How Tall is Mount Everest? Official Height in Feet and Meters

Eleven official surveys. Eight different answers. Two governments that spent fifteen years refusing to accept each other’s number.

British surveyors published 8,778 meters in 1847 for a peak they catalogued as XV. Later teams put it at 8,840 m, then 8,848 m, then 8,850 m, then 8,844.43 m. For most of modern history, the height of the world’s highest mountain has been an argument rather than a fact.

That argument ended on a December morning in 2020, when Kathmandu and Beijing announced the same figure at the same hour for the first time.

Mount Everest is 8,848.86 meters tall, or 29,031.7 feet above sea level. This guide covers the current figure in both units, why two official heights still exist, how the summit was measured, whether the mountain is still growing, and what that elevation actually means for anyone standing at the bottom of it.

Key Takeaways

• Official height: 8,848.86 m (29,031.7 ft), agreed by Nepal and China in December 2020.
• Rock height, excluding the summit snow cap: 8,844.43 m (29,017 ft).
• The older figure of 8,848 m came from a 1955 Survey of India measurement.
• Everest rises roughly 2 mm per year, faster than the surrounding range.
• Measured from its base, Mauna Kea is taller. Measured from sea level, nothing beats Everest.
• Everest Base Camp sits at 5,364 m (17,598 ft), about 61 percent of the summit height.
• Kala Patthar at 5,545 m (18,192 ft) is the highest point most trekkers reach.

How Tall is Mount Everest in Feet and Meters?

The official Mount Everest height in feet is 29,031.7 ft, which equals 8,848.86 meters. Rounded off, that is about 8.85 kilometers or 5.5 miles of vertical distance.

Measurement	Metric	Imperial
Official height (snow)	8,848.86 m	29,031.7 ft
Rock height	8,844.43 m	29,017 ft
Previous official figure (1955)	8,848 m	29,028 ft
Distance expressed as km/miles	8.85 km	5.50 mi

Commercial aircraft cruise between 10,000 and 12,000 meters. The summit reaches into the lower edge of that band, which is why summit day gets described in aviation terms more often than hiking ones.

The mountain straddles the border between Nepal’s Solukhumbu district and the Tibet Autonomous Region, roughly 160 kilometers east of Kathmandu.

Why does Mount Everest Have Two Official Heights?

Because the highest point of Everest is not rock, a permanent cap of snow and ice sits on the summit, measured at roughly 3.5 meters thick during the 2005 Chinese survey.

That forces a choice on any survey team. Report the top of the ice, or report the bedrock beneath it.

• Snow height (8,848.86 m): the surface climbers stand on. Nepal has always argued for this figure.
• Rock height (8,844.43 m): the solid summit under the snow. China published this in 2005.

The disagreement was never purely scientific. Everest’s height is a national asset for Nepal, and the peak drives a trekking economy that employs tens of thousands of people across the Khumbu.

Every trekker who walks in pays an entry fee at the Sagarmatha National Park checkpoint in Monjo, and that revenue funds trail repair and ranger posts throughout the valley.

The 2020 survey resolved the dispute by measuring both figures and giving both international recognition, with the snow height as the headline number.

How did Nepal and China Settle the Everest Elevation in 2020?

Two separate summit teams did the fieldwork, three years apart.

Nepal’s surveyors Khim Lal Gautam and Rabin Karki reached the top with Tshiring Jangbu Sherpa on 22 May 2019. They timed the ascent deliberately for the middle of the night, because the queue that forms at the Hillary Step during daylight hours would have made instrument work impossible.

Gautam lost part of a toe to frostbite on that climb.

China’s team followed in May 2020 from the north side, using BeiDou satellite positioning. Commercial climbing was suspended that season, which handed the surveyors an empty summit.

Both governments announced 8,848.86 m simultaneously on 8 December 2020. It was the first single height the two countries had ever agreed on.

Nepal ran its half of the project with its own surveyors, its own budget, and its own equipment. Inside the Department of Survey, that mattered as much as the number.

How has the Recorded Height of Everest Changed Since 1856?

The figure has moved eight times in 170 years, and only the most recent shift reflects any real growth in the mountain.

Year	Height claimed	Who measured it
1856	8,839.9 m (29,002 ft)	Great Trigonometrical Survey of India
1955	8,848 m (29,028 ft)	Survey of India
1975	8,848.13 m	Chinese survey
1999	8,850 m (29,035 ft)	American GPS expedition
2005	8,844.43 m (rock)	Chinese State Bureau of Surveying
2020	8,848.86 m	Nepal and China, jointly

The 1856 number deserves more respect than it gets. British surveyors averaged readings from six stations on the Indian plains, hundreds of kilometers from the mountain, using theodolites and hand corrections for light refraction and the curve of the Earth. They landed within nine meters of the modern answer.

The Royal Geographical Society accepted the name Mount Everest in September 1856, after Andrew Scott Waugh proposed honouring his former survey chief. The Sherpa communities living below the mountain had been calling it Chomolungma for centuries by then.

How do Surveyors Measure a Mountain That High?

Height above sea level sounds simple until you try defining sea level 900 kilometers from the nearest ocean.

Surveyors solve this using the geoid, a model of where sea level would sit if the oceans extended beneath the continents. Everest’s height is the vertical distance from that modelled surface to the summit.

The 2020 survey combined four methods:

1. GNSS receivers carried to the summit and left running to fix its position in three dimensions.
2. Ground-penetrating radar to measure snow depth and separate rock height from snow height.
3. Gravity measurements taken along the approach to refine the local geoid, since gravity shifts with the mass of rock underneath.
4. Trigonometric levelling from twelve stations across the Khumbu, tying the summit into Nepal’s national height network.

Sushil Dangol, who coordinated Nepal’s measurement secretariat, put the margin of error at within centimeters. For a summit that regularly sees 200 kmh winds, that precision is remarkable.

Is Mount Everest Still Growing?

Yes. GPS data shows the summit rising roughly 2 millimeters a year, about double what the underlying tectonic collision alone should produce.

The Indian plate has been driving under the Eurasian plate for around 50 million years, and that collision raised the entire Himalayan chain. But Everest stands about 250 meters above Lhotse, and the next three highest peaks in the world sit within roughly 120 meters of one another. Everest is the statistical outlier, and plate tectonics does not fully explain the gap.

A study published in Nature Geoscience in September 2024 by researchers at China University of Geosciences and University College London offered an answer: the Arun River.

Their models suggest that around 89,000 years ago the Arun captured a neighbouring river system, a process geologists call drainage piracy. The extra volume sharpened its cutting power, and the river carved a gorge that drops seven kilometers in elevation across just 35 kilometers of horizontal distance.

Removing that much rock made the crust lighter, and the crust floated upward in response. That mechanism is isostatic rebound. The team estimates it has added between 15 and 50 meters to Everest since the capture event, lifting Lhotse and Makalu along with it.

The evidence shows up on the ground. Trekkers heading into Barun Valley walk past gorge walls that are close to vertical, with grey meltwater below still carrying the mountain away.

Is Everest the Tallest Mountain on Earth or Just the Highest?

Everest holds the highest point above sea level. It is not the tallest mountain by every measure, and the distinction confuses people constantly.

Peak	Claim to the title	Figure
Everest	Highest point above sea level	8,848.86 m
Mauna Kea, Hawaii	Tallest measured base to summit	10,210 m total, 4,207 m above water
Chimborazo, Ecuador	Farthest point from Earth’s center	6,263 m, boosted by the equatorial bulge
Denali, Alaska	Greatest vertical rise above surrounding terrain	around 5,500 m of relief

Everest’s own base-to-summit rise is smaller than Denali’s, because it starts from the already-elevated Tibetan Plateau. What Everest owns outright is the single highest patch of ground on the planet.

How does Everest compare with Other Himalayan Peaks?

Nepal holds eight of the fourteen mountains above 8,000 meters. Everest leads the list, but the margin over the next few is narrower than most people expect.

Rank	Peak	Height	Country
1	Everest	8,848.86 m	Nepal / China
2	K2	8,611 m	Pakistan / China
3	Kangchenjunga	8,586 m	Nepal / India
4	Lhotse	8,516 m	Nepal / China
5	Makalu	8,485 m	Nepal / China
8	Manaslu	8,163 m	Nepal

Lhotse shares the Khumbu Icefall and Western Cwm approach with Everest and stands only 333 meters lower. Kangchenjunga is reachable on foot from the Nepali side, though the Kanchenjunga Circuit trek takes eighteen days and sees a fraction of the Khumbu’s traffic.

Manaslu sits eighth on the list and was the first eight-thousander climbed by a Japanese expedition, in 1956.

Height is not the only measure of a mountain, and most guides in the Khumbu will point at Ama Dablam instead. At 6,812 m it is more than two kilometers shorter than Everest and photographed roughly twice as often.

