How tall is Yoda?

Yoda's official height: 66 cm (2′2″)

Yoda's height comes from the most official source available for Star Wars: Lucasfilm's own StarWars.com Databank, which lists the Jedi Grand Master at 0.66 m, or 66 cm (2′2″). Wookieepedia, the Star Wars fan encyclopedia, carries the same figure with the Databank as its citation, and adds a mass of 13 kg (about 29 lb) from the official book The Empire Strikes Back: So You Want to Be a Jedi? The site uses 66 cm as Yoda's headline height.

At 66 cm, Yoda is one of the smallest characters on the entire site and the second smallest in the Star Wars lineup, ahead only of Grogu. That tiny size is the whole point of his character. When Luke Skywalker lands on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) looking for a great warrior, he finds a small, eccentric creature rummaging through his supplies and doesn't realize he's met the Jedi Master he came to find.

Small by design: how Yoda was created

Yoda's size was a deliberate choice by George Lucas and the Empire Strikes Back team. According to Wikipedia's account of the character's creation, Lucas originally planned for Obi-Wan Kenobi to train Luke in the sequel, but decided Obi-Wan would die in the first film and introduced a new mentor. Early versions of that character were a small, frog-like creature called "Minch Yoda".

Visual effects art director Joe Johnston sketched hundreds of versions of Yoda; Lucas settled on a design Johnston described as a mix of a leprechaun, a troll and a gnome. The production considered several ways to bring him to life, including stop-motion animation and putting a monkey, a child or a small actor in a costume, before choosing a sophisticated puppet built by makeup artist Stuart Freeborn and Wendy Froud. Freeborn based Yoda's face on his own features and on Albert Einstein's, hoping Einstein's face would make Yoda look intelligent.

Lucas asked Jim Henson to perform the puppet. Henson was busy with another project and recommended Frank Oz, who puppeteered and voiced Yoda in Empire and returned for Return of the Jedi (1983) and later films. A puppet operated from below by performers sets a natural size limit: Yoda had to be small enough for Oz and his assistants to work him from under the set. His 66 cm height fits that practical constraint as well as the story.

From puppet to CGI

Yoda's on-screen size stayed consistent even as the technology behind him changed. Wikipedia notes that in the original 1999 release of The Phantom Menace, Yoda was a new puppet in all but two shots, which used computer-generated imagery. The puppet was later replaced with a digital Yoda in the 2011 Blu-ray and 2012 3D releases. In Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005), he's entirely computer-generated.

The CGI Yoda could do things the puppet never could, most famously fighting with a lightsaber. His duels with Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones and with Darth Sidious in Revenge of the Sith show a 66 cm Jedi leaping, spinning and flipping around opponents more than twice his height. The size difference makes those fights memorable: Yoda doesn't win by strength or reach, but by speed and the Force.

For the sequel trilogy, Oz returned to perform Yoda as a puppet again. In The Last Jedi (2017), Yoda appears to Luke as a Force spirit and calls down lightning to burn the tree holding the old Jedi texts.

Yoda versus the Star Wars cast

Here's how Yoda compares with the rest of the Star Wars characters in the site's data:

A few comparisons stand out:

• Luke Skywalker, 2.6 times Yoda's height. In Empire, Yoda famously rides in a pack on Luke's back during training. At 66 cm and 13 kg, he's roughly the size and weight of a large toddler, entirely plausible to carry while running through a swamp.
• R2-D2, 42 cm taller. Even the compact astromech droid stands well above Yoda. In the Dagobah scenes, Yoda and R2 tussle over a lamp, and R2 is clearly the bigger of the two.
• Chewbacca, three and a half times his height. In Revenge of the Sith, Yoda fights alongside Chewbacca and the Wookiees on Kashyyyk and escapes with Chewbacca's help after Order 66. Chewbacca, at 228 cm, is the tallest character in the site's Star Wars data.
• Darth Sidious and Count Dooku. The site doesn't list heights for them, but both are human-sized men, and Yoda's duels with each are among the most dramatic size mismatches in the saga.

Yoda and Grogu: the same species, at two ages

Yoda's species has never been named in canon; the Databank lists it simply as unknown, and Wookieepedia calls it "Yoda's species". The only other major member in the films and shows is Grogu, the youngling from The Mandalorian, listed on Wookieepedia at 0.34 m (34 cm, 1′1″).

