Stephen Colbert Height 2026: How Tall Is Stephen Colbert?

Stephen Colbert is 5 feet 11 inches tall (180 cm) by his own account — a figure he has defended on national television. But ask the internet and you will get a different answer: IMDb and Google list him at 5 feet 10.5 inches (1.79 m). That half-inch gap turned into one of the funniest celebrity height disputes ever broadcast, when Colbert spent a whole segment of The Colbert Report in October 2014 demanding an apology from Google. This page settles the question with every source on the table, the full story of the 2014 row, and the numbers behind the man: his age, his Late Show salary history, and a net worth estimated at $75 million by Celebrity Net Worth. Last updated November 12, 2026.

Colbert hosted The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS from 2015 until its final episode on May 21, 2026, after a run of 11 seasons at the Ed Sullivan Theater. Before that he spent nine years playing a blowhard pundit on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report (2005–2014) and eight years as a correspondent on The Daily Show. He is 62 years old, married since 1993, and one of the most decorated hosts in late-night history. But the question people keep typing into search boxes is simpler than any of that: how tall is he, really? The honest answer is that it depends on who you ask — and Colbert himself has made very clear which answer he prefers.

How Tall Is Stephen Colbert? The Short Answer

Stephen Colbert says he is 5 feet 11 inches tall. That is the number he has given in interviews and the one he defended on air in 2014, and it is the figure most biographical profiles now repeat. ScreenRant’s 2024 profile of the host states plainly that Colbert “has self-reported his height as 5′ 11″,” and the celebrity-stats site HealthyCeleb lists him at 5 feet 11 inches, or 180.5 cm. MEAWW’s 2023 profile likewise puts him at 5 feet 11 inches (1.80 m), citing IMDb.

The wrinkle is that IMDb — the source most of those profiles lean on — actually lists Colbert at 5 feet 10.5 inches (1.79 m). The same figure appears on Astrotheme and on the My Movies database, both of which draw on IMDb data. Google’s knowledge panel went through the same split: before October 2014 it showed 5 feet 10 inches, and after Colbert’s on-air complaint it was corrected to 5 feet 10.5 inches. So the record, as it stands today, looks like this:

What should a reader take from that? The gap is half an inch — the kind of difference that comes down to shoes, posture, time of day, or a measurement taken decades ago and never updated. Colbert was 50 when he made his complaint, and human height does shrink slightly with age, which makes the 5’10.5″ database figure and the 5’11” self-report easy to reconcile: he may well have measured 5’11” in his younger years and a touch under it later. For this article we anchor on 5 feet 11 inches, because it is the figure the man himself claims, while recording the 5’10.5″ listing wherever the databases disagree. Any profile that gives you one number without mentioning the other is leaving out half the story — and in Colbert’s case, the dispute itself is the story.

The 2014 Google Incident: When Colbert Demanded an Apology

Few celebrity height disputes have ever been settled on television, in character, with a direct appeal to a tech chief executive. On October 15, 2014, Stephen Colbert opened a segment of The Colbert Report called “Who’s Attacking Me Now?” with a grievance. He had been Googling himself — something he said he did regularly — and found that Google’s celebrity profile listed his height as five feet ten inches. “I was horrified to learn that the Google celebrity profile of me lists my height as five-ten,” he told the audience, according to MarTech’s report of the segment. “I am five-eleven.”

The bit was pure Colbert Report: a wounded ego played completely straight. He spoke directly to Google chief executive Larry Page and demanded a retraction, an investigation, an apology, and a cash settlement — “or I will see your ass in court,” as MarTech quoted him. He explained why the missing inch mattered to him. At 5’11”, he said, he stood eye-to-eye with Brad Pitt and Russell Crowe — “my peers,” as he put it, joking that in the steam room, barefoot, they looked at each other eye-to-eye. At 5’10”, by contrast, he was reduced to what he called “Matt Damon numbers.” The joke landed because it was built on a real irritation: a search result millions of people see, getting a basic fact about him wrong.

