Saudi Arabia's kilometre-high skyscraper has passed its 116th floor at roughly 466 metres; its developer is targeting a late-2028 finish, and the Burj Khalifa's 15-year reign is finally in view.
Compiled from published reporting and project sources, October 2026.
Jeddah Tower has climbed back into the record books. After seven years in limbo, the tower rising on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast is adding floors at a pace its owner describes as a five-day cycle, and it has now passed the point where only a handful of buildings on Earth stand taller.
In April 2026, the project cleared its 100th floor and 400 metres, the milestone that returned it to global headlines. By early October 2026, the structure had reached roughly 466 metres at its 116th floor, leaving 41 floors of the planned 157 still to be built, Jeddah Economic Company (JEC) chief executive Fabien Toscano told the Saudi Mega Projects 2026 conference in Riyadh. Independent tracking of the site put it even higher: past the 118th floor and above 470 metres as of 9 October 2026.
For scale, that already takes Jeddah Tower above
Malaysia's Petronas Towers (452 m) and above Europe's tallest building, the
Lakhta Center in St Petersburg (462 m). The tower it is chasing, Dubai's
828-metre Burj Khalifa, designed by the same architect, Adrian Smith, while he
was at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has held the world title since 2010.
|
Project
snapshot |
|
|
Official
name |
Jeddah Economic Company (JEC) Tower, widely known as
Jeddah Tower; formerly Kingdom Tower |
|
Status |
Under construction; past the 116th floor and ~466 m
(October 2026) |
|
Target
height |
At least 1,000 m (3,281 ft), set to be the first
kilometre-tall building |
|
Floors |
167 floors per the tower's public specification; JEC
cites 157 above-ground levels |
|
Observation
deck |
Around 630 m, planned to be the world's highest |
|
Location |
Obhur, about 20 km north of central Jeddah; Jeddah
Economic City |
|
Developer
/ principal investor |
Jeddah Economic Company / Kingdom Holding Company,
chaired by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal |
|
Architect |
Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture |
|
Structural
engineer |
Thornton Tomasetti |
|
Main
contractor |
Saudi Binladin Group |
|
Project
management |
Turner International |
|
Wider
team |
Langan (civil and geotechnical), RWDI (wind), Dar
Al-Handasah (engineering support), KONE (elevators), Guardian Glass (façade
glazing), CBRE (operator) |
|
Cost |
About USD 1.2 billion to construct the tower, within a
USD 20 billion masterplan |
|
Completion
target |
Late 2028 (August 2028 in current reporting) |
Past 400 metres and still climbing
 |
Jeddah Tower in May 2026, after construction had reached the 100th floor. Credit: Jeddah Economic Company / Saudi Binladin Group (via
Wikimedia Commons). |
The 400-metre mark, confirmed by structural engineer
Thornton Tomasetti, was announced in April 2026 and reported by Arabian
Business as the point at which the tower had "surpassed 100 floors"
and was "set to overtake Burj Khalifa by 2028". Three months later,
in late July 2026, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal announced after a site visit that
the tower had passed 430 metres with the 107th floor complete, about 43 per
cent of the structural work. On 2 September 2026, Saudi Binladin Group's senior
executive project director, Ian Norman Miller, reported 454 metres and 113
floors; Newsweek noted that the tower had by then overtaken the Petronas
Towers.
 |
Cranes
and the first stretches of glass façade at the tower's base as construction accelerated through 2026. Credit: Saudi Binladin Group / Dezeen. |
The pace matters as much as the height. JEC has described
a floor cycle of roughly five days, and façade installation has begun alongside
the concrete work, usually the signal that a megatall project has moved from
structural climbing into enclosure and fit-out.
Floors
completed since work resumed, with the climb remaining to the 2028 target.
Sources: Jeddah Economic Company, Saudi Binladin Group, Thornton Tomasetti,
Gulf Business, Newsweek, Arabian Business.
Jeddah
Tower's built height against the record holders. The tower is already taller
than Europe's tallest building; the Burj Khalifa remains 350-plus metres ahead.
Sources: CTBUH, project data, 2026.
Seven years stalled, then a restart
Jeddah Tower was unveiled in 2011 as Kingdom Tower, the centrepiece of what was then called Kingdom City, and construction began on 1 April 2013. Work was halted in January 2018 at roughly 63 floors. The stoppage followed Saudi Arabia's anti-corruption purge, in which Saudi Binladin Group's chairman Bakr bin Laden was detained; contract restructuring and the COVID-19 pandemic kept the site quiet for years afterwards.
