Your liver is on the right side of your body. It sits in the upper right portion of your abdominal cavity, tucked beneath your ribs and just below your diaphragm. Most of the organ lives on the right, but it’s large enough that a smaller portion extends across the midline into the left side of your upper abdomen.
Exactly Where the Liver Sits
The liver occupies most of the upper right area of your abdomen, a zone doctors call the right hypochondric region. It sits directly beneath the diaphragm (the dome-shaped muscle that helps you breathe), on top of your stomach, right kidney, and intestines. Your rib cage covers and protects the organ, with the lowest ribs wrapping around it down to about the tenth rib.
Because the liver is so large, it doesn’t stay neatly on one side. The right lobe makes up the bulk of the organ, but a smaller left lobe stretches across your midline and can reach as far left as the left side of your rib cage. From a surgical perspective, the split between right and left is roughly 60/40. Still, when people talk about “which side” the liver is on, the answer is firmly the right.
How Big the Liver Actually Is
The liver is the largest internal organ and the largest gland in the human body, weighing about 1.4 to 1.5 kg in men and 1.2 to 1.4 kg in women. In an adult, it typically spans around 15 cm from top to bottom when measured along the right side of the torso. That’s roughly the length of a dollar bill. The organ grows throughout childhood, starting at about 5 cm at age five and reaching its full adult size by maturity.
Liver size varies naturally with sex and body size. On ultrasound, anything under 16 cm is generally considered normal. Above that threshold, a doctor may evaluate for an enlarged liver, a condition called hepatomegaly.
How to Feel Your Liver
You can sometimes feel the lower edge of your liver yourself, though it takes the right technique. Lie on your back and place your fingers on the right side of your abdomen, just below your rib cage and to the side of the center line of your belly. Take a slow, deep breath in. As you inhale, the diaphragm pushes the liver downward, and you may feel a firm, smooth edge slip beneath your fingertips.
The liver moves with every breath. During a deep inhale, it shifts downward by roughly a centimeter or more compared to where it rests when you exhale. That downward movement is what makes the lower edge briefly accessible below the ribs. Press gently. Pushing too hard actually makes it harder to feel.
In many healthy people, the liver edge isn’t palpable at all because it stays tucked behind the rib cage. If you can easily feel a firm mass extending well below your ribs without pressing deeply, that could signal enlargement worth mentioning to a doctor.
What Liver Pain Feels Like
Because the liver itself has very few pain-sensing nerves inside it, discomfort typically comes from stretching of the capsule that surrounds the organ. When the liver swells from inflammation, fatty buildup, or congestion, that capsule stretches, and you feel it as a dull ache or soreness under your ribs on the right side. The sensation can be easy to confuse with a muscle strain, a rib injury, or gallbladder trouble.
Liver-related pain sometimes shows up in an unexpected place: the right shoulder. This is called referred pain. The nerves serving the liver capsule and diaphragm share pathways with nerves from the shoulder area, so your brain can misinterpret the signal. A persistent ache in the right shoulder alongside upper-right abdominal discomfort is a combination worth paying attention to.
What Sits Nearby
The liver doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s part of a tightly packed neighborhood in your upper abdomen. The gallbladder, a small pouch that stores bile produced by the liver, tucks into a groove on the liver’s underside. The stomach sits to the liver’s left and slightly below it. The right kidney is positioned behind and beneath the right lobe.
This proximity matters because pain in the upper right abdomen has several possible sources. Gallstones, kidney problems, and even gas trapped in the intestine can all produce discomfort in the same general area. Location alone isn’t enough to pinpoint a cause, which is why imaging and blood tests play a big role when something feels off in that region.
When the Liver Is on the Left Side
In rare cases, the liver actually is on the left. A genetic condition called situs inversus causes the major organs in the chest and abdomen to develop as a mirror image of typical anatomy. The liver and gallbladder end up on the left side, while the spleen and stomach shift to the right. This affects about 1 in every 10,000 people.
Most people with situs inversus live completely normal lives and may not even know their organs are flipped until an unrelated scan reveals it. The condition can, however, overlap with other issues. About half of people with a genetic disorder affecting the tiny hairlike structures that help clear mucus from the airways also have situs inversus, a combination known as Kartagener syndrome. Congenital heart defects are another possible association. But isolated situs inversus on its own rarely causes health problems. It just means your liver is the exception to the “right side” rule.