The segment also took a swipe at Apple’s Siri, which gave the same wrong answer — Search Engine Land reported the same day that Siri, drawing on Wolfram Alpha, also listed Colbert at 5’10”. Both Google and Wolfram Alpha were likely pulling from the same undisclosed source, the site noted. Colbert even pointed out that Google listed Larry Page himself at 5’11”, a detail that made the whole thing sting a little more.

What happened next is the reason the story is still cited today. Within days, Google quietly corrected the figure — but only halfway. MarTech reported on October 20, 2014 that Google had “manually fixed the quick answer,” raising Colbert from 5’10” to 5’10.5″, or 1.79 metres. Colbert had asked for an apology and a full inch; what he got was half an inch and no apology. The corrected figure — 5’10.5″ — is the one Google and IMDb still show today, more than a decade later. The half-inch compromise became a running illustration of how search engines handle celebrity facts: confidently, vaguely, and somewhere in the middle.

The episode tells you two useful things. First, the 5’10” figure that once floated around was never Colbert’s own claim — it was a database error that he publicly corrected. Second, the 5’10.5″ figure that replaced it was Google’s compromise, not a fresh measurement. Neither number came from a tape measure held against Colbert’s head. That is why serious profiles treat his height as a range — 5’10.5″ to 5’11” — and why this article anchors on the self-reported 5’11” while showing the database figure beside it.

Stephen Colbert Height in Feet, Inches and Centimeters

Height figures get confusing because different countries and different sites use different units. Here is Colbert’s height converted every way a reader might search for it, using both the self-reported figure and the database listing:

For context, the average American man stands about 5 feet 9 inches tall, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At 5’11”, Colbert is roughly two inches taller than average — tall enough to notice in a room, not tall enough to stand out in a crowd. It also puts him in the same band as most of his late-night rivals, a comparison we break down in detail further down this page. His listed weight, for readers who ask, is around 76 kg (about 167–168 lbs), according to HealthyCeleb’s body-statistics profile — though weight, unlike height, shifts over time and is far less reliably documented.

One more number that gets searched alongside his height: his shoe size. No reliable source publishes it, and Colbert has never mentioned it publicly, so we will not guess at it. The same discipline applies to the rest of this article — if a figure cannot be tied to a named source, it does not appear here.

How Old Is Stephen Colbert in 2026?

Stephen Colbert was born on May 13, 1964, in Washington, D.C., which makes him 62 years old as of November 2026. He turned 62 in May of this year, a few weeks before his final Late Show episode aired. The age question is the natural companion to the height question — the two are searched together so often that most celebrity profiles answer them side by side — and readers who want the full age story, including how his age shaped the final years of the show, can read Stephen Colbert’s age in 2026 on GuideNetWorth, our sister site’s profile of the host.

Sixty-two is a notable age for a late-night host to walk away. David Letterman was 68 when he retired from the same desk in 2015; Johnny Carson was 66 when he left The Tonight Show in 1992; Jay Leno was 63 at his second retirement in 2014. Colbert left younger than all three, and not by choice — CBS ended the show while he was still winning his time slot. His age matters to the height story in one small way, too: men lose a fraction of an inch of height from their peak as they move through their sixties, as spinal discs compress. A measurement taken at 30 and a measurement taken at 60 can honestly differ by half an inch, which is exactly the gap between Colbert’s claim and the databases.

Early Life and Background

Stephen Tyrone Colbert was born in Washington, D.C., on May 13, 1964, the youngest of eleven children of James William Colbert Jr. and Lorna Elizabeth Colbert. His father was a physician and medical school dean — vice president of academic affairs at the Medical University of South Carolina — and his mother was a homemaker. The family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, when Stephen was still a boy, and Charleston is the city he calls home in most interviews.

Tragedy shaped his childhood early. On September 11, 1974, when Stephen was ten years old, his father and two of his brothers, Peter and Paul, were killed when Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 crashed while approaching Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina. Seventy-two people died in the crash. Colbert has spoken about the loss rarely and carefully over the years, but he has credited his mother’s faith and steadiness with holding the family together, and he has described comedy as something that arrived in his life partly as a way through grief. He has also spoken openly about his Catholic faith, which he has kept throughout his adult life — he has taught Sunday school and has discussed his beliefs in interviews without making them a stage persona.

