How many floors does the Empire State Building have?

How to get close to this number

Divide height by storey height again. The building is around 380 metres to the roof, and older commercial floors run a little under four metres, which gives roughly a hundred. Applying the same method to two towers of very different eras is a good way to see how consistent the arithmetic is.

The comparison with the modern record holder is the useful calibration: the newer tower has roughly half again as many floors and more than twice the height, because much of that height is spire. Two buildings can differ enormously in height while differing far less in usable floors, which is the recurring lesson of skyscraper statistics.

The airship mast in the explanation is a genuinely strange piece of history. The top of the building was designed as a mooring point for dirigibles, an idea abandoned almost immediately because the wind conditions around a tower that tall made docking impossible. The structure survives as an antenna, which is a fitting end for infrastructure built for a future that never arrived.