Is male height worth $30,000 per inch?

A surprisingly quantifiable unusual asset

Male height is an unusual asset.

You can’t buy it, sell it, or borrow against it — but some research suggests a single inch is worth $30,000—at least on dating apps.

This article explains why that exact price is probably wrong in dating, how it’s nonetheless getting truer every year, and how $30,000 per inch strangely exactly on the money in other ways.

Is an inch of male height is worth $30,000?

This seemingly bizarre headline number comes from a famous online-dating study by Hitsch, Hortaçsu, and Ariely, which found that a 5’6” man needed about $175,000 more income to be as desirable as a 6’0” man.

Divide by six inches and you get the viral version: one inch of male height, worth nearly $30,000 a year. But, there’s more to the story.

First, a little about the research itself. While I think this result is directionally true, and getting truer every year, it’s worth knowing that nobody in the study actually traded $175,000 for height.

It’s an extrapolation from the fact that women messaged tall rich guys, tall guys, and rich guys first, and so $175,000 is the theoretical number a 5’6” guy would have to make to be messaged as quickly as a poorer, taller 6’ guy.

The study is old, using data from just a few months in 2003, which is its first problem. The study measured clicks — who women messaged first on a dating site — not who they actually dated, moved in with, or married.

Digital clicks or likes are basically the cheapest signals in the dating market: they costs nothing and commit to nothing. Deciding who to message first is really just sorting a queue, and height is an easy thing to sort by — so even a woman who’d happily date the shorter guy might still open by messaging the tall one first.

So, yes, the study showed women like tall guys. (Surprise surprise.) But it didn’t show they ended up with tall guys in the end. (Or that the tall guys messaged them back).

As a result, the $30,000 figure is also an extrapolation, a line drawn well past the data underneath it. It doesn’t measure relationships, casual hookups, or even conversations. It simply measured the first click on a now antiquated dating site, which used email to communicate, in two American cities. As a result, as a price on real relationships, $30,000 an inch is almost certainly too high.

So, 30k was kind of a fake number. But I think there’s evidence it’s actually becoming real. The reason? Apps like Tinder.

In an online-dating-heavy world, male height really is becoming more and more valuable. I’d even call it an appreciating asset.

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We made a dating calculator in collaboration with The Studies Show. Check it out at datingnetworth.com or read The Studies Show’s article about it.

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Why is the $30,000 per inch figure increasingly plausible?

A generation ago, you met people through work, friends, parties, neighborhoods, church groups. Height was not a totally disqualifying attribute there. It was observed next to a face, a voice, a real person with their own unique story. In this world, charisma and personality could win. In the 1990s, you could not filter a dinner party for “5’10” and up.”

But everything has changed now. Most courtship moved online — by the late 2010s, apps had become the single most common way couples in the US meet — and online dating did something the old world never did. It made being short a filterable offense.

You can open an app and exclude every single person who isn’t a certain height, age, or location — and, controversially, in some cases, ethnicity or religion.

The problem for shorter guys is that, at the party or the coffee shop, their personality or charm (or money) might override their height disadvantage. But if a woman has excluded everyone below 5’10” on the app and you’re 5’7”, and you don’t lie, I don’t really know what to tell you. That’s genuinely tough, and a bit unfair — it’s a real cost imposed before you ever get to be a person to her. That’s where that inch isn’t worth $10k or $20k. On an app the value of that inch is effectively infinite, because it’s a hard requirement. That’s tough.

I’d argue the $30,000 figure probably wasn’t right when that famous study came out — back then, height mostly decided who got messaged first, not who got rejected. But it’s getting to being accurate closer now.

In an Unusual Assets sense: Dating apps made the price of male height go up, because the marketplace got a filter, which was actually a kill switch.

But it’s not hopeless, precisely because male height is an unusual asset.

Male height is an asset valued relative to the counterparty. A 5’7” man meeting a 6’ tall woman and a 5’ tall woman might get a totally different evaluation.

That’s because most women aren’t shopping for absolute height; they’re shopping for taller than they are — and in real couples the man is taller something like 92% of the time, far more than chance. (Which also shows it’s not a dealbreaker for everyone).

While we can be pretty confident women care about height, I doubt most 5’3” women rule out every 5’10” man because he’s not at the mythical 6’ barrier.

Alternative ways of valuing male height

Still, male height matters enough that some men undergo grueling, gruesome surgery to buy a little of it. Surgeons break the leg bones — the femur, the tibia, or both — bolt on a stretching device, and pull the bone apart by about a millimeter a day for months, so it heals back longer and the body ends up artificially taller. Most patients gain two or three inches. It costs anywhere from roughly $75,000 to well over $150,000 (cheaper abroad), it’s overwhelmingly men who do it, and there’s now a Hulu documentary on the industry called Short Kings.

