The Empire State Building rises to 1,250 feet (381 m) at the 102nd floor, and including the 203-foot (62 m) pinnacle, its full height reaches 1453 feet 8 9/16th inches (443 m). The building has 85 stories of commercial and office space representing 2,158,000 sq ft (200,500 m²). It has an indoor and outdoor observation deck on the 86th floor. The remaining 16 stories represent the Art Deco tower, which is capped by a 102nd-floor observatory. Atop the tower is the 203-foot (62 m) pinnacle, much of which is covered by broadcast antennas, with a lightning rod at the very top.

The Empire State Building was the first building to have more than 100 floors. It has 6,500 windows and 73 elevators, and there are 1,860 steps from street level to the 102nd floor. It has a total floor area of 2,768,591 square feet (257,211 m²); the base of the Empire State Building is about 2 acres (8,094 m²). The building houses 1,000 businesses, and has its own zip code, 10118. As of 2007, approximately 21,000 employees work in the building each day, making the Empire State Building the second-largest single office complex in America, after the Pentagon. The building was completed in one year and 45 days. Its original 64 elevators are located in a central core; today, the Empire State Building has 73 elevators in all, including service elevators. It takes less than one minute by elevator to get to the 86th floor, where an observation deck is located. The building has 70 miles (113 km) of pipe, 2,500,000 feet (760,000 m) of electrical wire,^[28] and about 9,000 faucets.^{[citation needed]} It is heated by low-pressure steam; despite its height, the building only requires between 2 and 3 pounds per square inch (14 and 21 kPa) of steam pressure for heating. It weighs approximately 370,000 short tons (340,000 t). The exterior of the building was built using Indiana limestone panels. The Empire State Building cost $40,948,900 to build. A series of setbacks causes the building to taper with height.

Unlike most of today's skyscrapers, the Empire State Building features an art deco design, typical of pre-WWII architecture in New York. The modernistic stainless steel canopies of the entrances on 33rd and 34th Streets lead to two story-high corridors around the elevator core, crossed by stainless steel and glass-enclosed bridges at the second-floor level. The elevator core contains 67 elevators.

The lobby is three stories high and features an aluminum relief of the skyscraper without the antenna, which was not added to the spire until 1952. The north corridor contains eight illuminated panels, created by Roy Sparkia and Renée Nemorov in 1963, depicting the building as the Eighth Wonder of the World, alongside the traditional seven.

Long-term forecasting of the life cycle of the structure was implemented at the design phase to ensure that the building's future intended uses were not restricted by the requirements of previous generations. This is particularly evident in the over-design of the building's electrical system.