I was running through the same issue when it came to embedding a UIStackView with a horizontal axis and center alignment in a UICollectionViewCell, it turns out it is an issue with UIStackView in general not just when it is inside a UICollectionViewCell I figured out a way to fix the issue by adding an extra arrangedSubview to the UIStackView and giving it a width of 0 and a height of 0, coupled with 0 spacing, making the view invisible. This resolves the issue of the height ambiguity for some reason. Here's the test viewcontroller I used to test this theory. Every time you press the button it flips the state from the size being 1.7976931348623157e+308 to the actual height class ViewController: UIViewController { let stackView: UIStackView = { let stackView = UIStackView() stackView.axis = .horizontal stackView.alignment = .center return stackView }() let label = UILabel() let someView = UIView() override func viewDidLoad() { super.viewDidLoad() view.addSubview(stackView) stackView.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false stackView.center = view.center label.textAlignment = .center label.backgroundColor = .orange label.text = "This is text" stackView.addArrangedSubview(label) let button = UIButton(primaryAction: UIAction(handler: { [weak self] action in self?.buttonPressed() })) button.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false view.addSubview(button) NSLayoutConstraint.activate([ stackView.leadingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.leadingAnchor), stackView.trailingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.trailingAnchor), stackView.centerYAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.centerYAnchor), button.centerXAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.centerXAnchor), button.topAnchor.constraint(equalTo: stackView.bottomAnchor), someView.heightAnchor.constraint(equalToConstant: 0), someView.widthAnchor.constraint(equalToConstant: 0), ]) button.setTitle("Flip State", for: .normal) } func buttonPressed() { if someView.superview != nil { stackView.removeArrangedSubview(someView) someView.removeFromSuperview() } else { stackView.addArrangedSubview(someView) } let size = stackView.systemLayoutSizeFitting(.init(width: view.frame.width, height: .greatestFiniteMagnitude), withHorizontalFittingPriority: .required, verticalFittingPriority: .fittingSizeLevel) label.text = "\(size)" } } I hope this helps someone out there cause I just wasted a full day's work on something as stupid as this