The lost floors of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa – why 200m of world’s tallest building is empty

The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is over 800 metres tall and cost over a billion dollars to erect but amazingly 29% of the shimmering structure are uninhabitable due to its design

A staggering 29% of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa is empty with more than 200 metres of the skyscraper almost deserted.

The world’s tallest building was completed in 2010 and stands a massive 830 metres (2723 feet) tall.

It’s home to thousands of residents and is crammed with luxury homes, state-of-the-art entertainment spaces, and even outside pools.

But due to the ostentatious nature of its design, a large proportion of the colossal skyscraper is completely uninhabitable.

The tower has over 200 storeys but only 160 of them are habitable with over 200 metres of the vast structure being too thin for anything of substance to be built into it.

A staggering 29% of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa is empty (Image: Getty Images)

The structure of the skyscraper extends like a shard of glass into the heavens but roughly 600 meters up the decadent outfittings subside and are replaced by storeys of empty space.

200 metres of the skyscraper are mostly deserted (Image: Getty Images)

The impressive height of the building has some other quirks too which are especially noticeable around the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Every year, residents living at the top of the tower are instructed to break their fast two minutes later than those on the ground as they can still see the sun due to the height of their homes.

The Burj Khalifa’s sewage system is not connected to Dubai’s (Image: Getty Images)

Aside from almost a third of the building being completely deserted, the Burj has another little problem, it doesn’t have a working sewage system hooked up to the city’s wastewater system.

As a result, every day a collection of ‘poo’ trucks make their way to the shimmering tower and are burdened with the building’s sewage.