The Empire State Building Has Grown Another Foot, Surveyors Confirm

By our Metro Correspondent · Measured from the sidewalk, twice · September 12, 2026

The Empire State Building is one foot taller than it was in 2019, according to a survey completed this week, and nobody involved is willing to say why. The measurement was taken by the same firm, from the same four ground stations, using an instrument its operator described as “annoyingly good.” The roofline came back at 1,455 feet. In 2019 it came back at 1,454.

“A foot is nothing on fourteen hundred and fifty-four,” said a structural engineer who reviewed the data and asked not to be named in connection with it. “It is within tolerance. It is within tolerance the same way the third coin you find in the same coat pocket is within tolerance.”

“Buildings do not grow. This building is 1,455 feet. It was 1,454 feet. I am not going to be the one to reconcile those.”

Three explanations are in circulation and none of them is comfortable. The first is thermal: steel expands in heat, and the building is genuinely taller in August than in February, by an amount specialists put at several inches. The survey was conducted in September, as was the 2019 survey, on a day nine degrees warmer.

The second is instrumental. Surveying has improved, and each generation of equipment has found the building slightly larger than the last, which the profession regards as reassuring and the public has begun to regard as suspicious. The third explanation is that the building is growing, which no credentialed person will say aloud and which four separate people said to this reporter off the record within a single afternoon.

The measured record

• 1931: 1,250 feet to the roof, as built and as advertised.
• 1951: antenna added; official height revised, legitimately.
• 2005: 1,453 feet. First survey by laser.
• 2019: 1,454 feet. Attributed to method.
• 2026: 1,455 feet. Attributed, so far, to nothing.
• Cumulative gain since the last physical alteration: four feet.

A geologist at Columbia was asked whether post-glacial rebound could account for it. She said that rebound is real, that Manhattan schist is rising at a rate measured in millimetres per century, and that the phenomenon “does not care about your building and would not do this to it on purpose.” Asked what would account for a foot, she said nothing would, and that this is why it is interesting.

Building management declined to characterise the change. A spokesman said the property is well maintained, that its height is “whatever the surveyors say it is,” and that the observatory remains open. Asked whether an additional foot of building would affect rents, he said he was not able to discuss price movement of any kind, and referred this newspaper to Saturday’s executive order.

Tenants have noticed nothing, with one exception. A partner at a firm on the eighty-sixth floor said his morning elevator ride has taken approximately two seconds longer since the spring, that he has timed it forty times, and that his wife has asked him to stop. Told the building had gained a foot, he said that would not explain two seconds. Told that nothing would explain two seconds, he returned to his stopwatch.

Extrapolation has already begun online, where a widely shared calculation holds that at one foot per seven years the building will reach one mile in the year 6,600. A spokesman for the building, asked to respond, said that the projection was unscientific, that it assumed a linear rate, and that it was “also fine.”

The next survey is scheduled for 2033. The firm has been asked to use the 2019 instrument alongside the current one, and has agreed, and has asked that the results be released together rather than sequentially, for what its director described as “reasons of temperament.”