Vicky Kaushal Age 2026: How Old Is Vicky Kaushal Today?

Last updated: November 14, 2026  ·  By Nathan Cole

Vicky Kaushal is 38 years old in 2026. The Bollywood actor was born on May 16, 1988, in a suburban chawl in Malad, Mumbai, which makes him 38 years, 5 months and 29 days old as of November 14, 2026 — he turned 38 on May 16, 2026. If a search result told you he is still 37, that page is out of date, and this article shows the arithmetic so you can check it yourself. Kaushal is the actor who went from an engineering degree and an assistant-director job to a National Film Award for Uri: The Surgical Strike, and then, at 36, headlined Chhaava, a Rs 600.10 crore hit in India alone.

This is the full story behind the number, kept current to November 14, 2026: the chawl childhood in Malad, the engineering degree his father wanted him to finish first, the slow climb from Masaan at 27 to a National Award at 30, the Chhaava year that changed his market value, and the freshest chapter — fatherhood, after he and his wife Katrina Kaif welcomed their son Vihaan in November 2025 and shared his first photo in January 2026.

How Old Is Vicky Kaushal in 2026?

Vicky Kaushal is 38 years old in November 2026. He was born on May 16, 1988, in Malad, Mumbai, so on November 14, 2026, he is 38 years, 5 months and 29 days old. He turns 39 on May 16, 2027. That is the whole answer, and every serious film profile agrees with it: Wikipedia gives his age as 38, Sacnilk’s profile — updated on the same day this article was researched — lists “16 May 1988 (age 38)”, and Filmibeat’s celebrity page gives the same date and the same age.

The reason the question needs a full article instead of a one-line answer is that the internet disagrees with itself about Kaushal’s age. Type his name into a search box and you will find pages that call him 37 and pages that call him 38 — sometimes on websites that updated only weeks ago. The confusion has a specific cause, and it is worth a few hundred words of your time, because it is the difference between a search result that is right and one that is a year out.

Kaushal’s age matters more than the usual celebrity-birthday trivia because of where he sits in his career. At 38 he is no longer the outsider who broke through with Masaan at 27 or the 30-year-old who won a National Award for Uri. He is a leading man who has just delivered the biggest Hindi hit of 2025, a new father, and an actor with two of the most anticipated films in Indian cinema on his slate. He is also, at 38, at the age when Bollywood leading men either settle into a decade of big-budget stardom or start losing the biggest roles to younger names — and the Chhaava numbers say Kaushal is doing the first.

Why Some Sites Still Say 37

A handful of biography sites still list Vicky Kaushal as 37, and the reason is timing, not a different birth date. Biogooglies, for example, says he was “born on 16 May 1988, making him 37 years old as of 2026” — but that page was last updated around January 2026, four months before his 38th birthday. InsideBoxOffice, updated roughly 100 days before this article, also still says 37. Both pages have the right birth date and the wrong age, because nobody went back and changed the number after May 16.

The maths takes ten seconds. Kaushal was born on May 16, 1988. He turned 35 on May 16, 2023. He turned 36 on May 16, 2024. He turned 37 on May 16, 2025. He turned 38 on May 16, 2026. On any date between May 16, 2026 and May 15, 2027 — including November 14, 2026, the date of this article — he is 38. A page that says 37 in November 2026 was written before a birthday that has already happened.

The tell is that the stale pages contradict themselves. Biogooglies’ own text gives the birth date as May 16, 1988, and then calls him 37 “as of 2026” — a sentence that was true in January and false by June. Sacnilk, Andown, Naction, ProfileAge and Bollywood Fox, all checked on the same day, list 38. When a profile page and its own birth date disagree, trust the birth date: it is the one fact every source shares, and the age follows from it by subtraction.

