RMS Titanic
White Star Line · Liner · Sunk 1912 · built by Harland & Wolff
Titanic was the largest ship in the world for ten months and has been the world's reference object for size ever since. Every modern giant gets compared to her; on this site, she is a bar on almost every chart.
Derived metrics
Computed by ships.fyi from the core specification — see how we calculate these.
How big is it, really?
The RMS Titanic's length overall, against things you already know the size of.
The 747-8 bar is the longest airliner ever built — our sibling site aircraft.fyi measures everything that flies the same way.
One RMS Titanic = 2.6 football pitches · 11 blue whales · 3.5 Boeing 747-8s laid end to end.
The numbers
| Length overall | 269.06 m |
|---|---|
| Beam | 28.19 m |
| Gross register tonnage | 46,328 GRT (pre-1982 measurement — not directly comparable to modern GT) |
| Passengers & crew | ≈2,224 aboard on the maiden voyage (capacity ≈3,327) |
| Service speed | 21 kn (max ≈23 kn) |
| Funnels | 4 (the fourth was a ventilation dummy) |
| Maiden voyage | 10 April 1912, Southampton |
| Sank | 15 April 1912, North Atlantic — ≈1,500 lives lost |
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Last verified: 2026-07-15 · Spot an error? business@luck.fyi
What makes it different
Titanic is on this site for the same reason she is in everyone's head: she is the unit people actually think in. 'Five Titanics' means something to a reader in a way that 248,663 gross tons never will, which is why she appears as a reference bar on the scale charts of nearly every modern giant here.
As a ship she was the second of White Star's Olympic class, built by Harland & Wolff in Belfast as the largest moving objects yet made — 269 metres, 46,328 gross register tons, and a first-class experience aimed at beating Cunard on luxury rather than speed. Four days into her maiden voyage she struck an iceberg at 23:40 on 14 April 1912 and sank in under three hours, with the loss of around 1,500 of the 2,224 people aboard — lifeboat capacity existed for barely half of them.
The disaster rewrote maritime law: the first SOLAS convention of 1914, lifeboats for all, 24-hour radio watch, and the International Ice Patrol all trace directly to that night. And her size, remarkable then, is the sharpest illustration of a century of shipbuilding: the tonnage board on this site starts at more than five of her.
The Titanic line
Olympic class
Who operates the Titanic
No current operator — this ship's sailing days are over. The operators of record are below.
WSLWhite Star LineWhite Star's challenge to Cunard's speed records was comfort and scale rather than pace.1✓→Titanic, asked and answered
How long is the RMS Titanic?
How big was the Titanic in modern terms?
Who operated the RMS Titanic?
Does the RMS Titanic fit through the Panama Canal?
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Sources
Primary
- Encyclopedia Titanica — ship data ↗
- UK National Archives — Titanic inquiry ↗
- Harland & Wolff — heritage ↗