How tall is Barack Obama?

Barack Obama's height: 186.7 cm (6′1½″), measured

Barack Obama is one of the few people on this site whose height comes from a documented clinical measurement rather than a self-report or a team roster. His periodic physical examination as president, released in a memorandum dated March 8, 2016, from Physician to the President Ronny L. Jackson to White House press secretary Josh Earnest, lists his height as 73.5 inches, which is 6′1½″ or 186.7 cm. This site rounds that to 187 cm.

The same memo, released with Obama's consent, gives his weight as 175 pounds (about 79 kg) and his body mass index as 22.8. It was his fourth periodic physical as president; the exam took place in February 2016, and his previous exam had been in June 2014.

Because presidential physicals are conducted by physicians with standard equipment, they are about as good as a public height record gets. They are still single measurements, so time of day and posture can shift a reading by a centimeter, but there is no real dispute about Obama's height. Most published figures round it to 6′1″ or 6′2″.

Where Obama ranks among US presidents

Obama is comfortably above average for an American president. According to the Wikipedia compilation of presidential heights, which draws on medical records, biographies and contemporary accounts, the average height of the 45 people who have held the office is about 5′11″ (180 cm). The tallest was Abraham Lincoln at about 6′4″ and the shortest was James Madison at about 5′4″.

The table uses heights stored on this site for recent presidents and a few historical reference points.

Obama sits in a cluster of late-20th and early-21st-century presidents who were all at least 6 feet tall: Reagan, Clinton, both Bushes, Obama, Biden and Trump. He is about 4 cm taller than his vice president and successor-but-one, Joe Biden, whose 2023 health summary gave 72 inches, and about 2 cm taller than John F. Kennedy, the president to whom he was most often compared as a young, charismatic candidate.

Donald Trump's physicians have listed him at 6′3″, about 3.5 cm taller than Obama. Trump's figure has been questioned in press coverage summarized on Wikipedia, but this site uses his listed height and the comparison is made on that basis.

The "taller candidate wins" idea, tested on Obama's elections

A long-standing piece of American political folklore holds that the taller major-party candidate usually wins the presidency. Obama's two elections illustrate why the claim is more complicated than it sounds.

In 2008, the height pattern held: Obama was clearly the taller candidate. In 2012 it said nothing at all, because Obama and Mitt Romney were recorded at the same 6′1½″ in their respective medical statements.

The research behind the folklore is also more cautious than headlines suggest. A 2013 study by Gert Stulp and colleagues in The Leadership Quarterly, summarized on Wikipedia's presidential heights page, found that significantly taller candidates were more likely to win the popular vote, but that the number of taller candidates who won elections was not statistically different from chance. The same study noted that earlier analyses often picked convenient date ranges, inflating the apparent effect. Obama's case is a useful reminder that height is at most one small factor among many in how voters choose.

Obama and Michelle Obama: a tall couple

Michelle Obama is listed on this site at 180.3 cm (5′11″), which makes the former first couple one of the tallest in White House history. The gap between them is only about 6.7 cm (2.6 inches), much smaller than the typical difference between American husbands and wives, which by population averages is around 13 to 14 cm.

That relatively small gap was visible in countless official photos. Michelle Obama's height is notable in its own right: at 180 cm, she is above the 95th percentile for American women in the CDC's NHANES 2021–2023 survey, where the 95th percentile for women aged 20 and over is 172.5 cm. Reliable sources do not publish the adult heights of their daughters, Malia and Sasha, so this page does not speculate about them.

You can see the couple side by side, or compare Obama with any other figure, in the height difference calculator.

A basketball-playing president

Obama's height is often discussed in connection with his love of basketball. Born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, he attended Punahou School on a scholarship from fifth grade until graduating in 1979, and played on the school's varsity basketball team. He kept playing pickup basketball as an adult; a 2007 New York Times profile, cited in his Wikipedia biography, described his regular games during his first presidential campaign.

At 6′1½″, Obama is tall for an American man but small by basketball standards. On this site, Stephen Curry, one of the shortest stars of the modern NBA, is listed at 188 cm, essentially the same height as Obama. LeBron James, at 206 cm, is about 19 cm taller. In basketball terms, Obama has the frame of a guard, not a forward or center.