There is a second, smaller source of confusion. Some low-quality biography sites still show Kaushal’s age from the year the page was written — 36 in a 2024 page, 37 in a 2025 page — and search engines keep serving those stale pages. The birth date is the anchor. Everything else is arithmetic, and the arithmetic says 38 until May 16, 2027.

Early Life: A Chawl in Malad, Mumbai

Vicky Kaushal was born on May 16, 1988, in a suburban chawl in Malad, Mumbai, to Sham Kaushal, an action director in Hindi films, and Veena Kaushal, a homemaker. His younger brother, Sunny Kaushal, is also an actor. The chawl detail matters, because it is the part of the story Kaushal himself keeps returning to in interviews: he grew up in a one-room home in a working-class neighbourhood, the son of a stuntman who had come to Mumbai from Punjab with little money, and his childhood was spent watching his father leave for film sets before dawn.

Sham Kaushal’s own story is the foundation of his son’s. He arrived in Mumbai in the late 1970s, worked as a stuntman, and built a career as one of Hindi cinema’s most respected action directors. Vicky grew up around film sets, but the household was not a film-family household in the star-kid sense — his father was a technician, not a producer or a star, and the family lived modestly. That distinction shows up in the way Kaushal talks about his early years: he has described himself as a shy, studious boy who was good at mathematics and had no plan to act.

School and college followed the safe path his parents wanted. Kaushal studied engineering at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology in Mumbai, graduating in electronics and telecommunications. It was during those college years that the acting bug took hold — he began doing theatre, joined director Manav Kaul’s theatre group, and started to think seriously about a career his father had warned him was brutally hard to break into. He finished the degree first. The engineering qualification is still the detail that surprises people who only know him as a film star, and it is the reason his story reads differently from the usual star-kid biography: he had a fallback, and he chose to walk away from it.

From Engineering to the Sets of Gangs of Wasseypur

Kaushal was 24 when he got his first real break in the film industry — not as an actor, but as an assistant director on Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012). The job was the film-school education he never formally had: two years on Kashyap’s sets, watching how a film gets built from the inside, learning camera, staging and the discipline of a working set. He has said in interviews that those two years taught him more about acting than any acting class could have, because he saw what directors actually need from the people in front of the camera.

The small acting roles came next, and they were small in the honest sense: a bit part here, a short film there, theatre work with Manav Kaul’s group Aranya. He auditioned constantly and was rejected constantly. The story he tells most often is from this period — years of auditions in Andheri, living on a tight budget, being told he did not look like a conventional Hindi-film hero. At 25 and 26 he was still an unknown, and the engineering degree was still sitting in a drawer as the sensible alternative.

The break came from a director who had seen his theatre work. Neeraj Ghaywan cast him as Deepak Kumar, a lower-caste boy in love with a girl from a higher caste, in Masaan (2015). Kaushal was 27. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, won the FIPRESCI Prize in the Un Certain Regard section, and Kaushal’s performance — quiet, restrained, heartbreaking — was singled out by critics who had never heard his name. It was a debut that announced a serious actor rather than a new star, and that distinction shaped everything that followed.

Vicky Kaushal’s Career, Year by Year and Age by Age

Kaushal’s career reads differently when it is laid out by age. The early years were slow — a debut at 27, when most Bollywood stars are already established — and the breakthrough years came at 30 and 36, when most leading men are supposed to be past their first peak. The table below gives the milestones with the age attached, because for an age article the age is the point.

Most Bollywood stars announce themselves before 25 and spend their late twenties consolidating. Kaushal did it the other way round: he spent his twenties learning the job — assisting a director, doing theatre, taking small parts — and then, at 27, played the role that made critics take notice, and at 30 played the role that made the whole country take notice.

Masaan at 27: The Debut That Put Him on the Map

Masaan (2015) is a small film about big things — caste, grief, love and the river Ganges in Varanasi — and Kaushal, at 27, carried its emotional centre as Deepak, a young man from the Dom community who burns bodies on the ghats and falls in love with a girl from a higher caste. The performance had none of the showiness of a debut actor trying to be noticed. Critics praised the restraint: a young man who lets the camera come to him instead of chasing it.