What does 8,848.86 Meters Actually Feel Like?

Numbers on a page do not carry the physiology. Air pressure at the summit is about one-third of sea level, meaning each breath delivers roughly a third of the oxygen a body expects.

Above 8,000 meters, the human body cannot acclimatize at all. It only deteriorates. Climbers call that band the death zone, and the stretch of the north-side descent known as Rainbow Valley takes its name from the jackets of those who never came down.

Here is how the elevation stacks up along the standard trekking route:

Location	Elevation	Percent of summit height
Kathmandu	1,400 m	16%
Lukla	2,860 m	32%
Namche Bazaar	3,440 m	39%
Tengboche	3,867 m	44%
Pheriche	4,371 m	49%
Dingboche	4,410 m	50%
Gorak Shep	5,164 m	58%
Everest Base Camp	5,364 m	61%
Kala Patthar	5,545 m	63%
Camp IV, South Col	7,906 m	89%
Summit	8,848.86 m	100%

Dingboche marks the halfway point of the summit’s elevation, and most itineraries build a rest day there. Sleeping two nights at the same altitude triggers the red blood cell response the body needs before it climbs higher.

Oxygen saturation starts dropping noticeably for most trekkers around 4,400 m. Headaches, broken sleep and loss of appetite are the early warning signs worth taking seriously rather than walking through.

One detail surprises almost everyone: Everest is not visible from Base Camp. The Khumbu ridgeline hides it completely.

Where Can You Actually See the Summit From?

The clearest view on the standard route comes from Kala Patthar, which is why groups leave Gorak Shep at 4 am to be on that ridge at sunrise. Base Camp itself is a glacier moraine with prayer flags on it, and the only Everest feature visible from there is the Khumbu Icefall grinding down from the Western Cwm.

Several routes deliver the summit without going all the way to Base Camp:

• The Gokyo Lake trek climbs Gokyo Ri for a wider panorama that takes in Everest, Lhotse, Makalu and Cho Oyu at once.
• Trekkers with three weeks and strong legs cross Kongma La, Cho La and Renjo La on the Everest Three High Pass trek, which strings all the major viewpoints together.
• Nine days is enough for the Tengboche Everest View trek, which tops out below 4,000 m and suits families or anyone wary of high altitude.
• Time-poor visitors can reach the amphitheatre and return the same morning on an Everest Base Camp helicopter tour.

What does it cost to Reach Everest’s Height?

Two completely different price brackets, depending on how high the objective sits.

Trekking to Base Camp needs a Sagarmatha National Park entry ticket plus a Khumbu Pasang Lhamu Rural Municipality card, and both are issued at fixed government rates that change most years. The standard Everest Base Camp trek runs 14 days from Kathmandu and costs around USD 1500 – USD 2500 based on how you travel.

Climbing to the summit is a different scale entirely. Nepal raised the spring climbing royalty from USD 11,000 to USD 15,000 per foreign climber, effective 1 September 2025, the first increase since 2015. Autumn permits cost USD 7,500, and winter or monsoon permits USD 3,750.

That royalty is only the government’s share. Full expedition packages on the south side average around USD 55,000 to 60,000, permit validity dropped from 75 days to 55 in the same rule change, and one guide is now mandatory for every two climbers on any peak above 8,000 meters.

Almost nobody arrives on Everest as a first Himalayan objective. The usual progression starts with a 6,000 m trekking peak, and Island Peak at 6,189 m is the most common choice because the summit ridge and glacier crossing teach fixed-rope and crampon technique under real conditions.

Expedition operators generally want to see one of those climbs on a CV before selling an Everest place. Mera Peak at 6,476 m is the alternative for climbers who want altitude without technical ice.

None of the climbing rules apply to trekkers. Confusion between the two permit systems is the single most common question that reaches the Magical Nepal inbox each spring.

Conclusion

Mount Everest stands 8,848.86 meters, or 29,031.7 feet, above sea level. That figure has held since 8 December 2020, when Nepal and China accepted a single number for the first time in the mountain’s surveyed history, and it counts the snow cap the way climbers experience it rather than the bedrock underneath.

The number is precise, but it is not permanent. The summit rises about 2 millimeters a year, and the next survey will almost certainly report something slightly different.

What does not change is the scale. Base Camp reaches 61 percent of that height and already sits above the altitude where the body starts to struggle. The remaining 39 percent is where Everest stops being a destination and becomes a mountaineering problem.

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