Tyra Banks Height 2026: How Tall Is Tyra Banks Really?

Last updated: 11 November 2026 | By Celebamerica Editorial Staff

Tyra Banks is 5 feet 10 inches tall (178 cm). That is the figure listed by Wikipedia, Parade, Your Next Shoes and AstroTheme, and it has stayed the same across decades of reporting, from her teenage modelling years right through to her 2026 return to fashion television as a recurring judge on Project Runway. At 5 ft 10 in, Banks stands six inches above the average American woman (5 ft 4 in, per the CDC figures cited by Your Next Shoes) and sits squarely in the classic supermodel height band of 5 ft 9 in to 6 ft.

Born Tyra Lynne Banks on 4 December 1973 in Inglewood, California, she is 52 years old in 2026 and turns 53 on her birthday in December. Her height was never a side note in her story. It was the first thing casting directors noticed, the reason schoolmates teased her, and one of the tools that carried her from a Paris runway at 17 to the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, the Victoria’s Secret runway, and a television empire that Celebrity Net Worth values at roughly $90 million. This page settles the height question source by source, converts the figure into every unit readers ask for, compares Banks with the other supermodels of her generation, and traces how those 70 inches shaped one of the most durable careers in fashion.

Quick Facts: Tyra Banks

How Tall Is Tyra Banks? The Answer in Full

Tyra Banks is 5 feet 10 inches tall, which converts to 178 centimetres or 1.78 metres. The number is one of the most stable facts in celebrity reporting: Wikipedia’s biography lists “5 ft 10 in (1.78 m)”, Parade’s 2023 profile answers its own “How tall is Tyra Banks?” section with “5 feet, 10 inches”, Your Next Shoes repeats 5 feet 10 inches (177.8 cm) across several articles updated in 2025 and 2026, and AstroTheme lists her at 5′ 10″ (1.78 m). Celebrity Inside’s measurements profile agrees at 5 feet 10 inches (178 cm).

That kind of agreement across reference sites, entertainment outlets and fashion publications is unusual for a celebrity height, where figures often drift by an inch or two between sources. Banks is different because her height was a professional measurement, recorded by agencies and printed in model cards from the age of 15. When a model books runway work in Paris, Milan and New York, her height is listed on a comp card that casting directors rely on. There is little room for the number to wander, and it has not.

The one dissenting figure worth naming is 5 ft 9 in (1.75 m), which appears on Last.fm’s profile of Banks. It is a minority listing, contradicted by Wikipedia, Parade, Your Next Shoes, AstroTheme and Celebrity Inside, and it most likely reflects a rounding or a secondary source rather than a separate measurement. A separate outlier, 5 ft 11 in, shows up on at least one celebrity-height roundup, but that same site’s own dedicated Tyra Banks measurements page gives 5 ft 10 in — so the 5 ft 11 in figure looks like a categorisation slip, not a competing measurement. Our adjudication: 5 ft 10 in (178 cm) is the consensus height, with 5 ft 9 in as the only notable minority figure.

The Source-by-Source Height Check

Height figures for public figures are only as good as the sources behind them, so here is exactly what each named source says — and where they disagree.

The People detail matters because it pins the height to her teenage years. Banks was already 5 ft 10 in as a schoolgirl, which means her adult height was set early — and it explains why the teasing she describes from that period centred on being tall and thin. She did not grow into the supermodel frame; she had it before she ever walked a runway.

Why do some celebrity heights shift between sources? Usually because of shoes, posture, rounding, or a figure copied from an old agency card. Banks avoids most of that noise. Her height was measured for professional purposes, printed in agency materials, and repeated by outlets that check each other. The 5 ft 9 in figure on Last.fm is the kind of one-inch slip that happens when a music database copies a bio without checking it against the fashion record. Nothing in her modelling career supports the shorter number: at 5 ft 9 in she would still have modelled, but the runway record — 25 shows in her first Paris season — belongs to a 5 ft 10 in teenager who fit the sample sizes and the sight lines of the era’s top designers.

Tyra Banks Height in Centimetres, Metres and Feet

Readers search for this number in every unit, so here it is in full:

• Feet and inches: 5 ft 10 in
• Inches only: 70 inches
• Centimetres: 178 cm (177.8 cm before rounding)
• Metres: 1.78 m
• Millimetres: 1,780 mm

The centimetre figure deserves a word of care. 5 ft 10 in converts precisely to 177.8 cm, which most sources round to 178 cm. Wikipedia prints 1.78 m; Your Next Shoes prints 177.8 cm. Both describe the same height — the difference is rounding, not disagreement. Anyone quoting 177 cm or 179 cm is working from the same measurement with a different rounding choice.

For scale, 178 cm puts Banks at about the height of the average American man (roughly 5 ft 9 in) and well above the average American woman (5 ft 4 in). In a room of a hundred American women picked at random, she would be among the tallest handful. That is the physical fact that made her a model — and the same fact that made her stand out in every school photograph long before fashion found her.

How Tall Is Tyra Banks in Heels?

Without heels, Tyra Banks is 5 ft 10 in. In heels, the answer depends on the shoe. A standard 3-inch heel takes her to about 6 ft 1 in; a 4-inch stiletto takes her to roughly 6 ft 2 in. Fashion coverage of her red-carpet appearances generally puts her at around 6 ft in heels, and Your Next Shoes notes that at 5 ft 10 in with a US size 12 shoe, she “hardly needs heels for extra height” — a line that captures the point neatly. Her footwear history, tracked across years of red-carpet coverage, runs from pointed pumps and stilettos to sandals and boots by designers including Gianvito Rossi, Jimmy Choo and Alexander Wang.

There is a practical side to this that working models understand and audiences rarely see. On a runway, every model in a show wears heels of roughly similar height so the line of the collection reads evenly. A 5 ft 10 in model in 3-inch heels presents at 6 ft 1 in, which is why runway photography can make the women look taller than they are. On television, the same effect plays out in reverse: standing next to a 5 ft 9 in co-host, Banks in flats is only an inch taller, so the difference barely registers on screen. The height that defined her modelling career becomes almost invisible in a television studio — one reason her move from runway to hosting worked so smoothly.

Her shoe size is part of the same story. At US women’s 12, her feet are proportionally large for her frame, and fashion writers have long noted that she embraced it rather than hiding it, wearing statement heels and open-toe styles on red carpets where other tall women might have reached for flats. It fits the pattern of her whole career: the thing that made her different became the thing she built on.

Tyra Banks Height Compared With Other Supermodels

Banks belongs to the generation of supermodels who defined the 1990s runway, and her height places her right in the middle of that group — taller than some of the most famous names of the era, shorter than others, and exactly at the average for a working supermodel.

Two of those comparisons carry a little extra weight. Naomi Campbell, at 5 ft 9.5 in, was Banks’s closest peer and occasional rival in the 1990s — the two women were the most prominent Black supermodels of the era, and their half-inch difference is the sort of detail only a casting director would notice. Heidi Klum, at 5 ft 9 in, is one inch shorter than Banks; the two women shared the Victoria’s Secret runway for years and now sit together again on the Project Runway judging panel, where Klum hosts and Banks judges. Gisele Bündchen, at 5 ft 11 in, is the one inch taller — the Brazilian who arrived a few years after Banks and became the highest-paid model in the world.

The comparison with Gigi Hadid, who also stands 5 ft 10 in, shows how little the ideal has moved. Hadid, a generation younger, measures exactly the same as Banks did at her age — 5 ft 10 in has been the centre of the supermodel range for thirty years. Kendall Jenner, also 5 ft 10 in, is another exact match. The fashion industry’s preferred height for women has stayed remarkably steady: tall enough to carry a gown, not so tall that the clothes stop being the point.

Against the wider world of celebrity, Banks is taller than most of the famous women she has worked with. She is four inches taller than Kate Moss, whose 5 ft 6 in frame broke the height rule and proved that presence could beat inches. She is a full six inches taller than the average American woman. Put her beside a typical red-carpet line-up and she reads as tall without reading as towering — which is precisely the band the industry wants.

