7,300 t16,100,000 lb
The Eiffel Tower’s iron structure weighs about 7,300 tonnes (roughly 16.1 million lb). That is the figure the official site gives for the metal frame alone. Counting everything else, such as lifts, floors, restaurants, shops and antennas, the whole tower weighs about 10,100 tonnes (about 22.3 million lb).
| Whole tower todayIron frame plus lifts, floors, shops, restaurants and antennas | 10,100 t22,300,000 lb |
|---|---|
| Iron structure18,038 iron parts held together by 2.5 million rivets | 7,300 t16,100,000 lb |
The official Eiffel Tower website lists two numbers: 7,300 tonnes for the metal frame and 10,100 tonnes in total. The first is the tower as Gustave Eiffel built it, 18,038 iron parts joined by 2.5 million rivets. The second adds everything that sits on that frame today, from lifts and floors to restaurants, shops and the broadcasting antennas at the top. The English version of the site says “tons”, but these are metric tonnes.
The iron is puddle iron, an almost pure wrought iron made by refining cast iron. It came from the Forges de Pompey near Nancy. Steel was starting to be used in construction at the time, but Eiffel trusted iron, which he had used in all his earlier work.
The total has not always been the same. During a renovation in the early 1980s, the Christian Science Monitor reported that more than 1,000 tons of iron and concrete were being taken off, roughly 15% of the tower’s weight, mostly from the first platform, whose floor was replaced with lighter materials.
For something over 300 m tall, 7,300 tonnes is not much. If all its iron were melted down and poured into the square formed by its four legs, 125 m on each side, it would make a layer only about 6 cm (2.4 in) deep.
The air around it weighs about as much. A box just big enough to hold the tower, 324 m by 125 m by 125 m, contains about 6,200 tonnes of air. A cylinder just wide enough to fit the base holds more: by our maths about 7.9 million cubic metres, or roughly 9,600 tonnes of air, more than the iron itself.
Scaling shows it too. Weight goes down with the cube of size, so an iron copy 1,000 times smaller, about 31 cm tall, would weigh 7,300 tonnes divided by a billion: about 7 grams (a quarter of an ounce), not much more than a sheet of printer paper.
Puddle iron rusts, so the tower’s protection is its paint. Each repainting campaign uses about 60 tonnes of paint (about 132,000 lb) on 250,000 square metres of surface, mostly applied by hand with brushes by around 50 painters. The official site estimates that about 15 tonnes of paint wears away between two campaigns.
The tower has been repainted 20 times since 1889, roughly once every 7 years. The 20th campaign, started in 2019, was the first to strip parts of the structure back to bare metal, and it brought back the yellow-brown colour Eiffel chose in 1907.
The iron structure weighs about 16.1 million lb, or about 8,050 US tons. The whole tower, with lifts, floors, restaurants and antennas, weighs about 22.3 million lb, or about 11,130 US tons.
It is 330 m (1,083 ft) tall today, including the antennas added at the top in 1957, 2000 and 2022. Without them it is 312 m (1,024 ft), its height when it opened in 1889.
Yes, slightly, because iron expands when it warms. The official site describes the change as a few millimetres to a few centimetres, while a 2025 calculation published in The Conversation puts the difference between a cold winter day and a hot summer day at 12 to 15 cm. On a sunny day the top also leans away from the sun and traces a rough circle about 15 cm across.
No. It is made of puddle iron, a kind of wrought iron, from the Forges de Pompey in Lorraine. Eiffel chose iron over steel because he had used it in all his earlier bridges and viaducts.
Last checked October 3, 2026.
