How many stairs are in the Washington Monument?
897 steps from the ground to the observation level, in fifty flights. You cannot climb them: the stairway has been closed to the public since 1976 after decades of injuries and vandalism, so every visitor now rides a 70-second elevator instead.
You will also see 898. The extra step is the one onto the observation floor itself, counted by some sources and not by others — the same off-by-one that appears in almost every staircase ever measured, and the reason two honest counts of the same climb rarely match.
The monument is 555 feet tall, which makes it about 55 flights by Apple Health’s reckoning, since your phone scores ten feet of ascent as a flight rather than counting stairs. The building itself is divided into fifty landings. Stairs, flights and floors are three different units pretending to be one.
The staircase closed in 1976 and has stayed closed, apart from occasional ranger-led descents that ended in the 1990s. If you are asking because you wanted to climb it, the honest answer to the question behind the question is: you cannot, and you have not been able to for longer than most visitors have been alive.
What that many steps equals
Each one links to where the number came from.