Puts a whole new meaning on ‘break a leg’

But notice the price. Call it $100,000 for three inches and you get about $33,000 an inch — eerily close to the dating study’s $30,000. The made-up shadow price and the real surgical sticker price have basically converged. When a number we invented and a market people actually pay into agree this closely, the asset is at least being priced consistently — even if both prices are a little insane.

(In a world where makeup and appearance surgery seems to be something women feel pressure to do, this surgery is an interesting counterpoint.)

Fun fact: Rivers Cuomo of Weezer got a version of this — but in one leg, and not for height. He was born with his left leg about 1¾ inches shorter than his right, so surgeons broke his femur and he stretched it daily with a screw-driven brace, an ordeal he compared to crucifying his leg. (Insurance called it cosmetic and refused to cover it, so he paid the roughly $50,000 himself, out of Blue Album money.)

Isolated and in pain, he wrote Pinkerton, which many see as a precursor to the emo movement. (Weezer fan side note… perhaps the best song from that time period was a demo never officially released until recently.) There’s even an X-ray of his braced leg tucked inside the artwork for “The Good Life.”

Lionel Messi also had height intervention via medical means, but he had a real disorder as a child and would’ve ended up under 5’ in height without HGH. With HGH he ended up being 5’7 and one of the best soccer players of all time.

Long story short, your market pool doesn’t depend on your height in a vacuum. It depends on where you sit next to her. (If you’re doing straight dating, which is what this article covers). The same 5’8” man is comfortably tall to a 5’2” woman and below the line for a 5’9” one. Move down the distribution and the slice of women who’d count you as taller-than-them quietly shrinks; move up and it swells. The asset has no fixed price — only a spread that widens or narrows depending on who’s across the table.

Height helps men, but only up to a certain point

The other thing about male height is that its value depends heavily on where you sit in the distribution. Going from 5’5” to 5’10” is a huge move: you climb from roughly the 8th percentile of US men to about the 62nd. At 5’10” you’re taller than around 98% of women — though still shorter than about 38% of men. You’ve crossed the threshold where you’re taller than nearly all women, but you’re only middling among men. (For scale: only about 15% of US men are 6’0” or taller, so a woman who filters for 6’+ is fishing in a small pond.)

Going from 5’10” to 6’2” pushes you past all but the top 5% of men.

But you can see where this is going. The height premium doesn’t compound forever. At the top, height flips from asset to liability. Very tall men and very short women pair off far less than a “taller is always better” rule would predict. Past a point, another inch stops reading as masculine, protective, status and starts reading as too much — awkward in photos, a niche taste, a gap that’s more uncomfortable than reassuring. The desirability curve peaks somewhere in the low six feet and drifts back down. By the time you’re hitting 6’8”, you’re excluding a lot of short — and even average-height — women from your own pool.

That means height is probably somewhat negative in value past, say, 6’5 or so.

There is such a thing as too tall — which there decidedly is not for income.

So, is male height at $30,000 per inch overpriced or underpriced?

Financially, it’s overpriced. The study we started this post talking about looked at who women gravitate toward at first glance. But anyone who’s dated knows the person you super-like isn’t necessarily the person you walk down the aisle with. The other big problem is the sample: a lot of the women generating that figure were never going to date the 5’6” guy anyway. It’s a bit like asking a 5’7” woman who specifically wants someone taller what it would take to date a shorter man — you’ll get an enormous number, because you’ve asked the people most opposed to the trade. It’s hard to believe a 5’6” man can’t find a woman his height or shorter — at least if the filters don’t stop him first.

Culturally and structurally, the effect of male height is underpriced — because the filter is real, and getting filtered out is not the same as being someone’s second choice. The second choice can become the first choice with time. With an online filter, you’re not in the conversation at all. We took a fuzzy, forgiving, easily-overridden preference and hard-coded it into a checkbox you can switch a human being off with.

That’s the scary part.

So the two prices are these: the price to get that first click is rising — toward infinite behind a hard filter. The price to actually become someone’s partner is the one that’s overrated. The study measured the first; we keep quoting it as if it were the second.

So what’s an inch of male height really worth?

The truth is we don’t know. One questionable estimate we’ve just discussed puts it near $30,000 a year. Surgical estimates suggest it’s also near $30,000. I think the dating figure is wrong, but getting truer every year as dating apps quietly filter people by attribute.

This is a companion to The Studies Show’s writeup of our Dating Net Worth calculator. If you are interested in data and dating content, we also recommend following Lana Li who writes Love Me Like a Robot.

Check out the calculator at DatingNetWorth.com

This post, like all Unusual Assets posts, is for entertainment and educational purposes only and is not financial, legal, or any kind of advice.