Tallest US Presidents

Ranking the presidents by height

Forty-five different men have served as president of the United States (Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump each served two non-consecutive terms, so the numbering runs higher than the headcount). This list ranks all of them by height, from Abraham Lincoln at the top to James Madison at the bottom. The canonical figures come from Wikidata height statements (property P2048) and the references attached to them, and they line up closely with the widely used compilation on Wikipedia's page about presidential heights.

The spread is about 30 cm. Lincoln stood 193 cm (6′4″); Madison stood about 163 cm (5′4″). Taken together, the 45 heights on this page average about 180.3 cm (5′11″), which matches Wikipedia's own estimate of roughly 5′11″ (180 cm) for the group.

At the other end of the list the heights cluster in the high 160s and low 170s, mostly among nineteenth-century presidents.

The middle of the table is crowded. Joe Biden, Gerald Ford, James A. Garfield and James Buchanan all sit at 183 cm (6′0″), and William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and James Monroe share 182 cm. In a group this tightly packed, a single centimeter of rounding can shuffle several ranks, which is worth keeping in mind before treating any position on the list as precise.

Abraham Lincoln: the benchmark at 6′4″

Lincoln's height is one of the best-attested facts of nineteenth-century political life. Dickinson College's House Divided project, a Civil War teaching resource, describes him as six feet four inches tall and about 180 pounds. The most specific contemporary measurement comes from the portrait painter Francis Bicknell Carpenter, who wrote that Lincoln stood beside the canvas while the artist marked his exact height on it, and gave the figure as six feet three and three-quarter inches "in his stocking-feet." That is 192.4 cm, so the familiar 6′4″ is a rounding up of less than a centimeter.

Lincoln also produced the largest height gap ever recorded between two major presidential candidates. In 1860 he faced Stephen A. Douglas, his opponent in the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858. Douglas stood about 5′4″, so the two men were roughly 12 inches (30 cm) apart. Four years later Lincoln's main opponent was General George B. McClellan, at about 5′8″, still 8 inches shorter.

Measured, listed or remembered: where the numbers come from

Presidential heights fall into three broad categories, and knowing which one you are looking at explains most of the disagreements between sources.

Clinical measurements. Modern presidents have released summaries of their physical examinations. Barack Obama's March 8, 2016 memorandum from Physician to the President Ronny L. Jackson lists his height as 73.5 inches, along with 175 pounds and a body mass index of 22.8. That converts to 186.7 cm, which this site rounds to 187 cm. Donald Trump's April 2025 physical, as reported by UPI, logged him at 6-foot-3 and 224 pounds. Wikipedia's list cites a later White House summary from May 2026 giving 75 inches and 238 pounds.

Older official documents. For mid-century presidents, the most reliable numbers often come from military or civil paperwork. Wikipedia notes that a 1941 report of physical examination put John F. Kennedy at 6′0″, a little under his commonly cited 6′1″, and that a 1941 exam recorded Lyndon Johnson at 6′2½″ rather than the 6′3½″ usually quoted. Richard Nixon measured 5′10½″ on a 1943 exam, and Harry Truman 5′8″ on a 1917 exam. Franklin Roosevelt's 1918 passport gave 6′0½″, well short of the 6′2″ usually attributed to him.

Recollections and self-descriptions. For the founders, heights come from letters, diaries and later accounts. George Washington, for example, once described his own height as six feet, while the figure most often cited is 6′1½″. This site records him at 188 cm, a centimeter above Wikipedia's 187 cm, a difference that falls well inside the uncertainty of an eighteenth-century description.

The practical lesson is that the more recent and more clinical the document, the more weight it deserves. A wartime physical or a passport is a recorded observation; a figure repeated in campaign literature or a later memoir may simply be a rounded number that stuck.

The debated cases

Donald Trump

Trump's height is the most argued-over figure on the list. Wikipedia's article summarizes it carefully: White House physicians have listed him at 6′3″, older public records including his 2012 driver's license give 6′2″, and press outlets such as Slate, Politico, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph have questioned the official number. This site uses 190.5 cm (6′3″), the physician's figure, which places him third on the list. If the 6′2″ documents were used instead, he would drop into the cluster at 188 cm alongside George Washington, George H. W. Bush and Chester Arthur. You can see him beside his predecessors on his height page.

