This is how I've done it for cross-domain communication, so I'm afraid it's maybe unnecessarily complicated. First, I would put jQuery inside the iFrame's document; this will consume more memory, but it shouldn't increase load time as the script only needs to be loaded once. Use the iFrame's jQuery to measure the height of your iframe's body as early as possible (onDOMReady) and then set the URL hash to that height. And in the parent document, add an onload event to the iFrame tag that will look at the location of the iframe and extract the value you need. Because onDOMReady will always occur before the document's load event, you can be fairly certain the value will get communicated correctly without a race condition complicating things. In other words: