1,000 t2,200,000 lb
An AT-AT weighs about 1,000 tonnes (roughly 2.2 million lb) by our estimate. Lucasfilm gives its height, 22.5 m, but never a mass. The figure treats the walker as armoured like a modern tank, about 16 M1 Abrams’ worth of metal; a 2016 real-world cost study reached the same answer, 1,020 tonnes.
| Prototype AT-AT (Star Wars Rebels)Our estimate scaled up to its 26.7 m height | 1,670 t3,680,000 lb |
|---|---|
| 2016 real-world cost studyEqual to 16 M1 Abrams tanks | 1,020 t2,250,000 lb |
| Our estimateThe 22.5 m walker from The Empire Strikes Back | 1,000 t2,200,000 lb |
| First Order AT-AT (The Last Jedi)Our estimate scaled to its 22.03 m height | 940 t2,070,000 lb |
| Low estimate: built as lightly as an AT-DPThe AT-DP’s official 11.2 t, scaled up to 22.5 m | 82 t181,000 lb |
No film or reference book gives the AT-AT a mass. StarWars.com lists its height, 22.5 m, and the official guides add its crew, troop capacity, top speed (60 km/h) and even its price, 150,000 credits, but the mass line stays empty. Any number you see, ours included, is an estimate.
The AT-AT is basically a tank on legs: a hollow box of heavy armour with guns, a reactor and a troop bay inside. So we borrowed a tank’s density. An M1 Abrams is 7.93 m long, 3.66 m wide and 2.44 m tall, a box of about 71 m³, and weighs about 62 tonnes (newer versions up to 66.8 t). That is roughly 0.9 tonnes per cubic metre of box.
Judging by its proportions, the AT-AT’s body is about 15 m long, 7 m wide and 8 m deep (840 m³). Add a head of about 50 m³ and four legs some 13 m long and 1.7 m thick (150 m³ together), and the walker fills about 1,040 m³. At 0.9 t per m³ that gives 900 to 980 tonnes, which we round to 1,000. Put another way, the AT-AT holds about 16 tanks’ worth of volume, and 16 × 62 t is 992 t.
StarWars.com and the Star Wars Encyclopedia of Starfighters and Other Vehicles give 22.5 m (74 ft) tall, while Star Wars Complete Vehicles says 22.2 m. Its length is given as 20 m in some books and 25.9 m in others. Inside sit a pilot, a gunner and a commander, up to 40 troopers on double-tiered benches, and a rear bay for up to five speeder bikes. Forty armoured troopers add perhaps 4 tonnes, a rounding error on a 1,000 t machine.
Other versions differ. The prototype walkers in Star Wars Rebels stand 26.7 m tall, and since weight grows with the cube of size, that makes them about two thirds heavier, around 1,670 tonnes. The First Order’s AT-AT in The Last Jedi is 22.03 m tall and uses lighter armour that adds protection without adding weight, so it comes out about the same. Lucasfilm’s Pablo Hidalgo has said the taller AT-ACT cargo walker in Rogue One came about partly because people remember AT-ATs as bigger than they really are.
Only just. Robotics expert Heiko Hoffman told Live Science in 2011 that the AT-AT’s slow gait, lifting one foot at a time, suits a heavy machine because three feet always hold it up. That still leaves each foot carrying roughly a third of the walker, over 300 tonnes. The bigger problem is scale: make a machine 10 times larger and it has to carry 1,000 times the weight, while its beams and joints don’t get stronger nearly as fast. Hoffman suggested tracks or shorter legs, since the high centre of mass makes it easy to topple.
The films agree. On Hoth, a rebel snowspeeder brings one down by wrapping a tow cable around its legs, and official guides note that the tall legs give it a high centre of gravity. In the older Legends books, a few AT-ATs were even lost on Hoth’s unstable ground before the battle began because of their weight.
The walkers in The Empire Strikes Back were stop-motion models, animated at ILM by Phil Tippett and Jon Berg. ILM studied elephants to get the gait right. The models ranged from about 6 to 50 cm (2 to 20 in) tall. A 5 ft robotic model was considered first, but dropped for cost and time.
About 2.2 million pounds, using our estimate of 1,000 tonnes. The larger prototype walkers from Star Wars Rebels would be around 3.7 million pounds.
No. Star Wars reference books give its height, length, crew, speed and price, but no mass. All published figures, including ours and the 2016 estimate of 1,020 tonnes, are real-world estimates.
22.5 meters (74 feet), according to StarWars.com; Star Wars Complete Vehicles gives 22.2 m. The earlier prototype stands 26.7 m, and the AT-ACT cargo walker from Rogue One is about 31.9 m.
Up to 40 troopers, plus a crew of three (pilot, gunner and commander) and up to five speeder bikes in a rear bay. Their combined weight is tiny next to the walker itself.
About 16 M1 Abrams tanks by weight. An Abrams weighs about 62 tonnes, and the AT-AT holds roughly 16 times its armoured volume.
Last checked October 2, 2026.
