How many stripes are on the U.S. flag?
Guess before you scroll — the answer is below
The answer
13 stripes
The flag has 13 stripes, alternating red and white, one for each of the original Thirteen Colonies. Unlike the 50 stars, which have changed 26 times as new states joined, the 13 stripes have been fixed since a 1818 law locked the design in place once the "growing flag" idea got impractical.
How to get close to this number
The stripes encode the founding colonies, so this site's companion question on the Thirteen Colonies gives the answer directly. A flag that carries two counts — stripes for the founding, stars for the present — makes both retrievable from either.
The design history in the explanation is the interesting part: the stripes were fixed by law in 1818, after an earlier version added a stripe per state and became unworkable. A flag that grows in two dimensions runs out of room, so the design was frozen in one dimension and left growing in the other.
The asymmetry that produces is worth noticing. The stars have changed twenty-six times and the stripes not at all since, which means the flag records the founding permanently and the present continuously. That is an unusual amount of information for a national symbol to carry, and it was arrived at by abandoning a design that did not scale.
Where this number comes from
| Source | U.S. Department of State |
|---|---|
| Figure refers to | 2023 |
| Last checked | |
| Unit | stripes |
Numbers move. If this one has drifted from its source, let us know.
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