Ronald Reagan

Reagan is the clearest case where sources split. His Wikidata entry gives 180.3 cm (5′11″), but the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library's own fact sheet lists his height as 6′1″, and Wikipedia's table also gives 6′1″ (185 cm). This list follows the library, recording him at 185.4 cm (6′1″), which places him just above Kennedy and Andrew Jackson rather than in the 180 cm group with Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland.

Joe Biden

Biden appears at 183 cm (6′0″). Wikipedia notes that The New York Times described him as 6′1″ in 1984, a decade into his Senate career. The difference is small, but it shows how a newspaper's passing description can enter the record alongside medical figures. Biden's full profile is on his height page.

Does the taller candidate win?

The belief that Americans always elect the taller candidate has been repeated in books for decades. Wikipedia's article collects examples: a 1975 psychology book claimed the taller man won every election from 1900 to 1968, and later books stretched the claim further. The comparison table on that same page undercuts it immediately.

Heights here are those in Wikipedia's comparison table, which can differ by a centimeter or so from the rounded figures on this site.

McKinley's two wins over Bryan alone break the "since 1900" version of the story. The 1975 book itself acknowledged that Nixon was slightly shorter than George McGovern in 1972.

The most careful look at the question is a 2013 paper in The Leadership Quarterly by Gert Stulp, Abraham Buunk, Simon Verhulst and Thomas Pollet, titled "Tall claims? Sense and nonsense about the importance of height of US presidents." As Wikipedia summarizes it, the study found that clearly taller candidates were more likely to win the popular vote, but the number of elections won by the taller candidate did not differ significantly from chance. In other words, there may be a modest preference at the ballot box, but it is far too weak to predict outcomes.

The record for the tallest candidate ever belongs to a loser: General Winfield Scott, at 6′5″ (196 cm), was beaten in 1852 by Franklin Pierce. Senator John Kerry, at 6′4″ (193 cm), is the second-tallest unsuccessful candidate and matched Lincoln's height.

Presidents compared with ordinary Americans

A president at 180 cm sounds unremarkable today, but the comparison only makes sense against the population of each era. The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration's century-long study of adult height, published in eLife in 2016, notes that the United States was among the tallest nations a century ago but has since fallen behind European countries, having had the smallest gain in height of any high-income country. American men born in 1996 average about 177.1 cm (5′9½″) in that dataset, as shown on our United States average height page.

Against that benchmark, the modern presidents mostly stand above average. Obama at 187 cm and Clinton at 189 cm are roughly 10–12 cm taller than the typical American man of today; Biden at 183 cm is about 6 cm taller. Truman, at 175 cm, would be slightly below today's average, and Madison, at 163 cm, would be well below it.

If you want to see where a particular height falls in today's population, the height percentile calculator on this site uses current survey data.

The first presidents: tall founders and a short architect

The founding generation produced both extremes. Thomas Jefferson, at 189 cm (6′2½″), and George Washington, at 188 cm, are among the tallest presidents of all time, and both still rank in the top ten more than two centuries later. Their successors were much shorter: John Adams, the second president, stood about 170 cm (5′7″), and his son John Quincy Adams, the sixth, about 171 cm (5′7½″). James Madison, whose 163 cm makes him the shortest president, served between Jefferson and James Monroe, who stood 182 cm.

Several of these early elections were genuine height mismatches. Jefferson faced Adams in both 1796 and 1800, a gap of about 7½ inches (19 cm); the shorter Adams won the first contest and the taller Jefferson the second. The rivals can be compared directly on their pages for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

How to use this list

Treat the ranking as a guide to the documented record rather than a set of laboratory measurements. Where a president's number comes from a medical memo (Obama, Trump), it is likely accurate to within a centimeter. Where it comes from a letter, a portrait sitting or a campaign biography, a margin of 2–3 cm is realistic, and that margin is larger than the gap between many neighboring entries.

To put any two presidents side by side, open the height comparison tool and add them as figures, or use the height difference calculator to see the exact gap between, say, Lincoln and Madison (30 cm, or almost a foot). Each featured president also has a profile with the sources behind the number, including Barack Obama and George Washington.