Tallest Skyscrapers in the World: A Side-by-Side Size Comparison

The Burj Khalifa is 828 metres tall. It is also 829.8 metres tall, and its highest occupied floor is 585.4 metres up. All three numbers are correct, and the difference between them is most of the story of how skyscrapers are measured.

Towers are some of the hardest things to judge by eye, because every photograph of one is taken from the ground, looking up, with the top shrinking away. Scale of Things puts dozens of them on a flat ground line beside a reference instead, from Torre Agbar to Merdeka 118 and the Burj Khalifa itself. Here they are side by side, using the figures of the Skyscraper Center, the database that keeps the official rankings, with an explanation of which height is which.

The rules are set by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Every building is measured from the same starting point, the level of the lowest significant open-air pedestrian entrance, and three heights are recorded.

• Height to the architectural top, which includes spires but not antennas, signs, flagpoles or other equipment. This is the height the official rankings use.
• Height to the highest occupied floor, the last floor people can actually use.
• Height to the tip, the highest point of anything at all, antenna included.

For some buildings the three are almost the same. For others they are very far apart. The Burj Khalifa's highest occupied floor sits about 240 metres below its architectural top, a stretch of spire and machinery taller on its own than the Gateway Arch. That top floor is still higher than the very tip of One World Trade Center.

The difference between a spire and an antenna sounds like pedantry until you see what it does to a ranking. A spire is treated as part of the design and counts. An antenna is equipment and does not.

The rule came out of an argument. In 1996 the council ruled that Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers, whose decorative spires reach 451.9 metres, were taller than Chicago's Sears Tower, now the Willis Tower, whose roof stands at 442.1 metres even though its antennas climb far higher. The categories were set out so that the next argument would have an answer.

Two American classics show how big the gap can be:

• The Willis Tower is 442.1 metres to its architectural top and 527.3 metres to the tip of its antennas, a difference of 85 metres, nearly a whole Statue of Liberty with its pedestal.
• The Empire State Building is 381 metres to its architectural top and 443.2 metres to the tip. If you remember it as "about 440 metres", you are remembering the antenna.

One World Trade Center went the other way. Its mast was counted as a spire, which is why the building's official height is exactly 541.3 metres, 1,776 feet, a number chosen for the year of American independence. Its tip is a little higher, at 546.2 metres.

This matters in the game. Scale of Things measures the Empire State Building at 443 m and the Willis Tower at 527 m, both to the tip. Guess their architectural heights and you will land about 15 percent short, a round worth the high 80s rather than a perfect 100.

Here are the giants by height to the architectural top, with the year each was finished.

• Burj Khalifa, Dubai (2010): 828 m, 2,717 ft
• Merdeka 118, Kuala Lumpur (2023): 678.9 m, 2,227 ft
• Shanghai Tower, Shanghai (2015): 632 m, 2,073 ft
• Makkah Royal Clock Tower, Mecca (2012): 601 m, 1,972 ft
• Ping An Finance Center, Shenzhen (2017): 599.1 m, 1,965 ft
• Lotte World Tower, Seoul (2017): 554.5 m, 1,819 ft
• One World Trade Center, New York (2014): 541.3 m, 1,776 ft
• Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre and Tianjin CTF Finance Centre (2016 and 2019): 530 m each
• CITIC Tower, Beijing (2018): 527.7 m
• Taipei 101, Taipei (2004): 508 m, 1,667 ft

And a few famous names further down:

• Central Park Tower, New York (2020): 472.4 m, the tallest residential building in the world
• Lakhta Center, St Petersburg (2019): 462 m, the tallest building in Europe
• Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur (1998): 451.9 m
• Willis Tower, Chicago (1974): 442.1 m
• Empire State Building, New York (1931): 381 m
• The Shard, London (2012): 306 m, the tallest building in the United Kingdom

The first thing the list shows is how far ahead the Burj Khalifa still is. The second-tallest building in the world is about 150 metres shorter, a gap not much smaller than the whole Washington Monument. The council calls anything over 300 metres supertall and anything over 600 metres megatall, and only four finished buildings clear that second line.

Raw metres stop meaning much above a few hundred, so it helps to translate.

• The Burj Khalifa is about two and a half Eiffel Towers, or nearly nine Statues of Liberty stacked pedestal on torch.
• It is nearly twice the Empire State Building, even counting the Empire State's antenna.
• Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world from 2004 until the Burj Khalifa opened in 2010, is about five and a half Statues of Liberty.
• The Shard would reach only a little past the Burj Khalifa's first third.

Most of those comparisons are ratios between two and nine, which is exactly the range where guesses tend to fall short: beside something much smaller, a tall thing almost always deserves a bigger guess than feels comfortable.

Toronto's CN Tower is 553.3 metres, and it was the tallest free-standing structure in the world for more than three decades after it opened in 1976. Tokyo Skytree, at 634 metres, is taller than every building on the list except the Burj Khalifa and Merdeka 118, and Guangzhou's Canton Tower reaches 604. None of them appears in the building rankings, because a structure only counts as a building if at least half of its height is usable floor space. Those are observation and broadcast towers, a separate category, which is why "the tallest structure in Japan" and "the tallest building in Japan" are two different answers. All three are in the game, and in silhouette they look nothing like office blocks, which makes their height harder to read.

The title of tallest building has changed hands only a handful of times.

1. 1885: Chicago's Home Insurance Building, often called the first skyscraper for its steel frame, reaches 42 metres.
2. 1913: New York's Woolworth Building, 241 metres.
3. 1930: the Chrysler Building, about 319 metres with its spire, the first building past 300.
4. 1931: the Empire State Building, 381 metres to its roof, holds the title for about four decades.
5. 1974: the Sears Tower, now the Willis Tower, 442 metres.
6. 1998: the Petronas Towers, 452 metres to their spires.
7. 2004: Taipei 101, 508 metres.
8. 2010: the Burj Khalifa, 828 metres, a jump of more than 60 percent.

Saudi Arabia's Jeddah Tower is planned to be the first building to pass 1,000 metres. Work stopped in 2018 and restarted in 2025, with completion targeted for 2028. When it opens, the Burj Khalifa's run at the top will end, and a kilometre will become the new number to beat.

The best way to feel these differences is to set them yourself. Play a few runs of Scale of Things and watch what happens when a tower stands beside something far shorter: the instinct is to stop well short of the real height. For the shorter landmarks, from the Statue of Liberty to Stonehenge, see how big famous monuments really are, and for why tall things fool the eye, why we misjudge size.

The Skyscraper Center and the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat: height criteria and building records for each tower listed, and tower records for the CN Tower, Tokyo Skytree and Canton Tower.