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Description: When navigating unfamiliar social environments, it is important to identify who is powerful. Knowing who has power can be challenging because there may be limited social information available to an observer, and because people achieve influence for many reasons. In experiments with 3- to 5-year-old children (n = 192) and adults (n = 32), we investigated the developmental origins and conceptual structure of power judgments based on physical appearance. First, we examined participants’ judgments of strength and authority from facial structure and expansive body posture; next, we used a matching task to assess whether children thought that powerful faces and bodies “go together”. By the age of 3, children already associate physical strength with expansive posture; soon after, expansive postures also support judgments of normative authority and are joined by similar judgments about masculine facial structure. By the age of 4, children also match high- and low-power versions of faces and postures together, indicating that they draw connections between different aspects of more-or-less powerful appearance. The complexity and timing of these changes highlights limitations in current accounts of the origins of adults’ intuitions about powerful appearances. However, this study also documents several novel developmental patterns that help generate new hypotheses about the specific mechanisms that support the emergence of children’s intuitions.