How heavy is a saltwater crocodile?

Far less than the famous giants. Adult males are typically 3.5 to 5 m (11 ft 6 in to 16 ft 5 in) long and weigh 200 to 1,100 kg, with the average male at 4 to 4.5 m and 408 to 770 kg. The Queensland Museum says the species can reach 7 m but rarely grows past 5 m, and that large males over 6 m weigh more than 1,000 kg, which is the weight used here.

Females are much smaller. Most are 2.7 to 3.1 m (8 ft 10 in to 10 ft 2 in) long and weigh 76 to 103 kg, and the Queensland Museum puts their top weight at about 150 kg (330 lb). An adult male typically weighs four to five times as much as an adult female and can be twice her length.

Weight climbs much faster than length. Lolong, at 6.17 m, was only about a third longer than the 4.59 m, 531 kg crocodile used in a 2012 bite study, but he weighed about twice as much.

Lolong was caught in a creek in Bunawan, Agusan del Sur, in the Philippines on 3 September 2011. National Geographic crocodile expert Adam Britton sedated and measured him that November at 6.17 m (20 ft 3 in), and his weight was given as 1,075 kg (2,370 lb). Guinness World Records certified him as the largest crocodile in captivity in June 2012. He died on 10 February 2013 of pneumonia and cardiac arrest.

The title then passed to Cassius, a 5.48 m (18 ft) male at Marineland Melanesia on Green Island, near Cairns in Queensland. He had lived there since 1987 after being moved from the Northern Territory, was thought to be more than 110 years old, and died in November 2024. News reports put him at more than one tonne, and Wikipedia gives about 1,300 kg (2,870 lb), though that is an estimate rather than a weighing.

Wild crocodiles longer than these have been measured, but not weighed. The skin and skull of a crocodile killed in Papua New Guinea in 1979 measured 6.2 m, or about 6.3 m after allowing for shrinkage. Very large males over 6 m may weigh up to about 2,000 kg (4,400 lb), and about 7 m (23 ft) is considered the most the species can reach.

In a 2012 study published in PLOS ONE, Gregory Erickson and colleagues measured the bite force of living crocodilians. One saltwater crocodile bit with 16,414 N (3,689 lbf), which the authors called the highest bite force measured in any animal. The largest saltwater crocodile in the study was 4.59 m long and weighed 531 kg (1,171 lb).

For comparison, the highest bite recorded in a mammalian carnivore was 4,500 N, in a spotted hyena. Extrapolating from their data, the researchers estimated that a 6.7 m saltwater crocodile would bite with about 27,531 to 34,424 N (6,187 to 7,736 lbf), but nobody has measured one that big.