The turn came in late 2024. JEC signed a SAR 7.2 billion
agreement with Saudi Binladin Group to finish the tower after 63 of its planned floors were built, and Kingdom Holding formally resumed construction in January 2025 at 60 floors, a little over a third of the final
build. By December 2025, the tower had passed 80 floors. Four months later, it
was through 100.
Engineering a kilometre of tower
The structural system behind the climb is unusually pure for a building this tall. Thornton Tomasetti's design uses interconnected reinforced-concrete walls to carry both gravity and lateral loads, with no perimeter columns, no outriggers and no vertical transfers, creating a continuous load path from the summit down to the foundations. The floor plate is a three-winged, Y-shaped plan that tapers continuously as it rises, a geometry that does double duty: it suits residential layouts and it prevents wind vortices from organising into the rhythmic loading that shakes uniform towers.
The foundation is as consequential as the tower. A five-metre-thick concrete raft covering about 7,500 square metres sits on 270 bored piles, each roughly 1.8 metres in diameter and reaching up to about 105 metres into limestone and coral rock that geotechnical engineers have described as far softer than Manhattan bedrock. The system carries a gravity load of around 860,000 tonnes; the project is expected to consume some 500,000 cubic metres of concrete, with 85 MPa mixes pumped to heights no building has demanded before.
Wind is the other governing force. About a third of Jeddah
Tower stands above the atmospheric boundary layer, so RWDI combined 17 years of
balloon-sounding data from Jeddah airport with mesoscale atmospheric modelling
to characterise the wind at height. The measured data proved the code-based
wind profiles to be conservative, supporting a 20 per cent reduction in the
wind speeds used for serviceability checks, the difference between a tower
that sways and one that does not. "It will probably be the most
comfortable tall building on the planet," Thornton Tomasetti's John
Peronto told Newsweek in June 2026.
A design drawn from desert fronds
Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill describe the massing as "a bundle of leaves shooting up from the ground", slender, subtly asymmetrical, and rooted in the new growth of palm fronds typical of Saudi Arabia. The three-petal base gives the tower a footprint suited to residential units, while the tapering wings produce an aerodynamic profile that reduces structural loading from wind. Each of the three faces carries a series of notches that create pockets of shadow, shielding parts of the façade from the sun and forming outdoor terraces with views over Jeddah and the Red Sea.
At level 157, roughly 630 metres up, the design places a
sky terrace about 30 metres (98 feet) in diameter, an open-air platform
originally conceived as a helipad and now planned as the world's highest
observation deck.
 |
The finished tower: an
official render by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill
Architecture. Credit: AS+GG / Jeddah Economic Company. |
What will be inside
Like the Burj Khalifa, Jeddah Tower is a mixed-use building rather than a single-purpose one. It will hold offices, serviced apartments and luxury residences alongside a Four Seasons hotel occupying floors 19 to 27 with roughly 200 keys, plus the observation deck and sky terrace above. The vertical transportation is a project in itself: 57 KONE passenger lifts, including seven double-deck units plus two construction elevators that climb with the building and eight escalators. Four lifts use KONE's carbon-fibre UltraRope, which exists because steel rope becomes its own limiting weight at this travel height; the run to the observation deck exceeds 630 vertical metres at around 10 metres per second.
A Vision 2030 landmark on the Red Sea
Jeddah Tower sits at Obhur, about 20 kilometres north of central Jeddah, as the centrepiece of the Jeddah Economic City masterplan, 5.3 million square metres in total, with around 1.3 million square metres in the first phase now being serviced with power, water, drainage and high-speed connectivity. The scheme is backed by Kingdom Holding Company, the investment firm chaired by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, which has long positioned the tower as the anchor of a wider mixed-use district.
 |
Jeddah
Economic City from the air, with the tower at the centre of the masterplan. Credit: Jeddah Economic Company. |
The tower predates Vision 2030, the Kingdom's programme to
diversify its economy, but it has been folded into that story: a landmark that
advertises Saudi Arabia's ambition in real estate, tourism and infrastructure
at a moment when the country is investing heavily in projects of unprecedented scale.
 |
The
district at the tower's base: plazas, water features and landscaping planned
for Jeddah Economic City. Credit: Jeddah Economic Company / AS+GG. What happens next
Forty-one floors separate the tower from its target.
Façade and fit-out works are running in parallel with the structural climb, and
JEC is guiding the project toward completion in late 2028, August 2028 in the
most recent reporting. Only then, once the building is finished and measured,
will the title change hands: "world's tallest building" is a status
conferred on completed structures, and the tower's final height, officially
"at least 1,000 metres", with the exact figure undisclosed until
completion, will settle a record that Dubai has held since 2010. Sources
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