Weight, build and the 2016 physical

The 2016 memo describes a president in very good health: a resting heart rate of 56 beats per minute, blood pressure of 110/68 and a BMI of 22.8, with a note that his adherence to a healthy diet and consistent exercise program had improved his lean body mass since 2014. The memo states that he exercised daily, with a focus on aerobic fitness and resistance training.

His build was lean throughout his public life. At 186.7 cm and 79.4 kg, his body mass index sits in the middle of the range that public-health agencies classify as healthy for adults. For context, the site's body visualizer can render a figure at those dimensions next to other builds. This page reports only the vital statistics Obama chose to release and does not interpret the medical details further.

Compared with the average American man

Obama was born in 1961, and the closest NCD-RisC birth cohort on this site is 1956. American men of that cohort average 177.2 cm (about 5′9.8″). Obama is roughly 9.5 cm (3.7 inches) taller.

The NHANES comparison is particularly neat. In the CDC's most recent survey, the 95th percentile for American men aged 60 to 69, Obama's age group in 2026, is 186.6 cm, almost exactly his measured height. In other words, he is taller than about 95 out of 100 American men his age. Among all adult men aged 20 and over, the 95th percentile is 187.2 cm, again essentially his height.

The NCD-RisC data also show that American men's average height has been nearly flat since the 1950s cohorts, at about 177 cm. That makes the United States unusual among rich countries: in much of Europe, men born in the 1990s are several centimeters taller than those born in the 1950s. The average height in the United States page explains this plateau, and the height percentile calculator shows where any height falls in the NHANES distribution.

Why presidential heights are so well documented

Obama's height is reliable partly because of a modern tradition: presidents and major candidates release summaries of their medical exams, and those summaries usually include height and weight. The Wikipedia compilation of presidential heights draws heavily on these documents, which makes the recent part of the list far more trustworthy than figures for 19th-century presidents, which often come from biographers or tailors' records.

These records are not perfect. They are prepared by each person's own physician, measurement conditions are not standardized, and some figures have been publicly questioned. But compared with self-reported celebrity heights, they are far more consistent. Obama's 73.5 inches has never been seriously disputed, which is why this site treats it as a measured value rather than an estimate.

Height and age: will Obama's measurement change?

Adults typically lose a little height as they age, mostly through compression of the spinal discs and changes in posture, with the loss usually becoming noticeable after about age 50 and accelerating later in life. The NHANES 2021–2023 tables reflect this, together with generational differences: American men aged 30 to 39 average 176.1 cm, while men aged 70 to 79 average 172.4 cm. Part of that gap is because older generations were shorter to begin with, and part is age-related shrinkage.

Obama was 54 when the 2016 measurement was taken, so that figure captures his height close to his adult peak. Any future measurement could reasonably come in a centimeter or two lower without implying anything unusual. For comparisons on this site, the 2016 clinical figure remains the best reference.

How Obama compares with world leaders of his era

Presidential height is often discussed in international settings, where leaders are photographed side by side. Using heights stored on this site, Obama was taller than most of the leaders he regularly met:

Only Canada's Justin Trudeau was taller than Obama in this group, and only by about a centimeter, while British prime minister David Cameron was essentially the same height. Leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel were 17 to 20 cm shorter, a difference that was obvious in summit photos but had no bearing on diplomacy.

Summary

Barack Obama's height is documented more precisely than almost any public figure's: 73.5 inches (186.7 cm, 6′1½″), as recorded by the White House physician in his March 2016 physical, along with a weight of 175 pounds. That puts him above the historical average for US presidents, about 4 cm taller than Joe Biden, about 3.5 cm shorter than Donald Trump's listed height and roughly 6.7 cm taller than Michelle Obama. He is at the 95th percentile for American men his age, and his two elections show that the "taller candidate wins" rule is far from reliable: he was clearly taller than John McCain in 2008 but tied with Mitt Romney in 2012. To compare him with other presidents or any figure in the catalog, use the 3D height comparison tool.