The liver sits on the right side of your body, tucked into the upper right portion of your abdominal cavity. It occupies most of the right upper quadrant of your abdomen, just below the diaphragm (the muscle you use to breathe) and on top of your stomach, right kidney, and intestines.
Exact Position in Your Body
Your liver is the largest solid organ in your body, weighing roughly 900 to 1,100 grams in most adults, or about two pounds. It’s wedge-shaped, wider on the right and tapering to a thinner edge that crosses the midline of your body slightly into the left side. So while the bulk of the liver is on the right, a smaller portion does extend past your centerline to the left.
The lower ribs act as a natural shield for the liver. Ribs 7 through 10 on the right side partially encase it, which is why you can’t normally feel your liver by pressing on your abdomen. In a healthy person, only the very bottom edge of the liver peeks out below the rib cage, if it’s detectable at all. When a doctor checks your liver during a physical exam, they press upward just below your right rib cage and ask you to take a deep breath. As the diaphragm pushes the liver downward, the doctor can sometimes feel its edge slip past their fingertips.
What Sits Next to the Liver
The liver’s neighbors help explain why problems in the area can produce a range of symptoms. Directly above it is the diaphragm, which separates your chest cavity from your abdomen. The gallbladder, a small pouch that stores bile, is tucked underneath the liver’s right lobe. The stomach sits just to its left, and the right kidney lies behind and slightly below it. The liver is divided into a larger right lobe and a smaller left lobe, with two additional smaller lobes visible from behind.
Where Liver Pain Shows Up
Because of its position, liver-related discomfort is typically felt in the upper right abdomen, under the ribs on your right side. It often presents as a dull ache or a sense of fullness rather than a sharp, pinpointed pain. The liver itself doesn’t have many pain-sensing nerves inside it, but the capsule surrounding it does. When the liver swells from inflammation, infection, or other conditions, that capsule stretches, and that’s what you feel.
One pattern that catches people off guard is referred pain in the right shoulder. This happens because the nerves serving the diaphragm and the liver capsule share pathways with nerves from the shoulder area. Your brain can’t always distinguish where the signal originated, so it interprets the discomfort as shoulder pain. Right shoulder pain that gets worse when you breathe in deeply, especially if it comes with fatigue, fever, or unexplained weight loss, can point to a liver issue worth investigating.
When the Liver Is on the Left
In rare cases, the liver is on the left side of the body. A condition called situs inversus causes all the major organs to be mirror-reversed from their normal positions, so the liver ends up on the left, the heart tips to the right, and so on. This affects roughly 1 in every 10,000 people. Most people with situs inversus live completely normal lives and may not even know about it until an imaging scan reveals the reversal. It becomes medically relevant mainly during surgery or diagnosis, when doctors need to know where organs actually are rather than where they’re expected to be.
How to Locate It on Yourself
Place your right hand flat against your right side, fingers pointing inward, with your fingertips just below the bottom edge of your rib cage. The bulk of your liver is directly behind and above your hand, shielded by bone. If you press gently inward and upward while taking a slow, deep breath, you’re mimicking what doctors do during a liver exam. In most healthy adults, you won’t feel anything distinct, and that’s normal. An easily felt liver edge that extends well below the ribs can indicate that the liver is enlarged, a condition with many possible causes ranging from temporary and harmless to serious.