How Her Height Shaped Her Modelling Career

Height is a gate in fashion. Agencies list it first, casting directors filter by it, and designers cut sample garments to fit a narrow band of bodies. For a woman, the working band is roughly 5 ft 9 in to 6 ft. At 5 ft 10 in, Banks landed dead centre — and she landed there at 15, before she had any idea what to do with it.

The story of how she was found is part of fashion lore. Spotted as a teenager, she signed with an agency and was sent to Paris, where in her first season she booked more than two dozen shows. Designers in Paris in the early 1990s wanted height, and Banks had it along with a face that photographed from every angle. The bookings piled up because the clothes hung the way the designers intended and because a 5 ft 10 in teenager with a long stride could carry a finale gown without being swallowed by it.

Her height also shaped the kind of model she became. She was never the waifish, androgynous presence that dominated parts of the decade; her frame was athletic and her walk had weight to it. That made her a natural for swimwear and lingerie work, where the body is the point, and it led directly to the two covers that defined her modelling career: the first African-American woman on the cover of GQ, and the first African-American woman on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue in 1997. Both covers depended on a body that read as strong rather than fragile, and height was part of that reading.

There was a cost, too, and Banks has talked about it. The same height that opened doors in Paris made her a target at school, where she was teased for being tall and thin. She has described the nickname she was given and the way it stung — and then, years later, the way she turned it around. The girl who was mocked for standing out grew into a woman whose whole career was built on standing out. It is a neat arc, but it is also true: the attribute that made her miserable at 15 made her a millionaire by 25.

Height mattered again when she crossed into television. On America’s Next Top Model, she judged young women whose heights were measured and debated on camera, and she knew exactly what she was talking about — she had been measured herself, at the same age, by the same kind of people. When she told a contestant that height was not the only thing that mattered, it carried weight precisely because hers had mattered so much. And when she hosted Dancing with the Stars, her height let her stand eye to eye with the professional dancers and the celebrity contestants in a way a shorter host could not. The frame that fit the runway also fit the ballroom.

Early Life in Inglewood: Tall, Teased and Determined

Tyra Lynne Banks was born on 4 December 1973 in Inglewood, California, to Carolyn London, a medical photographer, and Donald Banks, a computer consultant. She grew up in Inglewood and later Los Angeles with her older brother Devin, and the family background was solidly middle class — not the poverty-to-riches story that gets attached to so many models, but a stable home where a tall, gangly daughter was encouraged rather than pushed.

School was harder. Banks has said she was 5 ft 10 in and 110 pounds as a teenager, and classmates teased her for it. The teasing was the ordinary cruelty of children toward anyone visibly different, and it left a mark: she has spoken about the insecurity it bred and the work it took to shake it. What is striking, looking back, is how completely the thing she was teased for became the thing she was paid for. The height did not change. The context did.

She attended John Burroughs Middle School and then Immaculate Heart High School in Los Angeles, an all-girls Catholic school. It was while she was still a student that modelling found her. She was 15 when she began, and the early work was local — catalogues and small shoots — before the move to Paris at 17 that turned a sideline into a career. Her mother travelled with her in those early years, a detail Banks has credited with keeping her grounded while teenagers around her were burning out.

That grounding matters to the height story, too. A 15-year-old who is 5 ft 10 in and suddenly being told her body is a product can go one of two ways. Banks went the way of treating it as a tool she owned rather than a verdict on her worth. It is the same attitude she later drilled into contestants on America’s Next Top Model: your measurements are data, not destiny.

From Paris Runways to the Victoria’s Secret Angel Wings

Banks’s modelling career moved fast once it started. Her first Paris season produced more than two dozen runway bookings, an extraordinary number for a newcomer, and the work kept coming: Chanel, Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta. She walked for the houses that defined 1990s fashion, and she did it while still a teenager.