That makes Yoda almost exactly twice Grogu's height. The comparison is especially interesting given their ages. In The Mandalorian, Grogu is said to be 50 years old but is still a child by his species' standards, while Yoda lived to 900. If growth in their species is slow and continues for centuries, as their ages suggest, Grogu still has a lot of growing ahead of him, though no canon source gives an adult height for the species or a growth timeline.

A lightsaber and a walking stick scaled to his size

Yoda's equipment is built for a 66 cm Jedi. Wookieepedia notes that as a fully fledged Jedi he owned several shoto-style lightsabers, the short-bladed type, including the one he lost in his duel with Darth Sidious at the end of the Clone Wars. A full-length blade, sized for a human, would be almost as long as Yoda is tall; the shorter blade keeps the weapon in proportion to his arms and lets him fight in the acrobatic style the prequels show.

His other trademark is the walking stick he carries in the original trilogy. According to Wookieepedia, he originally adopted the stick as an affectation, part of a joke played on his Padawans, and only later came to genuinely rely on it as age caught up with him. Even as a Force spirit in The Last Jedi, he gives Luke a sharp rap with it. The stick adds to the impression of a tiny, hunched elder, and it's one reason his sudden leaps in the prequel duels are so surprising.

In the Senate duel in Revenge of the Sith, Sidious hurls the Senate's floating hoverpods at him. Wookieepedia points out that Yoda stops one and throws it back upward, against gravity. Few moments in the saga show the gap between physical size and Force power more clearly.

Yoda across the eras and screens

Because Yoda lived to 900, he appears in stories set across more than a thousand years of the timeline, from The High Republic comics set 200 years before the prequels to his Force-spirit appearances in the sequel trilogy. The Databank's 0.66 m is the only official height, and no source suggests it changed during the eras shown. Among the different performers, Frank Oz is the main voice; Tom Kane voiced him in The Clone Wars film and series and in the earlier Clone Wars micro-series, and John Lithgow voiced him in the radio dramatizations, according to Wikipedia.

He also appears in Star Wars Rebels, Tales of the Jedi, the children's series Young Jedi Adventures and, as a non-speaking cameo, the final episode of The Acolyte (2024). In every one of those he is portrayed as tiny next to the humans around him, and a single figure from the Databank serves for every version.

What 66 cm means in the real world

Real people rarely stand as short as Yoda, which helps explain why he looks so otherworldly next to humans. The best reference points are children's growth charts. In the 2000 CDC Growth Charts, the median height of a 2-year-old is about 86.5 cm for boys and 85.0 cm for girls. Yoda, at 66 cm, is roughly 20 cm shorter than a typical 2-year-old.

His weight of 13 kg, on the other hand, sits between the CDC medians for a 2-year-old (about 12 to 12.7 kg) and a 3-year-old (about 14 to 14.4 kg). For his height, that makes Yoda a compact, heavy little figure.

The Warwick Davis comparison is a fun one for Star Wars fans. Davis, who played the Ewok Wicket in Return of the Jedi, is listed on this site at 106 cm, so the Ewok actor would stand about 40 cm taller than Yoda. Yoda and the Ewoks never meet on screen, but Yoda's Force spirit appears on Endor in the film's final scene.

Why Yoda's height matters to the story

Yoda's most famous lesson to Luke turns on size. When Luke gives up on lifting his sunken X-wing from the swamp, convinced it's far too large to move, Yoda raises it himself through the Force, demonstrating that size is irrelevant to someone strong in the Force. The scene only works because Yoda is so small: a 66 cm creature lifting a starfighter makes the point better than any speech.

Critics noticed. Wikipedia records that reviewers in 1980 singled out the puppet; Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Yoda "the hit of the movie", while noting he worked best in small doses. Yoda's small size, the inverted speech pattern Lucas gave him and Oz's performance have made him one of the saga's most beloved characters for more than forty years.

Yoda's height at a glance

• Official height: 0.66 m (66 cm, 2′2″), StarWars.com Databank
• Mass: 13 kg (about 29 lb)
• Versus Grogu: almost exactly twice as tall
• Versus Luke Skywalker: Luke is 2.6 times taller
• Versus R2-D2: 42 cm shorter
• Versus a typical 2-year-old: about 20 cm shorter

To put Yoda next to any person or character, use the height comparison tool, or browse the full Star Wars character heights hub.