When will the construction of Jeddah Tower be complete?

TL;DR

My median construction-completion declaration date is July 2029 (forecast model). I assign 26% probability to completion before January 1, 2029, and 66.1% before January 1, 2030 (forecast model). The central 80% range runs from August 2028 to February 2032, with 5% probability beyond the December 31, 2037 upper boundary, including permanent noncompletion (forecast model).

Context

Jeddah Tower is an active construction project, but its published completion date remains a target, not a completed-work declaration. The owner’s annual report specifies August 2028; the latest high-reliability height milestone I verified was 113 floors and 454 metres, published by the architect in early September (Kingdom Holding annual report, architect’s September 3, 2026 update).

I apply the supplied resolution criteria: structural and architectural construction must be finished, with a clear qualifying declaration. Topping out alone does not count. Tenant fit-out, occupancy and surrounding development need not be finished. The distribution forecasts that declaration, not the opening ceremony; cancellation belongs in the late-or-never outcome.

Evidence

The historical backbone is the gap between visible structural milestones and finished construction. Burj Khalifa reached 100 floors in January 2007, finished its exterior in September 2009, and opened on January 4, 2010. The first interval was about 32 months; applying it to Jeddah’s comparable milestone points toward late 2028, before adjusting for its additional upper structure (Emaar chronology). Lotte World Tower reached 100 floors on March 24, 2015, held its ridgepole ceremony on December 22, 2015, and completed construction on February 9, 2017—about 14 months after that ceremony (developer chronology). Merdeka 118 celebrated spire completion on November 30, 2021, but received its completion-and-compliance certificate on December 22, 2023 (PNB 2021 report, PNB 2023 report). These are three selected, completed towers, not a representative statistical sample. Certification can also be stricter than this question’s threshold. I use them to establish finishing-stage risk, not to impose an average delay.

Jeddah’s own history supplies the disruption warning: construction began in 2013, halted in 2018, and resumed in early 2025 (Shaoxing government report, May 13, 2026). The restart agreement, announced October 2, 2024, was worth SAR 7.2 billion in nominal contract value, including about SAR 1.1 billion for earlier work, with an anticipated 42-month programme and funding through internal resources and banking facilities. The announcement does not establish the contractual commencement date, so adding that duration to the announcement date is not a binding deadline (owner announcement).

The complete dated progress record used in this forecast is below. It contains nine snapshots from the restart agreement through the latest verified milestone. Heights are metres; reported levels are not necessarily completed slabs across every wing. Publication dates differ from observation dates, and these snapshots are not independent surveys.

Progress is real, but the advertised five-day floor cycle is not a stable calendar average. The reported increase from 100 to 113 floors spans roughly 136 days, or about 10.5 days per level. The shorter end-July-to-early-September interval is close to five days per level. Different reporting definitions limit both calculations; the evidence supports variable productivity, not a single straight-line extrapolation (April engineer update, July owner snapshot, September architect update).

The structural task does not end at the last occupied floor. A pre-restart, JEC-branded technical deck places the sky-raft transition at Level 167, approximately 670 m, and the concrete endpoint at Level 240, 962 m, followed by a steel pinnacle. That leaves approximately 292 m of concrete spire above the transition. These are structural elevations, not conventional occupied floors. The deck is a third-party-hosted historical copy, with an uncertain compilation date, rather than a current construction drawing (historical JEC technical deck). The project engineers’ November 2016 article independently describes a concrete spire without ordinary floor slabs and services, and expects tapering to reduce the work per construction cycle (engineers’ article, ACI publication record). I therefore reject both shortcuts: stopping the schedule at the occupied-floor count, and treating every upper increment as an identical residential-floor cycle.

The architectural backlog also matters. At end-July, the owner reported structural works at 67%, more than 300,000 cubic metres of concrete poured, façade installation at 11%, and approximately 6,400 workers. These percentages have different denominators; they do not establish overall completion (August owner presentation). The low façade percentage does not make the target impossible: Burj Khalifa’s developer reports installation accelerating from 20–30 panels daily to as many as 175. That is one project’s experience, not a guaranteed rate for Jeddah (Emaar fact sheet).

Procurement and incentives argue against assigning a large abandonment probability. KONE announced an order for 67 elevators and escalators on October 8, 2025 (supplier release). The owner’s financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2025 describe a proposed 10.66% contractor stake whose economic benefits depend on conditions including completion, testing and pre-commissioning. This creates a delivery incentive; it is not proof that all remaining funding is secured (audited financial statements, note 11).

<a id="forecast-model"></a> I translate this evidence into the following judgmental mixture. These are my assumptions, reproduced in the accompanying code, not observed scenario frequencies.

Each finite component is a lognormal duration measured from January 1, 2027. This mathematical origin excludes immediate completion; it is not a developer milestone. The components overlap and are right-skewed. The largest weight goes to continued construction with slippage because the restart is well supported, while the remaining upper structure and enclosure create more downside than scope for an early finish. The separate interruption and noncompletion components preserve discontinuous risks rather than treating every setback as a few extra months (model specification).

The calculation gives 11% probability before September 1, 2028, 26% before January 1, 2029, and 84% before January 1, 2031. Completion before the lower boundary has less than 1% probability. The final bucket contains the 4% permanent-noncompletion assumption plus about 1% for finite completion beyond the upper boundary. The code returns unrounded bucket probabilities and was checked for nonnegativity and a total probability of one (forecast calculation). No prediction-market signal was used to set the distribution.

What's non-obvious

A steel contract is not evidence that the entire upper tower has switched to steel. The reported award above Level 120 concerns the tower’s main steel package; the historical design already contained upper steel components, including the terrace, embedded beams and pinnacle. Without an itemized scope or revised structural section, the award cannot establish a wholesale redesign (May 13 procurement report, historical design scope). This keeps a substantial upper-concrete phase in the forecast without pretending its old details are confirmed unchanged.

There is also a reporting inconsistency that defeats a tempting progress model. The owner’s March presentation reports 65,000-plus cubic metres as approximately 50% of total, while April reports 274,000-plus as approximately 61%. Their implied totals are incompatible unless the scope changed or one figure is wrong. I do not fit a concrete-volume trend or infer remaining duration from those figures (March presentation, April presentation).

Uncertainties

The largest gaps concern the critical path, not whether workers are currently building the tower.

• Upper-structure programme: I could not verify a current drawing and schedule separating the sky raft, concrete spire, damping equipment, pinnacle and crane removal. The historical engineering evidence establishes the nature of this work, not its current duration (engineering publication).
• Architectural progress: I found no newer verified installed-panel percentage beyond the end-July snapshot, nor a detailed close-out programme. That is a public-information gap, not evidence that enclosure work stopped (last quantified owner snapshot).
• Meaning of the target: An October 3, 2026 Arabic report describes August 2028 as structural completion and year-end as operational opening, but supplies no named source or detailed revised programme. I do not treat it as a verified revision to the owner’s completion target. A declaration confined to topping out would still fail the supplied resolution criteria (recent Arabic report, owner’s stated target).

A verified upper-structure schedule and fresh enclosure counts would narrow the distribution most. The long tail remains a judgment about future disruption, not a measured cancellation rate. Numerical precision in the code preserves probability mass; it does not imply day-level knowledge of the construction schedule.