AbstractWe study needle formation at martensite/martensite macro interfaces in shape-memory alloys. We characterize the scaling of the energy in terms of the needle tapering length and the transformation strain, both in geometrically linear and in finite elasticity. We find that linearized elasticity is unable to predict the value of the tapering length, as the energy tends to zero with needle length tending to infinity. Finite elasticity shows that the optimal tapering length is inversely proportional to the order parameter, in agreement with previous numerical simulations. The upper bound in the scaling law is obtained by explicit constructions. The lower bound is obtained using rigidity arguments, and as an important intermediate step we show that the Friesecke–James–Müller geometric rigidity estimate holds with a uniform constant for uniformly Lipschitz domains.