The covers followed. She became the first African-American woman to appear on the cover of GQ, and in 1997 she became the first African-American woman on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue — a cover she shared the honour of in a year that made her a household name in America. She returned to the Swimsuit Issue repeatedly, and in 2019, at 45, she came back for another cover, photographed in a swimsuit more than two decades after the first. The return was a statement in itself: the body that had launched her career was still the body she was proud of.

Victoria’s Secret was the other pillar. Banks became one of the brand’s Angels in 1997 and walked its runway through the brand’s peak years, staying until 2005. Parade reports that her Victoria’s Secret deal was worth $10 million, and the brand made her a television fixture: the annual fashion show was, for a stretch of years, one of the most-watched events on American television. She also became the first Black woman to appear on the cover of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. When she retired from runway modelling in 2005, she did it on the Victoria’s Secret runway, in a farewell walk that closed a chapter on her own terms.

The money from modelling was substantial but not yet the fortune she would build. The runway paid well for a teenager and very well for a star, but the real money in her career came later, from television and business. What modelling gave her was the platform: a face and a name that America recognised, and a height that had become part of the brand. When she moved into television, she carried that recognition with her, and it never left.

America’s Next Top Model and Television Stardom

If the runway made Tyra Banks famous, television made her rich — and it made her a producer with power over the industry that had employed her. In 2003 she created America’s Next Top Model, a reality competition in which aspiring models competed for a contract and a career. She hosted it, judged it and executive-produced it, and it ran for 24 cycles across 15 years, first on UPN and The CW and later on VH1. It became one of the longest-running reality franchises on American television and a global format sold around the world.

The show was also where her height became a teaching tool. Contestants were measured on camera, and the 5 ft 9 in to 6 ft band was discussed openly as the industry’s working range. Banks could speak to it from experience: she had been the tall teenager, she had been measured by Paris casting directors, and she knew which doors height opened and which it did not. The show’s most famous coinage, “smize” — smiling with the eyes — became a piece of popular vocabulary, and Banks’s on-camera persona, by turns warm and severe, made her one of the most recognisable television personalities of the 2000s.

Forbes reported that she earned $30 million from a single cycle of the show in 2009, a figure Parade repeats, and Celebrity Net Worth records that she was earning an estimated $30 million a year at the height of her television empire in the late 2000s. Between June 2008 and June 2009 alone, the site puts her earnings at $30 million. Those are the years that built the fortune: not the runway, but the television studio.

Alongside Top Model she hosted her own daytime talk show, The Tyra Banks Show, from 2005 to 2010, winning two Daytime Emmy Awards. She acted in films including Higher Learning (1995), Love & Basketball (2000) and Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009), and on television in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Felicity. She wrote a young-adult novel, Modelland, published in 2011, and a memoir-style book, Perfect Is Boring, in 2018. In 2011 and 2012 she completed Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management Program, a credential she has cited when talking about her move from talent to owner.

Dancing With the Stars and the Project Runway Return

Banks took over as host of Dancing with the Stars in 2020, for season 29, and stayed for three seasons through 2022. The job suited her: a live ballroom, a tall host who could hold the floor, and a format that rewarded the same showmanship she had practised on runways and talk shows. She left in 2023, a departure Parade’s 2023 profile frames as her own choice to move on, and Alfonso Ribeiro took over the hosting role. The question of who won Dancing with the Stars in 2025 now belongs to a later era of the show, but Banks’s three seasons remain a visible chapter in its history.

Her 2026 return to fashion television came in a different chair. In June 2026 it was announced that Banks would join Project Runway season 22 as a recurring judge, alongside Heidi Klum, Nina Garcia and Law Roach, with Christian Siriano returning as mentor. The season premiered on 9 July 2026 on Freeform, streaming the next day on Hulu and Disney+, and it was the largest in the show’s history, with 22 designers competing. Banks had appeared as a guest judge in season 21; season 22 made the role permanent. The pairing with Klum is a neat piece of symmetry: two former Victoria’s Secret Angels, one 5 ft 10 in and the other 5 ft 9 in, judging the next generation of designers together. The season ran through to September 2026, with Jude Mikulencak taking the win.

