100 t220,000 lb
The Millennium Falcon weighs about 100 tonnes (roughly 220,000 lb) empty, by our estimate. Lucasfilm has never published an official mass: the figure comes from the ship’s size, 34.75 m long and 25.6 m wide, compared with real aircraft and spacecraft of similar bulk, such as the Space Shuttle orbiter.
No film or official source gives the Falcon a mass. The StarWars.com databank lists only its length, 34.75 m, and the technical specifications collected on Wookieepedia cover its size, speed, crew and cargo capacity but not its weight. Any number you see, ours included, is an estimate.
We start from size. The Falcon is a saucer about 25 m across and a few metres thick, plus two forward mandibles and a side cockpit, which adds up to very roughly 1,000 to 1,500 cubic metres of hull. A Boeing 737-800 weighs 41.4 t empty, which works out to around 100 kg for every cubic metre of its fuselage and wings. Built that lightly, the Falcon would come out at about 100 to 150 tonnes.
The Space Shuttle is a good real-world check: a spacecraft about the same length (37 m) that weighed 80.7 tonnes with its main engines installed. The Falcon is much wider and bulkier than the Shuttle, so 100 t is a modest, round figure. With armour plating, heavy guns, a reactor and a hyperdrive on board, the real ship could easily be heavier.
The Falcon is a modified YT-1300 Corellian light freighter, 34.75 m long, about 25.6 m wide and 7.8 m tall. That makes it a little shorter than a Boeing 737-800 (39.5 m), but where the plane is a slim 3.76 m tube, the Falcon is a wide, flat disc, so it holds far more volume for its length.
Inside there is room for a pilot, co-pilot, two gunners and a handful of passengers, and reference material lists a cargo capacity of 100 metric tons. If the hold were full, the loaded ship could weigh around twice our empty estimate.
For The Empire Strikes Back, Marcon Fabrications, a heavy engineering firm in Pembroke Dock, Wales, built a full-size Falcon in a former flying-boat hangar in spring 1979, under the code name “Magic Roundabout”. A crew of 30 to 40 took three months to build it. It measured over 24 m long and 19 m wide and weighed 23 tonnes, then was taken apart and shipped to Elstree Studios for filming.
That prop is the only Falcon anyone has actually weighed, but it was a set built to be filmed, not flown: no engines, no cargo, no armour. It was also shorter than the 34.75 m the ship is officially given today, so it tells you little about what the starship itself would weigh.
No. Lucasfilm’s databank gives only its length, 34.75 m, and none of the official specifications list a mass. Figures online, including our 100 tonnes, are estimates.
About 220,000 lb empty, using our estimate of 100 tonnes. With a full 100 metric tons of cargo it would be around 440,000 lb.
Star Wars reference material lists 100 metric tons of cargo capacity for the Falcon, about as much as we estimate the empty ship itself weighs.
It is a bit shorter: 34.75 m against 39.5 m for a 737-800. But the Falcon is a disc about 25.6 m wide, so it is far bulkier and, by our estimate, more than twice as heavy as an empty 737.
The full-size Falcon built in Wales for The Empire Strikes Back weighed 23 tonnes, about 50,700 lb. It was a film set with no engines, so it was much lighter than a real ship would be.
Last checked October 2, 2026.
