How tall is Izuku Midoriya?

Izuku Midoriya's height: 166 cm

Izuku Midoriya, the boy born without a Quirk who inherits One For All, is listed at 166 cm (5′5″). The My Hero Academia Wiki gives that figure in his profile and cites official character data for it, and the site records the source as a My Hero Academia character profile. The same profile data gives his blood type as O and his birthplace as near Shizuoka Prefecture, while his birthday, July 15, comes from the bonus pages of Volume 1.

The number is modest by shōnen standards, and that is deliberate. According to the notes in Volume 1, Kohei Horikoshi intentionally designed Izuku to look plain. A hero who starts out small, ordinary and overlooked gives the series its basic arc: the weakest kid in the room becomes the strongest hero of his generation.

The conversion is straightforward. 166 cm is 65.35 inches, which rounds to 5′5″. The site's 166 cm to feet page works through it in detail.

Izuku's height at each stage of the story

My Hero Academia follows Izuku from early childhood to adulthood, but only one height has been published for him.

The epilogue is the one stage where Izuku visibly changes. The wiki's appearance notes say that eight years after the final war he has grown taller and more mature, with his scars somewhat faded, and that he works as a teacher at U.A. wearing a suit and green tie. Horikoshi did not release an adult height, so the site keeps 166 cm, the only official number.

Izuku's U.A. records offer some physical context for that 166 cm frame. The wiki lists his Quirk Apprehension Test results: a 50-meter dash of 7.02 seconds, up from 7.49 seconds in junior high, and a grip strength of 56 kg, up from 40 kg. Those gains came from ten months of training with All Might, which the wiki says turned a very skinny boy into a toned one without changing his height.

Izuku next to Class 1-A

Izuku sits a little below the middle of his class. The site's My Hero Academia data comes from the character profiles in the collected volumes.

The comparison that matters most is with Katsuki Bakugo. Bakugo is 6 cm taller, and their childhood rivalry, in which Bakugo gives Izuku the insulting nickname "Deku", is often staged with Bakugo looming over him. As the series goes on and Izuku closes the gap in power, the height difference remains, but the way they are framed changes from bully and victim to equals.

Shoto Todoroki, the third member of the class's top trio, is 10 cm taller. In the Sports Festival battle between Izuku and Todoroki, Izuku is the smaller fighter who breaks his own fingers to keep pace, a scene the wiki notes left lasting damage to his right hand. Tenya Iida, the class representative Izuku hands the role to, is 13 cm taller still.

Ochaco Uraraka, Izuku's closest friend in the class, is 10 cm shorter, and she is the one who reframes "Deku" as a hopeful name because it sounds like the Japanese for "I can do it".

Izuku and All Might: a 54 cm gap

No height comparison in the series is more striking than Izuku and his mentor. All Might, Toshinori Yagi, is listed at 220 cm in the bonus pages of Volume 1, which also give a weight of 255 kg for his muscle form. That makes him 54 cm taller than Izuku.

The gap shapes their scenes from the first chapter. When Izuku meets his idol on a Musutafu street, he barely reaches All Might's chest. The wiki describes All Might's skeletal true form, after his injury from All For One, as very thin with long limbs and an elongated neck, which keeps him tall even when his muscles are gone. The series never publishes a separate height for the true form.

For Izuku, inheriting One For All from a 220 cm hero is part of the story's tension. His body initially cannot handle the power, and he shatters his bones using even a fraction of it. The ten months of training at Dagobah Beach before the U.A. entrance exam are about building a vessel strong enough to receive the Quirk, not about growing taller.

Other pro heroes follow the same pattern. Shota Aizawa, Izuku's homeroom teacher, is 183 cm. Endeavor, the Number One hero after All Might retires and Izuku's later mentor during his internship, is 195 cm. Among villains, All For One is listed at 225 cm in a 2022 Jump GIGA villain report, and Tomura Shigaraki, Izuku's final opponent, is 175 cm, 9 cm taller than Izuku.

How his size shapes his heroics

Izuku's height and plain design reinforce the themes Horikoshi built into the character.

