This is surprisingly annoying where I live and some houses use the British way and everyone uses the American way in speech.

We live on the American second floor. So whenever someone new comes to visit there is no easy answer to where our apartment is: if I tell them we are on the first floor, they won’t find us looking on the ground floor. If I say come to the second floor, they may use the elevator and press 2 which will then take them to the third floor.

Happens almost every time I’m not specific enough.

In Europe a lot of countries name the "ground level" floor something because historically "zero" was a bad number, so they instead called it something else because the logic was to start at 0.

It's kinda like how some buildings in the USA exclude the 13th floor.

Little fun fact btw - the whole foods database used to exclude Friday the 13th. Found this out when I worked there and was trying to show my receipt for something I got, and when the manager looked, we couldn't find it. Then another coworker came in and brought up something they brought up the day before and it couldn't be found either.

After a bit, we found it Thursday 12th, but then when scrolling saw it skipped Friday 13th and instead went straight to Saturday 14th.

As some one outside both countries 1 2 3 4 5 is where it's at. The second floor being the first makes no sense.

Americans are not consistent about this either

I like ground floor as well....1st floor is ground floor.

The benefit of starting the number at 1 is the majority of apartment blocks and hotels can have 4 digit room numbers with the first digit representing the floor it's on.

E.g. room 4201 is on 4th floor and 1691 is on 1st floor

If this was a taller building, the terms would match up once the Americans skip referencing a 13th floor

You don't start counting at 0, so going with Americans on this.

German counts floors like the british with the lowest being the ground floor (Erdgeschoss) and then counting the Upstairs floors.

I'd be curious how that is in other languages.

International people in the comments:
Tell me how you count floors

The Americans might be right on this one. Perhaps if we give them this one they will give us the metric system.