Average Height of NFL Player: How Tall Football Players Are by Role

Position is the biggest factor in how tall a football player is. The table below uses the 1,537 players who were on an active roster in the 2025 season, with the height each team listed for them. Heights are given in inches and in feet and inches, and the table is sorted from the tallest group to the shortest.

The gap between the tallest and the shortest group is 6.3 inches. Offensive linemen are the tallest position group, followed closely by tight ends, and running backs are the shortest. Defensive backs and kickers sit almost level, both a little under six feet. Quarterbacks land close to the league average of 74 inches, at 6 feet 2.8 inches.

The averages describe groups, and the ranges show how much room each group leaves. Offensive linemen range from 6 feet 1 inch to 6 feet 9 inches. A running back can be as tall as 6 feet 4 inches, and a defensive back as short as 5 feet 8 inches. Position sets the typical height, but it does not fix it.

The table above shows the average height by position, and the pattern follows the job each position does. Players who block and rush the passer at the line of scrimmage, the offensive and defensive linemen and the tight ends, are the tallest. Players who carry the ball and cover receivers sit at the shorter end. In general terms the tallest players work closest to the ball at the start of a play, and the shortest work in open space.

Special teams add a small surprise. Punters average 6 feet 2.7 inches and long snappers 6 feet 2.2 inches, close to the league average, while kickers average 5 feet 11.9 inches, almost the same as defensive backs. Those groups are small, 32 or 33 players each, so a few unusually tall or short players move the average noticeably.

It is easy to read too much into these gaps. A position average says nothing about how any one player will perform, and the data on this page covers listed heights only. What it does show is how the league is built: a roster is a collection of body types, and the football player height of 6 feet 2 inches is simply where those types balance out. The league average itself is a blend. It sits between the running backs at 70.6 inches and the offensive linemen at 76.9 inches, and only linebackers, long snappers, punters and quarterbacks land within an inch of it.

The mix of positions on a roster also changes the overall number. In 2025 the active rosters held 257 offensive linemen and 288 defensive backs, two large groups on opposite sides of the average. A league with more of one group and fewer of the other would have a slightly different average height of NFL player rosters, even if no individual player changed.

There is no height requirement in the NFL. The NFL playing rules do not set a minimum or a maximum height, and teams decide which players they keep. The data shows what happens in practice. Among the 1,537 players on active rosters in 2025, the shortest were listed at 5 feet 7 inches, three players in all: two running backs and a kicker. The tallest was listed at 6 feet 9 inches, an offensive lineman.

How tall do you have to be to play in the NFL depends on the position you want. The shortest listed offensive lineman was 6 feet 1 inch and the shortest tight end was 6 feet. The shortest defensive lineman was 5 feet 11 inches. At the other end, kickers and running backs have reached the league at 5 feet 7 inches, and defensive backs and wide receivers at 5 feet 8 inches. A player under 5 feet 10 inches is rare but not unheard of: 79 players, or 5.1 percent of the league, were listed below that height.

Most players are tall. About 81.5 percent of active players were listed at 6 feet or taller, and 34.4 percent at 6 feet 4 inches or taller. Fifteen players were listed at 6 feet 8 inches or more. Height is not a barrier to a roster spot, but players under 5 feet 10 inches are a small minority, and players at 6 feet 4 inches or taller make up about a third of the league.

The average football player height has barely moved in 26 years. In 1999 the roster average was 73.89 inches. In 2025 it was 74.12 inches, a gain of 0.23 inches, less than a quarter of an inch. The lowest season in the data was 2002 at 73.80 inches, and the highest was 2024 at 74.18 inches, so the league average has stayed inside a band of 0.4 inches the whole time.

Every season since 2018 has been at or above 74.04 inches, a small step up from the early 2000s. The change is tiny, and the way the roster tables record players differs from year to year, so the trend should be read as stability rather than growth.

Looking at individual positions shows a little more movement. Comparing 1999 with 2025, for the eight position groups that carry the same label in both years, defensive backs are 0.63 inches taller, offensive linemen 0.58 inches taller and tight ends 0.57 inches taller. Running backs went the other way: the average running back is 1.04 inches shorter than in 1999.