The film’s Cannes premiere changed Kaushal’s standing overnight in the way only Cannes can. A debut actor in a small Indian independent film, screened in the Un Certain Regard section, winning the FIPRESCI Prize — that is the kind of launch that gets a young actor meetings with every serious director in Mumbai. Kaushal used those meetings carefully. Instead of chasing the big commercial launch, he took a dark, against-type role in Anurag Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016), playing a drug-addled young man opposite Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s serial killer. It was a film that almost nobody saw in theatres and almost every critic admired.

The two choices together — Masaan then Raman Raghav 2.0 — set the pattern for the first half of Kaushal’s career. He was building a reputation as the actor directors called when they needed someone who would do the hard work and not ask for the glamour. That reputation is what put him on the list for Raazi, and what made Aditya Dhar trust him with Uri.

Uri at 30: The Role That Won the National Award

Uri: The Surgical Strike (January 2019) is the film that turned Vicky Kaushal from a critics’ favourite into a household name. He was 30, playing Major Vihaan Singh Shergill, the special-forces officer who leads the retaliatory strike after the 2016 Uri attack. The film collected Rs 245.36 crore in India (Bollywood Hungama) and around Rs 342 crore worldwide — numbers no one had predicted for a military drama with no established star in the lead.

The performance won him the National Film Award for Best Actor at the 66th National Film Awards, announced in August 2019. He was 31 by the time the award was announced, and it made him one of the youngest winners of the honour in recent years. The award mattered for a specific reason: it was the Indian state’s highest acting honour going to a man who, four years earlier, had been an unknown debutant in a small Cannes film. The distance between Masaan and Uri — four years, from a ghat in Varanasi to a military operation in Kashmir — is the whole arc of Kaushal’s rise.

The role also gave him the most quoted line of his career — “How’s the josh?” — which became a catchphrase far beyond the film, repeated by politicians, soldiers and schoolchildren. Kaushal has said the line followed him for years, and it is still the thing fans shout at him at public events. The name Vihaan, the character’s first name, came back into his life in a very different way in 2025, when he and Katrina Kaif gave it to their son.

30 to 33: Raazi, Sanju, Sardar Udham and Sam Bahadur

The year before Uri had already shown Kaushal’s range. In 2018, at 30, he appeared in two of the year’s biggest films in completely different registers: Raazi, Meghna Gulzar’s spy drama, where he played Iqbal Syed, the Pakistani army officer who marries Alia Bhatt’s Indian spy; and Sanju, Rajkumar Hirani’s biopic of Sanjay Dutt, where he played Kamli, Dutt’s loyal friend, and stole scenes from Ranbir Kapoor. Raazi collected Rs 123.84 crore in India; Sanju was one of the biggest hits of the decade. Two films, two supporting turns, and by the end of 2018 nobody in the industry was calling Kaushal a supporting actor any more.

Alia Bhatt, who was 25 when Raazi released, became a recurring collaborator — the two would reunite years later on Love & War, the Bhansali film Kaushal is shooting at 38. The Sanju connection mattered too: Ranbir Kapoor, whose age profile tracks a career that began a decade earlier, shared the screen with Kaushal in that film, and the two will share it again in Love & War.

Sardar Udham (2021) came at 33, and it was the riskiest choice of Kaushal’s career: a nearly three-hour, deliberately slow biopic of the revolutionary Udham Singh, released straight to streaming during the pandemic, with long stretches of silence and no commercial concessions. Critics called it his finest performance. It won him a Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actor and confirmed what Masaan had suggested — that Kaushal’s best work happens when a director gives him room and time.