He attended Porter-Gaud School in Charleston, then spent two years at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia before transferring to Northwestern University in Illinois, where he studied theatre and graduated in 1986. At Northwestern he fell in with the improvisational comedy scene that would define his career. After graduating he joined Chicago’s Second City, the improv institution that has trained generations of American comedians, and it was there that he met Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, his two closest creative partners. The three of them created the sketch show Exit 57 for Comedy Central in 1995, and then Strangers with Candy (1999–2000), in which Colbert played Chuck Noblet, a closeted gay history teacher — a character that showed off the deadpan, slightly unhinged persona he would later refine into a national figure.

From The Daily Show to The Colbert Report

Colbert joined The Daily Show in 1997, two years before Jon Stewart took over as host, and stayed for eight years as a correspondent. The Daily Show of that era was inventing a new form — fake news delivered by people who plainly knew more about real news than most news anchors — and Colbert was one of its sharpest instruments. His field pieces, delivered in the voice of a clueless but supremely confident reporter, became a signature of the show. He left in 2005, briefly, to launch his own program, and the character he took with him was the one he had been warming up for years: a blowhard conservative pundit who loved America, feared liberals, and never, ever admitted doubt.

The Colbert Report premiered on Comedy Central on October 17, 2005, and ran for nine years and 1,447 episodes. The show’s central joke was that Colbert the host was a fool and Colbert the writer was not — the character said absurd things with total conviction, and the audience was in on it. The format gave him room to do things no other host could: he coined the word “truthiness” in the very first episode, a term for preferring gut feeling over facts that was later named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society and added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. He testified before Congress in character in 2010, appearing before a House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration. He ran a real super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, in 2011–2012, raising over a million dollars to demonstrate the absurdity of campaign finance law. The show won multiple Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Variety Series, and a Peabody Award.

It was also on The Colbert Report that the height dispute played out. The show’s whole premise was a man defending his own importance against all evidence, so a segment in which he demanded a retraction from Google over a missing inch of height fit the character perfectly — and the fact that the complaint was also genuine made it better. Viewers who remember the segment tend to remember the jokes about Brad Pitt and Matt Damon; what they forget is that Google actually changed its answer afterward, which made it one of the rare comedy bits that moved a real-world fact.

The Late Show Years and the 2026 Finale

On April 10, 2014, CBS announced that Stephen Colbert would succeed David Letterman as host of The Late Show, and on September 8, 2015, he took over the desk at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York. The move required him to retire the pundit character — the new show needed the real Colbert, warm and curious, not the blowhard — and the transition was one of the most watched reinventions in television. Early reviews were mixed as he found the tone; within two years the show was winning its time slot, helped by a monologue-heavy format that suited the politics of the Trump era and by Colbert’s skill as an interviewer.

The show ran for 11 seasons and ended on May 21, 2026, with an extended final episode. CBS had announced the decision on July 17, 2025, telling Colbert the night before the public announcement that the next season would be the last and that the entire Late Show franchise — 33 years old, counting Letterman’s 22 seasons — would be retired with him. The network described the move as “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” insisting it was not related to the show’s performance or content. Reporting at the time put the show’s losses at roughly $40 million a year against production costs of about $100 million, with a staff of around 200 people. Colbert himself was reportedly told he could look at the books; he declined, according to a CinemaBlend report on the final year.

The announcement landed two days after Colbert had criticized Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company, on air over its settlement with President Donald Trump concerning a 60 Minutes story, and the timing fed heavy speculation about political motives and the then-pending Paramount–Skydance merger. CBS held its line that the decision was financial. Whatever the full truth, the numbers behind late night had been moving against the format for years: audiences had shifted to streaming and clips, advertising had followed, and a show that cost $100 million a year to produce needed a broadcast audience that no longer existed at that size.

