Building The Great Pyramid In Modern Times Would Cost A Shocking Amount Of Money

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built about 4,500 years ago, and at 481 feet high it was the tallest structure on earth for over four millenia.The Great Pyramid is 756 feet long on each of its three sides and is made of about 2.3 million stones, each one weighing two and a half tons. In 2012 NBC estimated the cost of building the Great Pyramid of Giza with modern techniques at $5 billion; that equals a little over $7 billion today. Legend has it that the original structure went up in just in 20 years, which means a pace of one 5,000-pound block every five minutes around the clock. That would have taken thousands of people working constantly in careful coordination; historians think workers used external ramps to place blocks for the bottom third of the pyramid and built a spiral structure inside to finish the project. French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin developed this theory and created a virtual model with help from 3D graphics firm Dassault Systems.

Houdin said anyone building such a pyramid today could supplement those same techniques with modern equipment. "Instead of people pulling the sleds that carry the stones up the ramps, you would use something with an engine," he told NBC. "Secondly, for the (topmost) 10 or 15 meters, you would use a small crane." Houdin used Hoover Dam as a comparison because the volume of concrete used in its construction roughly matches the amount of stone in the Great Pyramid. The dam is part of the reason Nevada had one of the biggest tourist booms of 2024, and the state is also home to one of the world's biggest pyramids.

The Luxor hotel and casino went up in the early 1990s and still stands about 3/4 the size of the Great Pyramid despite persistent rumors of its impending demise. Although rebuilding the Great Pyramid is a purely theoretical exercise, NBC and Jean-Pierre Houdin aren't the only ones to come up with an estimate. In 2021,TheRichest calculated that each of the 2.3 million blocks would cost $495, bringing the total material cost to almost $1.14 billion. The outlet further estimated a bargain-basement labor cost of $102 million, raising the total expense past $1.24 billion (almost $1.5 billion in 2025 money). 

Applying modern construction costs to an ancient structure is an inexact science; the Egyptians didn't incur the costs of meeting modern safety standards and had fewer links in their supply chain. In the modern United States Trump's tariffs will likely raise the cost of housing, but knowing how they'd impact the building of another Great Pyramid is impossible before raw materials are sourced. The Luxor was completed in 1993 after 18 months of work at a cost of $375 million (about $843 million today); that includes furnishings, security features, and iconography like the 110-foot Sphinx statue. Unfortunately for visitors, rising costs led to the closure of the Luxor Las Vegas buffet in March 2025 but the pyramid itself still stands 30 stories and 365 feet tall.