How tall is the Eiffel Tower?

The Eiffel Tower is 330 m tall, for now

The Eiffel Tower in Paris stands 330 m (1,083 ft) to the tip of its highest antenna, the figure used on this site. That number dates only from 15 March 2022, when a helicopter lifted a new digital radio (DAB+) antenna onto the summit and added about 6 m. Before that, guidebooks said 324 m. Before 2000, they said less again.

The changing figure isn't a mistake. It comes from how the tower is built and used. The wrought-iron structure Gustave Eiffel's company finished in 1889 is about 300 m tall, and that has never changed. What has changed is the equipment on top: first a flagpole, then from 1957 a series of television and radio antennas. Under the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) criteria, antennas count toward height to tip but not toward architectural height. Since the Eiffel Tower is a tower rather than an occupied building, its popular height is simply its highest point.

A height history in six numbers

Wikipedia's height table, compiled from the operating company's records, shows how the antenna has changed the total over more than a century.

Notice that the total went down in the early 1990s, when antennas were swapped. A landmark's height can shrink without anything being demolished, just by changing equipment.

Designing a 300-meter tower

The idea didn't start with Gustave Eiffel himself. Two engineers in his firm, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, sketched a giant pylon in 1884. The architect Stephen Sauvestre then added the decorative arches at the base and other embellishments that made the design acceptable as a monument. Eiffel bought the rights, promoted the scheme, and won the competition for a centerpiece for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, which marked the centenary of the French Revolution.

The 300 m target was deliberately symbolic. No structure had reached 1,000 ft before. The tallest structure in the world at the time, the Washington Monument, completed in 1884, was about 169 m, so the Paris tower would almost double the record.

Construction ran from January 1887 to March 1889, just over two years. The firm prefabricated 18,038 iron parts in its workshops at Levallois-Perret, each drawn and drilled to precise measurements. About 300 workers on site joined them with roughly 2.5 million rivets. The total mass of wrought iron is about 7,300 tonnes. With lifts, shops and antennas, the whole tower weighs about 10,100 tonnes.

Protest, permit and survival

Not everyone welcomed it. In 1887 a group of prominent artists and writers published a protest against what they called the "useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower". The tower was built anyway, on a permit originally due to expire after 20 years, in 1909. What saved it was height. A 300 m iron mast was ideal for radio, and experiments in wireless telegraphy, led from 1903 by Gustave Ferrié, made it too useful to tear down. Antennas have been part of its story ever since, and they are the reason its height is quoted as 330 m today.

The longest-standing height record of the modern era

On completion the tower became the tallest human-made structure in the world, beating every cathedral spire and monument then standing. It held the title for about 40 years.

The record finally fell in New York. In October 1929 the architect William Van Alen raised a stainless-steel spire, secretly assembled inside the crown of the Chrysler Building, taking it to 319 m (1,046 ft). That beat the Eiffel Tower's 312 m with flagpole. Within two years the Empire State Building passed both. The Eiffel Tower later lost the title of the world's tallest tower to Tokyo Tower in 1958, but it is still the tallest freestanding, non-guyed structure in France. The best-known structure in France that is taller is the 343 m Millau Viaduct, a bridge whose tallest pier and mast top it.

Heat, wind and a moving summit

Iron expands as it warms, and a 300 m iron structure expands enough to measure. French sources describe a seasonal change in height of up to about 20 cm between a cold winter and a hot summer. Lower figures, around 15 cm, are also widely quoted. On sunny days the side facing the sun expands more than the shaded side, so the summit leans slightly away from the sun and traces a small loop during the day. The largest displacement recorded, about 18 cm, came during the 1976 heat wave.

Wind moves it far less than people expect. Eiffel designed the curved legs to resist wind and allowed for up to 70 cm of movement at the top. The largest wind-driven movement on record, during the December 1999 storm with gusts near 240 km/h, was only about 13 cm. The open lattice lets wind pass through instead of pushing against a solid face.

Above ground or above sea level?

Most published heights for the tower are measured from the ground at the foot of its legs, on the Champ de Mars beside the Seine. French reference sources also list each platform's altitude above sea level, and the two sets of numbers are easy to confuse.

The constant gap of 33.5 m is the ground elevation of the site. So when a source says the top platform is "about 310 m", it is giving the sea-level altitude, not a different measurement of the tower. Adding the same 33.5 m to the 330 m tip puts the top of the antenna about 363 m above sea level. In height comparisons, including on this site, the tower always stands on the ground at zero, so the right figures are the ground-based ones.

The same table shows how the tower's mass is spread. The first floor sits at only about a sixth of the total height, and the second floor at about a third. Most of the lattice above the second floor is the narrowing upper shaft, which carries the lifts to the summit. That proportion matters for visitors. The second floor, at 115.7 m, is already higher than Big Ben's 96 m spire, yet low enough that Paris's monuments are still easy to pick out below.

The tower at human scale

A few conversions help make 330 m concrete. An average French man is 179.7 cm tall according to the France average height data, so it would take about 184 of them standing on one another's heads to reach the antenna tip. The 1,665 steps to the top average about 16.6 cm of rise each over the 276 m to the summit platform, roughly a normal household stair, repeated far beyond what anyone would climb at home. Even the first floor, at 57.6 m, is taller than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Comparing the Eiffel Tower with other landmarks

At 330 m the Eiffel Tower is still taller than many famous skyscrapers. Here is how it compares with other structures in this site's landmark data. You can line them all up in the 3D height comparison tool.

There's a link to New York beyond the height race. Eiffel's firm also engineered the iron skeleton inside the Statue of Liberty, completed in 1884, just before work on the Paris tower began. The tower is about three and a half times the statue's total height.

Because the Eiffel Tower is quoted to its antenna tip, compare it carefully with buildings that are quoted to their architectural top. The Chrysler Building's 319 m includes its spire, which counts as architecture. The Eiffel Tower's iron structure alone, at about 300 m, is shorter than the Chrysler Building. With the antenna, the tower is taller. Both statements are true.

Visiting the three levels

The tower has three public levels, at very different heights:

• First floor, about 57.6 m: the largest platform, with a glass floor section looking straight down between the legs.
• Second floor, about 115.7 m: the best height for seeing Paris's landmarks up close. It's reached by lift or by the public stairs, about 600 steps from the ground.
• Summit, about 276 m: reached only by lift from the second floor. Above the main platform there is a smaller upper level at about 279 m. There is also a reconstruction of the office at the top often called Gustave Eiffel's apartment. French sources note there is no evidence he lived there, and the room was first used for meteorology and then for wireless experiments.

In total there are 1,665 steps to the top, but only the stretch to the second floor is open to visitors. The tower received about 5.9 million visitors in 2022. Tickets are timed and sell out in peak season, so book through the operator's official site.

Keeping a 330-meter landmark standing

Wrought iron rusts, so the tower depends on paint. About 60 tonnes of paint are applied in a campaign roughly every seven years, by hand, with brushes. The color, a graded bronze-brown that is slightly darker at the bottom than at the top so it looks even from the ground, has itself become part of the landmark. The most recent repainting campaigns ran in the years before the 2024 Paris Olympics. During the Games, the Olympic rings hung on the tower.

For more of the world's great towers and how they compare, browse the landmarks hub or the full tallest lists.