The ending did not dim Colbert’s standing. In September 2026 he took home the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Series for The Late Show’s final season, and reporting in the months after the finale described him as already working on his next chapter — including co-writing a new Lord of the Rings film. CBS leased the 11:35 p.m. slot to Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group, whose Comics Unleashed moved in the night after Colbert’s farewell. Thirty-three years of the Late Show franchise ended with him, and he left it as its second and final host.

How Stephen Colbert Built His Fortune

Celebrity Net Worth estimates Stephen Colbert’s net worth at $75 million in 2026, a figure echoed by Parade, TheStreet and multiple other outlets working from the same estimate. It is a fortune built almost entirely on one asset — himself, on television, five nights a week, for nearly three decades — with books, production work and speaking engagements layered on top.

The salary history tells the story in stages. When he took over The Late Show in 2015, Colbert reportedly earned about $6 million a year, according to Page Six and Celebrity Net Worth. In October 2019 he signed a contract extension that more than doubled his pay to $15 million a year — the figure most outlets quoted for the rest of his run. Then, in mid-2023, CBS offered him a five-year renewal; Colbert instead accepted a shorter three-year extension that pushed his annual salary to a peak of $20 million, a figure he held until the final episode in May 2026, per Celebrity Net Worth. With roughly 200 episodes a year, the $15 million salary worked out to about $75,000 per episode, according to Parade’s breakdown — up from about $30,000 an episode on the original $6 million deal. His Colbert Report salary was never publicly reported.

Beyond the hosting salary, Colbert has earned from bestselling books — I Am America (And So Can You!) (2007) and America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t (2012), both written in the pundit character’s voice — and from his production company, Spartina Productions, which he runs with his wife Evelyn and which produced The Late Show and other projects. He has also done voice work, including a role in The Hobbit films (he is a noted J.R.R. Tolkien enthusiast), and he has been a regular on the speaking and event circuit. Real estate is modest by celebrity standards: the family has long lived in Montclair, New Jersey, and property records show a home there bought well before the Late Show money arrived. He has never been a flashy spender, and the $75 million estimate reflects steady, high earnings over a long career rather than one windfall.

Stephen Colbert Compared With Other Late Night Hosts

Height is a relative question, and late night is a useful place to ask it, because the hosts stand next to each other at awards shows, share stages, and get photographed together constantly. Colbert sits almost exactly in the middle of the late-night pack — neither the tallest nor the shortest — and the comparisons show how little half an inch matters in practice.

Jimmy Fallon, who took over The Tonight Show in 2014, is listed at 5 feet 11 and a half inches — half an inch above Colbert’s self-reported figure, and a full inch above the database figure. Readers can compare the two profiles directly in our Jimmy Fallon height profile. Jimmy Kimmel, whose ABC show has run since 2003, is listed in the 5’11” to 6′ range, putting him at Colbert’s height or a little above; see our Jimmy Kimmel height profile for the full breakdown. Trevor Noah, who hosted The Daily Show from 2015 to 2022, is listed by IMDb at 5 feet 11 and a quarter inches — a quarter inch taller than Colbert, according to the same database that lists Colbert at 5’10.5″. The old guard towers over them all: David Letterman, the man Colbert replaced, is listed at 6 feet 2 inches, and Conan O’Brien at 6 feet 4 inches. You can find more host profiles in our celebrity profiles section.

What the table really shows is that the whole modern late-night generation clusters within an inch of each other. Fallon, Kimmel, Noah and Colbert are all within about an inch, which is why photographs of them together never settle anything — camera angles, shoes and posture swamp differences that small. The 2014 Google dispute matters more as a piece of Colbert’s public image than as a measurement question: it was the moment a comedian turned a database error into a running joke about his own vanity, and the joke stuck because it was true to the character he had spent a decade building.

