the ten tallest at true scale — and where the floors in them end
Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.
Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.
Solid — up to the highest occupied floor, hollow — above it. Heights and floors from The Skyscraper Center database (Council on Vertical Urbanism), 4 August 2026.
Place in the ten is decided by the architectural top: spires count, antennae do not. Above the highest occupied floor there is still height with no floors in it at all, and across this row it runs from 12 to 243 metres.
Rank the same ten by their highest occupied floor and eight of them move. CITIC Tower rises from tenth place to fourth, Merdeka 118 falls from second to fifth, and One World Trade Center from seventh to tenth: above its top floor stand 154.8 metres of spire, 29 per cent of the whole height.
The largest emptiness belongs to Burj Khalifa: 242.6 metres above the last floor, almost a third of its height. On its own it is taller than the lead Burj Khalifa holds over second place.
Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 8 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.
convert in your head · without a calculator
the ten largest by surface area — as squares at true scale, each inside the next
the A series · from A0 to A6
how many millimetres each size really is, and how much of the frame goes under the knife