• The underdog. Wikipedia notes that Izuku began as Jack Midoriya, an ill salaryman at a superhero supply company in Horikoshi's 2008 one-shot My Hero. When Horikoshi rebuilt him as a high-school student, the chronic illness moved to All Might, but the idea of an ordinary, physically unremarkable hero stayed.
• An earlier concept. The wiki records an even earlier prototype called Mikumo Akatani, a Quirkless boy who relied on gadgets and luck. Horikoshi's editors suggested giving the protagonist a real superpower so he wouldn't fade into the background.
• Analysis over size. Izuku's notebooks of hero analysis and his habit of muttering strategies show that he compensates for his limits with knowledge. The Ultra Analysis guide calls him a "get-it-done fanboy" and a dark-horse candidate for Number One.
• Breaking himself. Because his body is small relative to the power he carries, Izuku repeatedly injures his arms. The wiki notes the keloid scarring on his right arm after his fight with Muscular.

None of this makes Izuku weak. His records show he is fast and strong for his age, and he ranks fourth in his class's mid-term exams. His height simply keeps him visually grounded as the ordinary kid who reaches the top.

Costumes, silhouette and how tall Deku looks

Izuku's hero costumes change how big he looks far more than his height ever does. The wiki notes that he has more costume variants than any other character in the series, ten in total, or eleven counting the temporary outfit from the U.S.J. arc.

• Costume Alpha. His first suit was based on a design his mother sewed from his notebook sketches. The bonus pages of Volume 5 give its cost as ¥40,380. Its long rabbit-ear hood points and bulky mouthguard add visual height above his head.
• Costume Beta and later versions. Upgraded by U.A.'s support designers, the later suits add knee pads, shoulder pads, gauntlets and iron soles. The wiki notes that later versions share a designer with Shoto Todoroki's costume. The armor makes him look broader rather than taller.
• The Dark Hero look. When Izuku leaves U.A. to fight alone, his costume becomes torn and filthy. Horikoshi admitted in the Volume 32 extras that this battered look took him extra time to draw. On the page, the ragged cape and hunched posture make Izuku seem larger and more menacing than the cheerful first-year of 166 cm.

These designs explain why fans' sense of Izuku's size varies by arc. Standing in uniform next to Iida, he looks small. Charging in Full Cowl with Black Whip lines streaming behind him, he can fill a two-page spread. His listed height stays the same through all of it.

Izuku and Shigaraki

His final opponent, Tomura Shigaraki, is listed at 175 cm in the Volume 23 profile, 9 cm taller than Izuku. Their last battles are fought at enormous scale, with Shigaraki's body increasingly altered by All For One's influence. As with most of Izuku's major fights, the side drawn as physically bigger is not the side that wins. Horikoshi consistently pairs the smaller hero with larger threats, from the Zero-Pointer robot of the entrance exam to the Nomu at the U.S.J.

What 166 cm means in the real world

My Hero Academia is set in a near-future Japan, so the most useful comparison is with Japanese men of recent birth cohorts. The site uses NCD-RisC estimates from the collaboration's 2016 eLife study of 200 countries.

At 166 cm, Izuku is about 5 cm below the average height in Japan for men born in 1996. Japanese boys can still grow after 16, so a teenage Izuku of 166 cm could easily end up closer to average, which fits the wiki's note that he is taller in the epilogue. In the United States he would be about 11 cm below the adult male average.

You can compare him against any character or real person in the height difference calculator.

Popularity and why his height gets searched

Izuku is one of the most popular characters in the franchise. Wikipedia reports that he won Crunchyroll's 2018 My Hero Academia character poll with 11,429 votes and Viz Media's first Weekly Shōnen Jump poll, and that he won the first Japanese popularity poll with 2,314 votes before usually placing second behind Bakugo. The wiki notes that in the global poll he placed second in every region except Europe, where he came first.

Because he is often shown beside towering heroes, many viewers assume he is shorter than 166 cm. Others confuse him with his younger self in flashbacks. The only official number is 166 cm, and it describes the U.A. first-year who carries the story. Izuku is voiced by Daiki Yamashita in Japanese and Justin Briner in English, with Akeno Watanabe voicing him as a small child. None of the adaptations, including the anime by Bones, publishes a separate height for him.