17 kg37.5 lb
Yoda weighs 17 kg, about 37 lb, according to Scholastic’s Star Wars: Head-to-Head Tag Teams (2011), the figure Wookieepedia gives him alongside his official height of 66 cm. That book belongs to the older Legends continuity, though. Today’s canon lists him lighter, at 13 kg, from a 2015 junior novel of The Empire Strikes Back.
| Legends: Star Wars: Head-to-Head Tag Teams (2011)Scholastic book by Pablo Hidalgo; the number the game uses | 17 kg37.5 lb |
|---|---|
| Canon: The Empire Strikes Back: So You Want to Be a Jedi? (2015)Disney Lucasfilm Press junior novel by Adam Gidwitz | 13 kg28.7 lb |
The films never weigh Yoda. His height is official: StarWars.com’s Databank lists him at 0.66 m, about 2 ft 2 in. His weight comes from tie-in books. Wookieepedia’s Legends article, which covers the stories published before Disney reset the timeline in 2014, gives 17 kg and cites Star Wars: Head-to-Head Tag Teams, a 2011 Scholastic book of imagined character match-ups written by Lucasfilm’s Pablo Hidalgo.
Wookieepedia’s canon article gives a different number, 13 kg, citing The Empire Strikes Back: So You Want to Be a Jedi?, Adam Gidwitz’s 2015 retelling of the film for young readers. Neither book is more than a passing stat, so both are best read as rough guides.
In The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Yoda was a puppet built by makeup artist Stuart Freeborn and performed by Frank Oz, who held it above his head. Puppeteer Kathy Mullen, who worked the right hand, ears and smile while Oz did the rest, recalled that Yoda was “big and heavy”. No published source gives the puppet’s actual weight.
That weight left a mark on the character. Animation director Rob Coleman told StarWars.com that the puppet’s ears gave a little wiggle every time Oz turned it, because his arms trembled from holding it up. When Coleman’s team made Yoda fully digital for Attack of the Clones, they kept the tremble: without it, the computer-made Yoda looked too young.
In 2015, physicist Rhett Allain tried to work out Yoda’s weight from the Dagobah scene where Yoda stands on Luke’s raised foot while Luke balances on one hand. If the pair are balanced, their combined centre of mass must sit right above Luke’s hand. Taking Luke as 1.75 m and 68 kg, the maths said Yoda had to weigh minus 43.7 kg.
Negative mass is impossible, so Allain’s conclusion was that Luke was not holding the pose by himself: Yoda was quietly using the Force to keep him up.
Grogu, the Mandalorian’s “Baby Yoda”, has no official weight. StarWars.com lists him at 0.34 m, about half Yoda’s height. If he were simply a scaled-down Yoda, his weight would shrink with the cube of his height: half the height means roughly an eighth of the weight, so about 2.3 kg next to Yoda’s 17 kg. That is our estimate, not an official figure, and his big head and ears probably make it a little low.
Yoda is 0.66 m tall, about 2 ft 2 in, according to the official StarWars.com Databank.
He was 900 years old. He says so himself in Return of the Jedi, and current canon dates his birth to 896 years before the Battle of Yavin and his death on Dagobah to 4 years after it.
Lucasfilm has never given a weight for Grogu, only his height of 0.34 m. Scaling Yoda’s 17 kg down to that height gives roughly 2.3 kg, but that is only an estimate.
No exact figure has been published. The people who worked it describe it as big and heavy, and the strain of holding it overhead made Frank Oz’s arms shake, which you can see as a small wobble of Yoda’s ears.
Both appear in official books. 17 kg is from a 2011 Legends book, 13 kg from a 2015 canon junior novel, and the films themselves never say.
Last checked October 2, 2026.