Sam Bahadur (December 2023), at 35, put him back in uniform as Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, India’s first field marshal. The film was a modest box-office performer but a critical success, and it completed a run of biographical and military roles that had become Kaushal’s signature: real men, real history, played without caricature. Dunki (2023), a supporting turn in Rajkumar Hirani’s Shah Rukh Khan film, and Bad Newz (2024), a commercial comedy, filled out the same two years — the serious actor and the bankable star, alternating.

Chhaava at 36: The 600-Crore Turning Point

Chhaava, released on February 14, 2025, is the film that changed Vicky Kaushal’s commercial standing completely. He was 36, playing Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, the Maratha king, in a historical epic directed by Laxman Utekar. The film collected Rs 600.10 crore in India (Bollywood Hungama) and more than Rs 800 crore worldwide, making it the highest-grossing Hindi film of 2025 and Kaushal’s biggest hit by a distance — more than double the Indian gross of Uri.

The numbers put him in rare company. Chhaava became only the fourth Indian film to cross Rs 600 crore at the domestic box office, after Pushpa 2: The Rule (Rs 830.10 crore), Jawan (Rs 643.87 crore) and Stree 2 (Rs 627.02 crore). Kaushal joined Shah Rukh Khan, Rajkummar Rao and Allu Arjun in the Rs 600 crore club — and he did it as the solo lead of a historical film, a genre that had not produced a hit of that size in years.

The money followed the hit. Kaushal reportedly charged around Rs 10 crore for Chhaava — nearly 7% of the film’s reported Rs 130 crore budget — and reports after the release put his per-film fee at Rs 10–12 crore, with some outlets suggesting it could rise further. The fee matters because it is the clearest measure of what the industry thinks a star is worth, and Chhaava moved Kaushal from the Rs 4–6 crore bracket he had occupied for years into the top bracket of Hindi-film leading men.

The film also changed the conversation about his age. At 36, playing a warrior king in a physically demanding role — Kaushal trained for months, put on weight, grew his hair and beard — he looked the part of a man at the peak of his physical powers. The performance was praised for its intensity, and the film’s success silenced the quiet industry doubt that had followed him since Uri: whether a critics’ actor could ever carry a mass-market blockbuster alone. Chhaava answered that question with Rs 600 crore.

38 and What’s Next: Love and War, Mahavatar

At 38, Kaushal’s slate is the most ambitious of his career. Love & War, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s epic, pairs him with Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt — two actors whose careers began a decade before his, and two of the biggest names in Hindi cinema. The film is the one the industry is watching hardest: a Bhansali production, a love triangle, and a cast that puts Kaushal on equal billing with the two stars he supported in Raazi and Sanju eight years ago. The casting is itself a statement about where Kaushal stands at 38 — no longer the promising outsider, but a peer of the industry’s top tier.

Mahavatar Narsimha, his mythological epic, is reportedly targeting a December 2026 release. The film casts him as the man-lion avatar of Vishnu, and it is the kind of large-scale, effects-heavy project that would have been unthinkable for him five years ago. It follows the Chhaava template — history and mythology, scale and spectacle — and it is a bet that the audience who turned out for Sambhaji Maharaj will turn out for Narsimha too.

The two films together show a star at 38 thinking in terms of events rather than releases. Kaushal has said in interviews that he chooses scripts by asking whether the film will still matter in ten years, and at 38 he has the box-office proof to make that kind of choice stick. The next two years will tell whether Chhaava was a peak or a platform.

Family: Katrina Kaif, Marriage and Son Vihaan

Kaushal married actress Katrina Kaif on December 9, 2021, in an intimate ceremony at Six Senses Fort Barwara in Sawai Madhopur, Rajasthan. He was 33, she was 38. The wedding was one of the most covered celebrity events of the year, and the couple had kept the relationship private until the announcement — a discipline both of them have maintained since. Kaushal later revealed, in a November 2025 interview with Filmfare, that comedian Sunil Grover had played cupid, introducing the two of them.

