How many floors does the Burj Khalifa have?

How to get close to this number

Divide height by storey height. The building is a little over eight hundred metres tall and a typical commercial floor is around four metres including structure, which gives roughly two hundred — then subtract the spire, which is structure rather than floors. That correction is what brings the estimate down to the right figure.

The spire is the detail that catches people out, and it is not incidental. A substantial portion of the building's height contains no usable space at all, which is why height rankings and floor rankings do not match between supertall buildings. Developers add spires precisely because height records are measured to the architectural top rather than to the highest occupied floor.

The lift detail in the explanation is the one that makes the scale physical. Even at close to ten metres per second — among the fastest in the world — the ride to the observation deck takes over a minute. Vertical transport is the real engineering constraint on tall buildings: beyond a certain height, the lifts needed start consuming the floor space they are meant to serve.