Business Ventures: Bankable, Tyra Beauty and SMiZE & Dream

Banks’s business career is the reason her net worth sits near $90 million rather than the far smaller sum a modelling career alone would have produced. She has built, launched and run companies since the mid-2000s, and she has done it as an owner rather than a paid endorser.

Bankable Productions, founded in the 2000s, is the production company behind America’s Next Top Model and The Tyra Banks Show. Owning the production company meant owning a share of the formats, the international sales and the syndication — the kind of backend money that a host’s salary alone never captures. It is the single most valuable business decision of her career, and it is why the Forbes figure of $30 million for one cycle of Top Model is plausible: she was not just the talent, she was the owner.

Tyra Beauty, her cosmetics line, launched in 2014 as a multi-level marketing venture selling makeup directly through representatives. The line leaned hard on her personal brand — the “smize” and the supermodel authority — and it sold, though the multi-level model drew the usual criticism that attaches to that structure. Banks has defended it as a way for women to earn independently, and the line remains part of her business story even as her attention has moved on.

SMiZE & Dream, her ice-cream business, is the venture she talks about most now. Launched in 2021, it sells ice cream with a theatrical, experience-led twist — the shops are designed as attractions as much as stores, and the brand carries the same showmanship as her television work. Shops opened in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and the brand has become her main public business identity in the 2020s. Parade’s 2026 net-worth profile lists the ice-cream business alongside modelling, television and cosmetics as one of the pillars of the $90 million figure.

ModelLand, the modelling-themed attraction she announced for Santa Monica Place in 2019, was the most ambitious of her ventures — a physical space where visitors could live the model experience for a day. Your Next Shoes covered its press tour in detail in 2020. The attraction’s opening was delayed and its scale was rethought, and it stands as the one Banks venture that has not yet fully landed. It also shows the pattern of her business thinking: experiences, not just products, and brands built around her own story.

The Money Behind the Height

Celebrity Net Worth puts Tyra Banks’s net worth at $90 million in 2026, a figure Parade repeats in its 2026 profile and that several other 2026 outlets — OK! Magazine, Hollywood Life, Nairobi News — also carry. A smaller number of profiles give a wider range of $90 million to $120 million. We anchor on $90 million, the figure Celebrity Net Worth publishes and Parade confirms, and note the $90M–$120M range as the upper end of published estimates. The number has been stable for years, which is itself informative: Banks’s wealth is not riding a single stock or a single deal, but a spread of income built over three decades.

The earnings record, as reported by named sources, looks like this:

Those numbers put Banks among the wealthiest models of her generation, though not at the very top: Cindy Crawford, whose business empire is valued far higher, sits well above her, and Gisele Bündchen’s fortune is larger still. Banks’s money was made differently — less from a single brand deal, more from owning the television formats she starred in. The $30 million-a-year peak came from being the owner of the show, not just its face, and that is the part of her story that the height articles usually miss. The height got her into the room. The ownership is what paid.

Real Estate, Assets and Lifestyle

Banks has lived much of her adult life between Los Angeles and New York, the two cities where her modelling and television careers were based, and in 2023 she moved with her son to Sydney, Australia, a relocation widely reported at the time. Her partner in that move, Louis Bélanger-Martin, is a Canadian businessman, and the family has been based in Australia since. The move was a lifestyle choice rather than a career one: she has continued to work in American television, including the 2026 Project Runway season, while living abroad.

Property reporting on Banks is thinner than for many celebrities of her wealth, and we will not invent prices or addresses. What the record supports is a pattern of substantial homes in the Los Angeles area across her career and a life now centred in Sydney. Her most visible asset is not a house but a company: Bankable Productions and the Top Model format rights, which continue to generate income from international versions of the show. The SMiZE & Dream shops are physical assets too — retail leases in prime locations in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — and they represent the direction her money is moving: from performance fees into owned businesses.

Her lifestyle, as she presents it publicly, is deliberately hands-on. She works in the ice-cream shops, she posts from them, and she has built the brand around her own presence rather than a silent investment. It is the same instinct that made her a host rather than just a model: she would rather be in the room than behind it.

