What is the tallest building in the world?
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It has held the title since 2010, which makes it the longest reign since the Empire State Building, and no completed building has come close since.
The short answer
The Burj Khalifa stands 828 m (2717 ft) and has 163 floors. It opened on 4 January 2010 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, designed by Adrian Smith at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Chicago firm that also built the Willis Tower. Sixteen years later it is still first by a margin of 149 m over the building in second place.
That margin is unusual. When the Petronas Twin Towers took the record in 1998 they beat the Willis Tower by ten meters. The Burj Khalifa beat Taipei 101 by 320 m, which is itself taller than the Chrysler Building. Nothing in the history of tall buildings had jumped that far at once.
The ten tallest, by architectural height
| Building | Place | Year | Height | Floors | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Burj Khalifa | Dubai, UAE | 2010 | 828 m | 163 | |
| Merdeka 118 | Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia | 2023 | 679 m | 118 | |
| Shanghai Tower | Shanghai, China | 2015 | 632 m | 128 | |
| Makkah Royal Clock Tower | Mecca, Saudi Arabia | 2012 | 601 m | 120 | |
| Ping An Finance Center | Shenzhen, China | 2017 | 599 m | 115 | |
| One World Trade Center | New York City, USA | 2014 | 541 m | 94 | |
| Petronas Twin Towers | Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia | 1998 | 452 m | 88 | |
| Willis Tower | Chicago, USA | 1973 | 442 m | 108 | |
| Empire State Building | New York City, USA | 1931 | 381 m | 102 | |
| Chrysler Building | New York City, USA | 1930 | 319 m | 77 |
What counts as the height
The number in the table is architectural height: ground level to the structural top, spires included, antennas and flagpoles excluded. The Council on Vertical Urbanism, which keeps the official list, measures it this way because a spire is drawn by the architect and an antenna is bolted on by a broadcaster.
The rule decides records. The Petronas Twin Towers took the title from the Willis Tower in 1998 on their spires alone: the Chicago building has more floors, more occupied height and higher roof, but its 527 m antennas do not count. Argue for a different rule and you get a different world record, which is why the measuring body matters as much as the tape.
Two other numbers get quoted for the Burj Khalifa. Its highest occupied floor is at 585 m and its observation deck At The Top is at 555 m, on the 148th floor. Both are lower than the 828 m headline, because the upper 240 m hold the spire and mechanical floors rather than rooms.
Jeddah Tower, and when the record changes
Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia is designed to pass 1,000 m, which would make it the first kilometer-tall building. Construction began in 2013, stopped in 2018 when the contractor left the site, and restarted in 2025. It is not finished, so it does not hold the record: the list counts completed buildings, not announcements.
That caution is earned. The Chicago Spire was going to reach 610 m and its foundation hole sat empty for a decade before it was filled in. Several kilometer-high proposals since the 1950s, including Frank Lloyd Wright's mile-high The Illinois, never left the drawing board. Until a building tops out, it is a plan.
Tallest building, tallest structure, tallest tower
These are three different records. A building has continuously habitable floors; the Burj Khalifa holds that one. A free-standing structure need not be habitable, and there the Burj Khalifa still leads because nothing taller stands on its own. A guyed structure, held up by cables, can go higher: the KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota reached 629 m in 1963, taller than every building of its century, and nobody counted it as one.
The distinction is why the Eiffel Tower, 330 m and the tallest thing on earth from 1889 to 1930, never appears on a list of tall buildings. You cannot live or work on most of it.
Where this fits
The Burj Khalifa descends from a line that starts in Chicago in 1885, when William LeBaron Jenney hung the walls of a 55 m office block on an iron and steel frame. Every record holder since has used that idea. The history of the day explains how that happened, and the twelve buildings page puts the Burj Khalifa next to the one that started it.