Why do buildings skip the 4th floor? The Vancouver rule, explained

Which numbers get skipped

In many Vancouver residential and office towers, the elevator buttons jump from 3 to 5, from 12 to 15, and sometimes skip 24 as well. A building advertised as 30 storeys may have only 26 floors under it.

This is not an urban legend. The City of Vancouver issued a bulletin about it in 2015, telling developers that new buildings could no longer be numbered this way.

Why buildings skip the 4th floor

The reasons are pronunciation and custom. In Cantonese, the word for four sounds like words about death, so 4, 14 and 24 are often avoided. Thirteen has long been treated as unlucky in Western cultures, and skipping the 13th floor is an old habit in North American towers.

Vancouver has a large Chinese-Canadian population, so both sets of superstitions land on the same building, and more numbers disappear.

Why the city changed the rule in 2015

The trouble shows up in emergencies. Saul Schwebs, the city's chief building official, has explained that firefighters climbing a stairwell read the floor numbers to know where they are, and missing numbers make that count unreliable. His example: buildings marketed as 80 storeys that hold only 68 floors.

The 2015 bulletin requires floors and suite numbers in new buildings to run in a consecutive, increasing sequence, with nothing left out for superstition. If a permit application arrives with a gap, the developer has to fix it.

What happens to the older towers

The rule is not retroactive. Buildings already standing, and projects that had been in development before the bulletin, were never required to put the missing numbers back. That is why towers without a 4th or 13th floor are still all over Vancouver.

There is one exception: if an older building goes through a significant renovation, fire and life-safety upgrades can bring renumbering with them.

How to work out the floor you are really on

Count the numbers skipped below you and subtract them. In a tower that leaves out 4, 13 and 14, the button marked 15 sits on the 12th floor, because three numbers went missing underneath it.

That gap is exactly what makes a stairwell count unreliable: the number painted on the landing no longer matches the number of floors a firefighter has actually climbed.

Is this only a Vancouver rule?

The bulletin applies to new construction in the City of Vancouver. It does not reach buildings in neighbouring municipalities, and it does not force any existing Vancouver tower to change. Anyone who wants a building with a 4th floor has to check the elevator panel.

How this connects to No Fourth Floor

The interactive story No Fourth Floor starts from this detail: an apartment tower built in 2009 whose elevator has no 4th floor. The rule is real. The building, the elevator and everything that happens inside are fiction.