Katrina Kaif’s net worth, estimated at Rs 224 crore, makes the couple one of Bollywood’s wealthiest pairings — combined estimates put their household wealth at Rs 265–304 crore — but the marriage is more often discussed for its discretion than its money. The couple live in a sea-facing apartment in Mumbai’s Juhu locality; Kaushal renewed the lease in April 2025 on a three-year term, with rent starting at Rs 17.01 lakh a month, a total of around Rs 6.2 crore over the lease period, according to Man’s World India. For a closer look at her physical profile, how tall Katrina Kaif is is covered on our sister site CelebAmerica.

The newest chapter began on November 7, 2025, when the couple welcomed their first child, a son. They kept the name private for two months, then revealed it on January 7, 2026, in a joint social-media post: Vihaan Kaushal. The name is a nod to Kaushal’s Uri character, Major Vihaan Singh Shergill — the role that won him the National Film Award. On November 8, 2026, during Diwali, the couple shared the first photo showing their son’s face, calling him “our brightest Diwali yet”. Kaushal was 37 when his son was born and 38 when the world first saw his face.

His father, Sham Kaushal, remains the family’s anchor — the action director whose career brought the family to Mumbai and whose work ethic his son cites as his model. His younger brother Sunny Kaushal, also an actor, is seven years younger, and the two are frequently photographed together at family events. The Kaushal household, for all its fame now, still reads in interviews as a close, ordinary Mumbai family that happened to produce two actors.

How Tall Is Vicky Kaushal?

Kaushal’s height is the one personal detail this article cannot settle with a single number. StarsUnfolded and WikiBio both list him at 6 ft 1 in (185 cm). Other profiles list 5 ft 10 in (178 cm). The honest answer is the range — 5 ft 9 in to 6 ft 1 in, or 175 to 185 cm — with 6 ft 1 in as the most commonly listed figure.

The disagreement is a reminder of how much of a celebrity’s listed biography is copied from site to site without anyone checking. Height is almost never measured on camera, and the number on a profile page is usually inherited from whichever site wrote it first. Kaushal himself has never publicly stated his height, and there is no verified measurement on record. What the photographs show is a man who stands tall next to his co-stars — visibly taller than Alia Bhatt (5 ft 3 in) and roughly the same height as Ranbir Kapoor (6 ft 0 in) in their shared frames — which fits the upper end of the range better than the lower end.

For the record: the range is 5 ft 9 in to 6 ft 1 in (175–185 cm). The figure most profiles use is 6 ft 1 in. This article publishes the range rather than pretending the disagreement does not exist.

Net Worth at 38: What the Reports Say

Kaushal’s net worth is the figure his fans search for most after his age, and it is also the figure with the widest disagreement. Published estimates in 2026 range from Rs 41 crore to Rs 140 crore — a spread so wide that it tells you more about the estimators than about Kaushal. This article anchors on the most recent dated estimate and shows the range, instead of picking one number silently.

The most recent dated estimate comes from YesItFirm, in October 2026, which puts his net worth at around Rs 60 crore (about $7 million), with a range of Rs 45–75 crore. The lower end of the published range, Rs 41 crore, comes from GQ India and widely circulated 2025 reports. The high end, Rs 140 crore, comes from Man’s World India in May 2025, citing Her Zindagi, ABP News and Times Now — a figure that most likely counts property at full value and gross career earnings rather than net wealth, and this article treats it as the high outlier. A $35 million figure from the aggregator networthbreakdown.com is a low-quality outlier with no reporting behind it, and it is not used as an anchor anywhere here.

What is documented is the income behind the estimates. His per-film fee is now reported at Rs 10–12 crore after Chhaava, against Rs 10 crore for that film and a reported Rs 12 crore for Uri. Endorsements — Oppo, Havells and Tata Motors among them — are reported at Rs 2–3 crore per campaign. Forbes India put his 2019 annual income at Rs 104.2 million ($1.4 million) when it ranked him 72nd on the Celebrity 100 list. The Juhu apartment lease, renewed in April 2025 at Rs 17.01 lakh a month, is the most concrete asset figure in the public record.

