 cm conversion page, and 5′3″ is 160.0 cm to the nearest tenth.

Levi among other short fighters in fiction

Levi belongs to a long tradition of small, deadly fighters in Japanese manga. Several featured characters on this site share his height or come close:

Wolverine is the most interesting comparison. The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe gives him exactly the same 160 cm, and both characters are known for being far more dangerous than their size suggests. Vegeta's figure in the 2009 Dragon Ball guidebook is only 4 cm more, and Krillin's is 7 cm less. Attack on Titan itself rarely makes a joke of Levi's height. The main story treats him as an intimidating presence, and the lighter touches come mostly from Isayama's interviews and the official extras.

Levi in the spin-offs and on screen next to the cast

Levi also stars in the prequel manga Attack on Titan: No Regrets, written by Gun Snark and drawn by Hikaru Suruga, which tells how he joined the Survey Corps. According to notes in its first volume, summarized on Wikipedia, Suruga tried to make Levi look younger than in the main series and found his lack of expression hard to draw. The spin-off doesn't give a different height, and the guidebook's 160 cm remains the reference for the younger Levi too.

On screen, the gap between Levi and the adult cast is easiest to see in the Final Season. At 23 cm shorter than Eren, Levi's eyes are roughly at the level of Eren's chin. At 16 cm shorter than Mikasa, they are around her mouth. Levi rarely reads as small on screen, though. He is usually framed alone, perched on rooftops or on a Titan's shoulders, or in close-up. Because of that, many viewers are surprised the first time they see his actual number next to the rest of the cast, and the same scenes can look very different once you picture the two figures side by side. You can check those gaps for yourself with the height difference calculator, which shows two figures to scale with the exact difference in centimeters and inches.

Popularity, voice acting and the short-captain image

Levi's small frame hasn't hurt his appeal. According to the Attack on Titan Wiki, he won the series' first, second and fourth official popularity polls and came second in the third, behind Erwin. Wikipedia lists his awards, including Best Male Character at the 36th Anime Grand Prix. Hiroshi Kamiya voices him in Japanese, and Matthew Mercer in English. Mercer named Levi his favorite character, citing his moral complexity.

In animation, Wit Studio and MAPPA both keep his height consistent with the guidebook. He reaches roughly Erwin's shoulder and is clearly shorter than the adult Eren and Mikasa of the Final Season. That consistency is part of what makes the guidebook's 160 cm one of the most widely quoted heights in modern anime fandom.

Common misconceptions about Levi's height

• "Levi is 5′2″." The guidebook gives 160 cm, which converts to 5′3″ (5 feet 2.99 inches). Some fan pages round down, but the source figure is 160 cm.
• "Levi got taller in the final season." No later book revises his height. He can look larger in some Final Season shots because MAPPA's character designs are more realistic, but the official figure is unchanged.
• "He's a lance corporal." His Japanese title, heichō, is short for squad captain. It was widely mistranslated early on as "lance corporal," according to the guidebook note cited on the wiki. That has nothing to do with his height, but it often shows up in the same fan profiles.

Spoiler note: this page mentions Levi's background and his rivalry with the Beast Titan, but it doesn't discuss how his story ends.