Where Is Your Liver? Location, Size and Liver Pain

Where your liver is located

Your liver lives on the right side of your upper body, tucked under your ribs and right next to your stomach (1). Merck's consumer manual places it, along with your gallbladder, in the upper right portion of your abdomen (2).

Here's the part most diagrams skip. The liver is a wedge, thick on the right and tapering toward the left, so it doesn't stay politely on one side. Cleveland Clinic notes that your stomach and liver overlap with your pancreas in the upper middle of your abdomen, the area just below your breastbone that doctors call the epigastric region (3).

That rib cage is doing real work, too. Most of your liver sits behind it, which is why you can't usually feel your own liver by poking your belly, and why a healthy one keeps such a low profile.

How to find your liver on your own body

Want a quick, hands-on way to picture it? Try this:

1. Put your right hand flat on the lowest ribs on your right side, fingers pointing toward your belly button.
2. Most of your liver sits behind and above your palm, protected by those ribs.
3. Slide your hand toward the center, just under your breastbone. The thinner left lobe reaches into this area, where it overlaps your stomach.
4. Now picture the gallbladder hiding under the liver's lower edge on the right side, close to where your ribs end.

Your liver has two main sections, called lobes. The right lobe is the larger of the two, and both are packed with blood vessels and thousands of tiny clusters of liver cells called lobules (1). Those lobules are where the day-to-day work happens.

How big is your liver?

Bigger than you'd guess! Cleveland Clinic describes the liver as a spongy, reddish-brown wedge about the size and shape of a football, weighing between 3 and 5 pounds (1). Merck calls it the largest and, in some ways, the most complex internal organ in the body (4).

Size also varies from person to person. In an ultrasound survey of 2,080 adults aged 18 to 88, the average liver measured 14.0 cm (about 5.5 inches) top to bottom along a line straight down from the middle of the collarbone. Men averaged 14.5 cm and women 13.5 cm. Body mass index and height were the biggest factors, and age and sex mattered too. In men, frequent drinking was also linked to liver size (5).

So a bigger frame usually means a bigger liver, and that's normal. Only a doctor can tell you whether yours is enlarged, usually with an exam and imaging.

The organs that share your liver's neighborhood

Your liver has company, and that's the key to understanding right-side aches. Cleveland Clinic's map of the upper right quadrant includes your gallbladder on the far right, half of your pancreas and most of your liver and bile ducts (3).

• Gallbladder. A small pouch under the liver that stores bile. Liver and gallbladder are connected by a set of ducts called the biliary tract, which drains into the first part of your small intestine (2).
• Bile ducts. The tubes that carry bile from your liver toward your gut (1).
• Stomach and pancreas. Toward the middle, where the left lobe overlaps them (3).
• Small intestine. Just downstream, where bile does its digestive work.

Because these organs are packed so closely together, a pain in that corner can come from any of them. More on that in a minute.

Why your liver sits right there

Location is strategy. Your liver gets blood directly from your intestines through the portal vein, and that blood carries nearly everything your gut absorbed, from nutrients to medications (4). Sitting right beside the digestive tract means your liver gets the first look at what you eat and drink.

From that spot, it performs more than 500 functions and filters more than 250 gallons of blood every day (1). It stores sugar as glycogen and releases it between meals, makes proteins such as albumin and clotting factors, and breaks down drugs and other compounds so they can leave the body in bile or urine (4). It's also one of the only organs that can regenerate itself (1). Talk about a transformer!

If you'd like the bigger picture of how alcohol fits into all that, our weekly plan on how to help your liver recover from alcohol picks up where this section leaves off.

What liver pain can feel like

Liver pain usually shows up as a dull ache or a feeling of fullness or discomfort in the upper right part of your abdomen, under the ribs. NIDDK counts mild discomfort over the liver, on the upper right of the abdomen, among the early signs of cirrhosis (6), and Cleveland Clinic notes that pain in the liver usually comes from inflammation, with acute causes such as viral or alcohol-related hepatitis more likely to hurt (3).

It can also turn up somewhere unexpected. Because your nerves form one connected network, a problem in your belly can be felt elsewhere, and Cleveland Clinic lists the liver among the causes of referred shoulder pain (7).

The trickier truth is that liver trouble is often quiet. You may have no symptoms at all in the earliest stage of cirrhosis (6), and early signs such as fatigue, a general feeling of illness, poor appetite and mild weight loss are easy to miss because so many other things cause them too (8). That's why blood tests, not twinges, are how most people find out what's going on.

When right-side pain isn't your liver

Here's the good news: plenty of upper right aches have nothing to do with your liver. Its neighbors are common culprits.

Your gallbladder

Gallstones are a classic one. When a stone blocks a bile duct, bile backs up into the gallbladder and causes a gallbladder attack, usually felt as pain in the upper right abdomen that can last several hours. These attacks often follow heavy meals and tend to strike in the evening or at night (9). Cleveland Clinic describes the pattern as intense pain that rises to a peak and then slowly fades, in episodes (3).

Everything else in the area

Your stomach and pancreas overlap in the upper middle of the belly, so indigestion, gas or a pancreas problem can all register in roughly the same spot (3). Sore muscles and bruised ribs can fool you too. Location alone can't tell you which organ is talking, so let a professional sort it out.

When to call a doctor about right-side pain

Trust your gut on this one, literally. Cleveland Clinic says stomach pain that doesn't go away, unintended weight loss and jaundice (yellow eyes and skin) are reasons to contact a healthcare provider (1). For a suspected gallbladder attack, NIDDK says to see a doctor right away if you have belly pain lasting several hours, any fever or chills, or yellowing of your skin or the whites of your eyes (9).

For a check-in without symptoms, the usual starting point is a blood test. A liver panel measures albumin, total protein, the enzymes ALP, ALT, AST and GGT, and bilirubin, and many of those markers are already part of the comprehensive metabolic panel from a routine checkup (10). Our guide on how to check your liver function walks through prep and results.

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