The honest summary is this: Kaushal is worth an estimated Rs 60 crore, in a reported range of Rs 41–140 crore, and the range exists because nobody outside his family and his accountant has seen the actual numbers. The direction of travel is clear, though — Chhaava pushed every component of his income up, and the two big films on his slate at 38 are the kind that pay the most.

How Vicky Kaushal Compares at 38: The Late Bloomer’s Peers

Kaushal’s career invites comparison with the men he shares screens and slates with, and the comparison flatters him. Ranbir Kapoor, who was 43 in 2026, began his career at 25 and was a star by 27 — the conventional path Kaushal never took. Ranveer Singh, who headlined Dhurandhar in 2026, is a near-contemporary who broke through earlier and louder. Hrithik Roshan, who was 52 in 2026, is the generation ahead — a star since 26 who is still headlining action films in his fifties, and the model for what a long career at the top looks like.

The comparison that defines Kaushal is the one with his own starting point. He debuted at 27, won a National Award at 30, and delivered his first Rs 600 crore film at 36. Most of his peers had their biggest hits a decade earlier in their careers. Kaushal’s arrived later, and that lateness is the point: he spent his twenties learning the craft instead of chasing stardom, and the craft is what carried him when the big roles finally came. A debut at 27 is late in Bollywood. A National Award at 30 and a Rs 600 crore hit at 36 are not.

At 38, Kaushal sits in a narrow window. He is old enough to have won everything a Hindi-film actor can win — a National Award, a Rs 600 crore hit, the respect of the industry’s toughest directors — and young enough, just, to add to it. Love & War and Mahavatar Narsimha are the next chances. He will be 39 by the time the second of them releases, and the question for the next two years is whether 38 was the start of his biggest decade or the middle of it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Reporting

This article was researched on November 14, 2026 from live reporting: Wikipedia for the birth date (May 16, 1988, Mumbai), age 38, spouse and one child; Sacnilk (updated November 14, 2026) for “16 May 1988 (age 38)” and the Masaan debut; Filmibeat for the birth date, age 38 and net-worth details; Andown, Naction, Bollywood Fox and ProfileAge for the birth date and age 38; Biogooglies and InsideBoxOffice for the stale “37” listings used in the discrepancy section; Bollywood Hungama for the box-office figures (Chhaava Rs 600.10 crore in India, Uri Rs 245.36 crore, Raazi Rs 123.84 crore) and the Rs 600 crore club list; YesItFirm (October 2026) for the Rs 60 crore net-worth estimate and Rs 45–75 crore range; Man’s World India (May 2025) for the Rs 140 crore outlier, the Rs 10–12 crore fee and the Juhu lease (Rs 17.01 lakh/month, ~Rs 6.2 crore over three years); MediaFeed for the Rs 76 crore estimate and endorsement figures; StarsUnfolded and WikiBio for the 6 ft 1 in height listing and the November 7, 2025 birth of Vihaan Kaushal; Pinkvilla (January 7, 2026) for the name reveal; IANS (November 8, 2026) for the Diwali face reveal; Filmfare (November 2025) for Sunil Grover introducing Kaushal to Katrina Kaif; and the earlier Guide Net Worth research file for the Rs 342 crore Uri worldwide gross, the Rs 10 crore Chhaava fee, the Forbes India Celebrity 100 2019 ranking (72nd, Rs 104.2 million) and the December 2026 Mahavatar target. Where sources disagreed — the stale “37” listings, the height range of 5 ft 9 in to 6 ft 1 in, and the net-worth range of Rs 41–140 crore — the article names the disagreement instead of picking a number silently. The $35 million net-worth claim from networthbreakdown.com is not used as an anchor anywhere in this article. Corrections are welcome via the About page.