Skyscrapers in Dubai
Around 270 completed buildings in Dubai pass 150 meters, behind only Hong Kong, Shenzhen and New York. Above 300 meters it leads the world.
How many skyscrapers Dubai has
The answer depends on the height you count from. At 150 meters and above, the line the Council on Vertical Urbanism uses for its city rankings, Dubai has roughly 270 completed and topped-out buildings and ranks fourth worldwide. Drop the bar to 100 meters and the figure passes 400, because Dubai Marina and Business Bay are full of 30-to-50-floor towers that no ranking notices.
Raise the bar instead and Dubai moves up. At 200 meters it is second in the world with about 130 buildings. At 300 meters, the supertall line, it has 33 completed and three more topped out, more than any other city on earth and more than the whole of the United States held until recently.
Why Dubai built them
Dubai has oil, but not much of it by Gulf standards, and oil and gas now account for a low single-digit share of the emirate's economy. The ruling family spent the revenue from the 1970s onward on ports, an airport and the free zone at Jebel Ali, betting that trade, tourism and finance would outlast the wells.
One law did more than any other. In 2002 Dubai opened freehold property in designated areas to foreign buyers, who until then could only lease. Developers answered with towers they could sell floor by floor to people who had never set foot in the country. Dubai Marina and Downtown Dubai were zoned for exactly that, with high floor-area ratios in the master plan.
The geography cooperates. The land is flat and there is no medieval center or protected skyline to argue with. A height limit protects something; Dubai in 1990 had little to protect. Height also became government policy rather than a developer's whim: the state wanted the world's tallest building and got it.
The Burj Khalifa
The Burj Khalifa is 828 m (2,717 ft) tall with 163 floors, and it opened in 2010. Adrian Smith designed it at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, whose structural engineer Bill Baker worked out the buttressed core: a hexagonal concrete spine with three wings pressing against it, each wing stepping back as the tower rises so the wind never finds one consistent shape to push against. The plan comes from the Hymenocallis, a desert flower.
Visitors reach At The Top on the 148th floor at 555 m, and the highest occupied floor sits at 585 m. The upper 240 m hold the spire and mechanical levels rather than rooms, which is why the 828 m headline and the floor you can stand on are far apart. It has been the tallest building in the world since 2010.
The towers below it
Almost everything in second place and below is housing. Marina 101 and Princess Tower are apartment towers in Dubai Marina, a district with more 300 m residential buildings than any other square kilometer on the planet. Cayan Tower rotates each floor 1.2 degrees, 90 degrees over 73 floors, which SOM solved by keeping the core straight and twisting only the slabs.
| Building | Year | Height | Floors | Use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marina 101 | 2017 | 425 m | 101 | Hotel and apartments |
| Princess Tower | 2012 | 414 m | 107 | Residential |
| 23 Marina | 2012 | 393 m | 90 | Residential |
| Elite Residence | 2012 | 381 m | 90 | Residential |
| Cayan Tower | 2013 | 306 m | 73 | Residential, 90-degree twist |
The Address hotels run on a different logic. Address Downtown and the rest are hotel-and-residence hybrids whose top floors are sold and whose lower ones are let by the night, a mix that pays for a 300 m tower faster than offices.
Are Dubai's skyscrapers empty?
Mostly no, and the figures are specific enough to check. Dubai Residential, the listed landlord holding about 35,700 apartments across the emirate, reported average occupancy of 98.3 percent for its 2025 financial year. JLL put Dubai's office vacancy at 7.1 percent in the third quarter of 2025, with prime space at 0.3 percent, a shortage rather than a glut. Residential sales in 2025 beat every previous year.
The claim has a real origin. After the 2008 crash Dubai had a genuine overhang: projects stalled, Abu Dhabi lent the government 10 billion dollars in 2009, and finished towers stood half-let for years. Marina 101 is the lingering case, topped out in 2017 and still in liquidation proceedings. Photographs from that period circulate as proof of a present-day condition.
What is going up now
Burj Azizi on Sheikh Zayed Road is designed for 725 m and 131 floors, which would make it second only to the Burj Khalifa worldwide. Its developer has given completion dates between 2028 and 2030. The most recent tower to finish is Ciel in Dubai Marina, 377 m and 82 floors, which topped out in November 2025 as the tallest hotel-only building in the world.
Announced is not built. The Nakheel Tower was planned for more than a kilometer and canceled in 2009 with the piling under way.
Building on sand
There is no bedrock under Dubai within reach of a foundation. Below the sand lie weakly cemented siltstone and sandstone, saturated with groundwater salty enough to attack ordinary concrete. Towers here sit on friction piles, which carry load through the grip of the pile wall against the surrounding rock rather than by resting on anything solid.
The Burj Khalifa has 192 bored piles, each 1.5 m across and more than 50 m deep, under a raft 3.7 m thick covering some 8,000 square meters. Its concrete mix was designed for the salt and for air temperatures that make a pour set too fast, so sections went up at night with ice in the mix. The construction page covers the general method; Dubai's version is a groundwater and chemistry problem.