Personal Life: Son York and Family

Banks has one child, her son York Banks Asla, born in January 2016 via surrogate. His father is Erik Asla, a Norwegian photographer Banks was in a relationship with from 2013 to 2017. She has spoken openly about the fertility struggles that preceded York’s birth, including IVF attempts that did not succeed, and about the decision to use a surrogate — a candour that made the announcement of his birth a widely covered moment.

She has never married. Her most public relationships, besides Asla, include her long-ago relationship with basketball player Chris Webber in the early 2000s and her current partnership with Louis Bélanger-Martin, with whom she moved to Australia. She keeps her son largely out of the public eye, sharing photographs sparingly and on her own terms.

Her mother, Carolyn London, remains a close figure in her life; Banks has credited her with travelling with her in the early modelling years and with the practical, unsentimental advice that kept a teenage model steady. Her brother Devin has stayed out of the spotlight. The family story, in the end, is an ordinary one made unusual by the scale of what the daughter built on it.

Controversies and the 2026 Netflix Lawsuit

No honest profile of Banks can skip the controversies, and the biggest of them is also the most recent. In February 2026, Netflix released Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, a three-part documentary series re-examining the legacy of the show Banks created. The series revisited the show’s treatment of contestants, including the makeover episodes and the on-camera criticism that had already drawn debate for years. Banks’s response was not a statement but a lawsuit: on 13 June 2026 she filed a defamation claim against Netflix, the production company EverWonder Studio and the documentary’s co-directors, Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, arguing that the editing of the documentary supported a false narrative about her. She is seeking a jury trial and damages. Netflix denied that the documentary was defamatory and filed a motion in August 2026 seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed. As of this writing the case is unresolved, and its outcome is not reflected in any published net-worth estimate.

The documentary is part of a longer reckoning with America’s Next Top Model itself. Clips from the show — harsh critiques, dramatic makeovers, contestants in distress — have circulated for years as examples of reality television’s harder edge, and Banks has faced sustained criticism for moments that look different in 2026 than they did in 2005. She has acknowledged some of it and defended the show’s intent, and the argument continues. It is a genuine controversy, not a tabloid one, and it belongs in any profile that claims to be complete.

Smaller matters have attached themselves along the way. A 2025 commercial lease dispute in Washington, D.C., connected to her ice-cream business, was reported in 2026 profiles and remains unresolved in public reporting. Her departure from Dancing with the Stars drew criticism from some viewers who found her hosting style divisive, and her exit in 2023 was followed by the usual round of commentary about whether she had been pushed or had jumped. None of these episodes has dented her earning power: the Project Runway judging role arrived in the middle of the Netflix lawsuit, which suggests the industry’s view of her is more settled than the headlines.

Tyra Banks Height FAQs

Sources and Reporting

How we estimated: Tyra Banks’s height is a reported measurement, not an estimate. We compared six named sources — Wikipedia, Parade, Your Next Shoes, AstroTheme, Celebrity Inside and Last.fm — and adopted the consensus figure of 5 ft 10 in (178 cm), naming the one minority figure (5 ft 9 in, Last.fm). Her net worth is an estimate: we anchor on Celebrity Net Worth’s $90 million figure, confirmed by Parade’s 2026 profile, and note the $90M–$120M range carried by some outlets. Earnings figures are attributed to the outlets that reported them (Forbes, Celebrity Net Worth, Parade) with the dates they cover. Where sources conflict, we say so rather than smoothing the difference away. Private financial details are not public, so all wealth figures remain estimates.

Sources consulted: Wikipedia — Tyra Banks; Parade — Tyra Banks Net Worth (2026); Parade — Tyra Banks: Age, Net Worth, Son, Why She Quit DWTS; Celebrity Net Worth — Tyra Banks Net Worth; Your Next Shoes — Tyra Banks’ Height and Shoe Size; AstroTheme — Tyra Banks; Healthy Celeb — Naomi Campbell; Wikipedia — Project Runway season 22. By Celebamerica Editorial Staff. Last updated 11 November 2026.