Personal Life: Wife, Family and Life Off Camera

Colbert married Evelyn McGee in 1993, after meeting her at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina — she was performing with a theatre company, and he has told the story of spotting her across a room and deciding, on the spot, that he would marry her. Evelyn, who goes by Evie, is an actress and producer who has appeared in Strangers with Candy and worked as a producer on The Late Show through Spartina Productions, the company the couple runs together. They have three children — Madeleine, Peter and John — and have lived for years in Montclair, New Jersey, a commuter town that let Colbert raise a family outside the Manhattan spotlight while working at the Ed Sullivan Theater.

Off camera, Colbert is known as a devoted reader — his love of Tolkien is so well documented that he appeared as a guest in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films and has read The Lord of the Rings many times — and as a practicing Catholic who has taught Sunday school and spoken about faith in interviews with unusual candor for a comedian. He has also been open about anxiety and about the loss of his father and brothers, subjects he handles with a directness that contrasts with the irony of his stage persona. He keeps no public social media presence of his own beyond the show’s accounts, and he has guarded his family’s privacy carefully through three decades in public life.

His wife’s height is sometimes asked about alongside his own, but no reliable source publishes it — the figures floating around online (5’5″ to 5’8″) are unsourced guesses, so we do not repeat them as fact. What is documented is that the couple has worked together for more than thirty years, that Evelyn has been a producer on his shows, and that Colbert credits her with keeping him grounded through the two very different eras of his television career.

What Colbert Has Said About His Own Height

The most revealing thing Colbert ever said about his height is also the simplest: “I am five-eleven.” He said it on The Colbert Report on October 15, 2014, in the voice of a man who had just discovered an insult on the internet, and he said it as though the number were a matter of public record rather than opinion. The rest of the segment built outward from that sentence — the demand for a retraction from Larry Page, the cash settlement, the court threat, the comparison with Brad Pitt and Russell Crowe — but the core claim never wavered. He was five-eleven, Google said five-ten, and Google was wrong.

He returned to the joke in later years whenever the subject came up, and the number stayed the same. In a 2020 ScreenRant piece revisiting the incident, the framing was the same: Colbert at 5’11”, Google at 5’10”, a comedian threatening to sue a search engine over an inch. The consistency is the point. Celebrities who are sensitive about their height tend to inflate it quietly and hope nobody checks; Colbert inflated nothing — he stated his number on television, invited the comparison, and then watched the world’s biggest search engine meet him halfway. The half inch Google gave him is still there in the knowledge panel today, a small monument to a joke that worked.

There is also a quieter lesson in the episode for anyone who writes about celebrities. Database figures are not measurements. They are copied, inherited, rounded, and occasionally invented, then repeated by a hundred sites until they look like facts. Colbert’s height had two numbers attached to it for years because one database said one thing and the man himself said another, and the only way to settle it was to report both and say which one came from where. That is what this page has done, and it is what the next section’s answers do as well.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and Reporting

This article was researched from live sources on November 12, 2026. Height figures come from IMDb (5’10.5″), ScreenRant’s 2024 Colbert profile (self-reported 5’11”), MarTech’s October 2014 reporting on the Google dispute, Search Engine Land’s same-day report on Siri’s error, HealthyCeleb’s body-statistics profile, and MEAWW’s 2023 profile. Net worth and salary figures come from Celebrity Net Worth, Parade, and TheStreet. The Late Show’s ending and the surrounding reporting come from CBS’s July 2025 announcement as covered by the Orange County Register, Wikipedia’s finale record, CinemaBlend, and Yardbarker. Peer heights come from IMDb (Trevor Noah) and CelebAmerica’s own Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel height profiles. Named sources: Celebrity Net Worth, IMDb, ScreenRant, MarTech, Search Engine Land, Parade, TheStreet, MEAWW, Wikipedia, CBS.

How we estimated: height figures are reported as a range because the sources disagree — Colbert’s self-reported 5’11” against IMDb and Google’s 5’10.5″ — and this article anchors on the self-reported figure while showing the database listing. Net worth is an estimate from Celebrity Net Worth, cross-checked against Parade and TheStreet; it reflects reported earnings and public records, not access to private finances, and the real figure may differ. Figures were last verified on November 12, 2026. By Celebamerica Editorial Staff.