As of 2026, how many years has the Sagrada Família been under construction?

How to get close to this number

Do the subtraction rather than guessing the duration. You probably know roughly when Gaudí was working and you certainly know the building is not finished, so the span is from the late nineteenth century to now. Questions phrased as "how long has X been happening" are almost always easier to answer as a date difference than as an elapsed time, because dates are easier to recall than durations.

The surprise is not the length but the reason for it. Cathedrals have always taken generations, and the medieval ones took comparably long — but this one is being built in an era that finishes skyscrapers in a few years. The explanation gives the cause: it is funded entirely by donations and ticket income, so the pace is set by revenue rather than by engineering. Money, not stone, is the constraint.

This is one of the few figures on this site that increases by one every year, which is why the question pins a year and the date stamp is load-bearing rather than decorative. It is also genuinely contested at the edges: construction has been interrupted by war, by fire and by the loss of Gaudí's original models, so what counts as continuous construction is partly a judgement call, and different sources start the clock in slightly different places.