Kickers, punters and long snappers are left out of this comparison, because the 1999 table lists them under a single special-teams label. The changes are the differences between the rounded averages shown in the table.

How tall is an NFL player compared with everyone else? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the average height of American men aged 20 and over is 68.9 inches, based on measurements in a national survey conducted from August 2021 to August 2023. The roster average, 74.12 inches, is 5.2 inches above that figure.

The comparison holds for every position. Running backs, the shortest group, average 70.62 inches, which is 1.7 inches above the national figure. Defensive backs and kickers are about 3.0 inches above it, wide receivers 3.7 inches, and offensive linemen, the tallest group, are 8.0 inches above it. Only 32 of the 1,537 players, 2.1 percent, were listed below 68.9 inches. In other words, nearly every NFL player is taller than the average American man.

A caution applies to the comparison. The survey measured people, while the NFL numbers are the heights teams list for their players, and the two groups are very different: one is a sample of the whole adult population and the other is a group of professional athletes picked for football ability, which for some positions favors size. The comparison shows how far the league sits above the population, not how tall a player has to be.

The most common listed height in the league is 6 feet 4 inches, which describes 212 players, or 13.8 percent of the active roster. The next most common are 6 feet 3 inches with 204 players, 6 feet 2 inches with 195 and 6 feet 1 inch with 179. Next comes 6 feet 5 inches with 178 players.

The most common height is taller than the average. Of the 212 players listed at 6 feet 4 inches, 142 are offensive linemen, defensive linemen or tight ends. The average sits lower, at 6 feet 2.1 inches, because running backs, defensive backs and receivers are spread across the shorter heights. The distribution has no single sharp peak: every height from 6 feet 1 inch to 6 feet 5 inches describes more than 170 players.

At the edges, 14 players were listed at 6 feet 8 inches, one at 6 feet 9 inches, three at 5 feet 7 inches and 29 at 5 feet 8 inches. The distance from the shortest to the tallest listed player is 14 inches, or 1 foot 2 inches.

The roster tables can be matched with the players table of the same project, which records the draft round for each player. All 1,537 active players in 2025 have a match. Players whose draft round is blank are grouped as undrafted or without a draft record, and they make up 432 of the 1,537.

First-round picks average 74.92 inches, or 6 feet 2.9 inches, which is 1.2 inches above the 73.71 inches of the undrafted group. The step is not smooth, and the sixth and seventh rounds do not follow the order, so draft round is not a clean measure of height.

Part of the gap comes from the positions themselves. Inside a single position group the gap shrinks. Among offensive linemen there is no gap: first-round offensive linemen average 77.08 inches and the undrafted group 77.12 inches. Among defensive backs, first-round picks average 72.52 inches against 71.69 for the undrafted group, a gap of 0.8 inches, and among wide receivers it is 72.96 against 72.20, a gap of 0.8 inches. The comparison suggests that a first-round pick is somewhat taller than an undrafted player at the same position in some groups, and not in others, and that the position mix explains part of the overall difference.

The figures on this page come from the rosters table of the nflverse project, an open data set of NFL players maintained on GitHub by the nflverse community. Each season has its own table of players, with the height and weight of each player and a status code.

The main figures use the 2025 season and count the players whose status in that season's table is active, which gives 1,537 players. Every one of them has a listed height. Heights are whole inches as listed by the teams, so they are not measurements taken for this page. The comparison over time uses the same rule for every season from 1999 to 2025, one row per player, and the number of active players recorded per season ranges from about 1,500 to about 2,100, because the roster tables record player status differently from one era to another. The share of those players with a listed height is above 99.9 percent in every season. A season still being played is left out.

The draft-round comparison joins each active player to the players table of the same project by player ID. The comparison with the general population uses the average height of men aged 20 and over published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from the National Center for Health Statistics survey for August 2021 to August 2023.

The calculation is short enough to repeat. Download the roster table for a season, keep the rows with an active status, remove duplicate players, and average the height column by position. The position averages for 2025 are available as a CSV file, and the yearly averages for 1999 to 2025 as a second CSV file. The heights use rosters up to the latest season in the data, which ends on the date above. More football pages are collected on the NFL hub, and the scoring side of the sport is covered on the page about the most common NFL scores.