How tall is Mount Rushmore (presidential heads)?

How tall are the faces on Mount Rushmore?

Each of the four presidential heads at Mount Rushmore National Memorial is about 18 m (60 ft) tall, the figure used on this site. The National Park Service gives George Washington's head as 60 ft (18.3 m) from chin to the top of the head and treats it as the benchmark; Abraham Lincoln's head is slightly taller and Theodore Roosevelt's slightly smaller, while Thomas Jefferson's sits in between. Those 60 ft are only the sculpture. The heads are carved into a granite face that rises roughly 500 ft above its base, and the mountain's summit stands about 5,725 ft (1,745 m) above sea level in South Dakota's Black Hills.

So "how tall is Mount Rushmore?" has three honest answers, depending on what you mean:

On this site, comparisons use the 18 m head, because that is the part people mean when they picture the monument and the only part that can be fairly set beside a statue or a person.

Facial features at the scale of buildings

The National Park Service publishes a handful of measurements that make the scale easier to grasp. Washington's nose is about 21 ft (6.4 m) long, taller than a two-story house. Each eye is about 11 ft (3.4 m) wide, and each mouth about 18 ft (5.5 m) across.

A useful thought experiment is to give the heads bodies. An adult's head is commonly drawn at about one-seventh to one-eighth of total height. At that ratio, a figure with a 60 ft head would stand roughly 420 to 480 ft tall, taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza. That is not an official number, just arithmetic, but it shows how close the original plan came to a truly colossal sculpture.

The original plan: presidents to the waist

The sculptor Gutzon Borglum did not set out to carve four floating heads. His design showed each president from the head down to the waist, and early models included hands and clothing. Work began on 4 October 1927 and continued until 31 October 1941, about 14 years in all. As money ran short, the plan shrank. Borglum died in March 1941, his son Lincoln Borglum supervised the final months, and the government declared the memorial complete that autumn. Only Washington's figure shows any detail below the chin, where a suggestion of collar and coat can be seen.

The layout also changed along the way. Jefferson was first carved to the left of Washington (as seen by visitors), but the rock there proved unsound. Workers blasted that face away and started again on the right, which is why Jefferson now sits tucked between Washington and Roosevelt. Lincoln is on the far right. The sequence reflects how much the final arrangement was dictated by where the granite was good, not just by the original drawings.

How the heads were carved

The National Park Service's account of the carving describes an operation closer to mining than to traditional sculpture. Nearly 400 men and women worked on the project as drillers, carvers, blacksmiths, call boys and support staff. Each day they climbed about 700 stairs to reach the top of the mountain before clocking in, then were lowered over the face in bosun's chairs hanging from 3/8-inch steel cables.

About 90 percent of the rock was removed with dynamite. Blasters worked until only 3 to 6 inches of stone remained over the final surface. Carvers then drilled closely spaced holes, a technique called honeycombing, which weakened the granite so it could be broken away by hand. The faces were finished with pneumatic hand tools that left a smooth surface. In total about 450,000 short tons (410,000 t) of rock came off the mountain, and much of it still lies in the talus slope below the sculpture. Despite the explosives and the height, no one died during the work. The total cost was $989,992.32, a little under a million dollars at the time.

A sacred mountain with an older name

Before it was named after the New York lawyer Charles Rushmore in the 1880s, the peak was known to the Lakota as Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe Pahá, the Six Grandfathers. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had guaranteed the Black Hills to the Lakota, and the seizure of the region after gold was discovered there remains a central grievance. The National Park Service acknowledges that many tribal nations have historical, spiritual and cultural ties to the Black Hills and works with them on interpretation at the memorial. Any account of the mountain's height and carving is also an account of land that was taken, and the memorial's own exhibits now address that history.

Mount Rushmore compared with other monuments

How does an 18 m head compare with famous statues and buildings? The table uses the heights on this site.

The closest match is the Great Sphinx, whose entire body, from the floor of its enclosure to the top of its head, is only about 2 m taller than Washington's face. Christ the Redeemer in Rio, a full standing figure, is not even twice the height of a single Rushmore head. You can line these up at true scale in the 3D height comparison tool, or browse every monument on the site by size in the landmarks hub.

The Hall of Records

Borglum wanted more than a sculpture. Behind Lincoln's head he began cutting a chamber he called the Hall of Records, meant to hold the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and an account of the memorial for future civilizations. His plan called for a room about 75 ft long and 35 ft high, reached by an 18 ft doorway and a grand stairway of some 800 ft cut from the blasted rock. Blasting started in 1938, but the tunnel had reached only about 70 ft into the granite when funding priorities shifted to finishing the faces, and the project died with Borglum.

The chamber was not entirely forgotten. In 1998, members of the Borglum family gathered there as porcelain enamel tablets describing the memorial and its history were placed in a vault in the floor and sealed under a 1,200-pound granite capstone. The room is not open to the public.

Visiting Mount Rushmore and seeing the heads at scale

The memorial welcomes well over two million visitors a year; the park counted 2,440,449 in 2022. Most people see the sculpture from the Grand View Terrace at the end of the Avenue of Flags, which is far enough away that the heads look smaller than you might expect. The Presidential Trail, a short loop with several hundred steps, brings visitors much closer to the base of the talus slope, where the size of the noses and eyes becomes obvious. Climbing on the sculpture is prohibited.

Light changes the experience. The faces look toward the south-east, so they catch the morning sun, and in the main season the sculpture is floodlit after dark. If you are curious how the heads would compare with a person or a building you know, the height converter turns the meter figures above into feet and inches, and the comparison tool lets you place a 60 ft head beside yourself.

Two colossal heads: Rushmore and the Sphinx

The most instructive comparison for Mount Rushmore is with the Great Sphinx of Giza, the only other world-famous monument made by carving a portrait directly out of living rock. The two were created about 4,400 years apart, yet the methods were related: both started with a natural outcrop, and both involved removing far more stone than was left behind.

The striking point is that a single Rushmore face is almost as tall as the entire Sphinx, head, chest and paws included. The Sphinx's face is much smaller, roughly the size of a house front, while each Rushmore face is the size of a six-story building. Granite is also far harder than the Giza limestone. That hardness is why Borglum's team needed explosives, and also why the faces should outlast the Sphinx's soft middle layers, which wind-blown sand has worn back. Hard granite weathers very slowly, so the sculpture's 60 ft heads should keep their height for a very long time.

Putting 60 feet in everyday terms

Numbers like 18 m are hard to picture, so here are a few reference points drawn from the measurements above:

• A person beside a nose. Washington's 21 ft nose is about three and a half times the height of a 6 ft (183 cm) man.
• A head beside a building. At 60 ft, each head matches a building of about six stories, assuming roughly 10 ft per floor.
• The whole face beside a skyscraper. The roughly 500 ft carved mountain face is about the height of a 45-story tower, but still less than half the height of the Chrysler Building's 1,046 ft spire.
• The rock removed. About 450,000 short tons came off the mountain over 14 years, an average of more than 30,000 tons a year.

For readers who think in metric, the height converter will convert any of these values precisely.

What the measurements tell us

Mount Rushmore is not tall by the standards of the monuments it is often listed beside. Its 18 m heads are dwarfed by the Statue of Liberty and by any modern tower, and its summit is not even the highest point in the Black Hills. What the measurements reveal instead is precision at scale. The Park Service's figures for a 21 ft nose, 11 ft eyes and 18 ft mouths describe features carved to within inches using dynamite and hand tools, on a cliff, by workers hanging from cables. That combination of size, accuracy and safety record is what makes the 60 ft figure remarkable, and it is why the heads remain among the most recognizable faces of any monument in the world.