Most people here are, mostly, half right. Because of the nature of deceleration when vertical leaping and gravity is concerned, it can get a little confusing. But here it is:
Spider-man should be able to jump higher than 3 stories. In order for you to leap upward you need to overcome the force of gravity as it applies to your personal weight. If you weigh 200 lbs then ANY vertical gain achieved must be greater than your 1G base, which is 200 lbs of force. It takes a LOT of Gs to jump. If you just jumped, no matter your weight, it cost you about 0.175 Gs for every single vertical inch you traveled. To get a 24 inch vertical leap, no matter your actual weight, you need to jump with just over 4 Gs of force. (4 times whatever your weight is) For me, that's about my max vertical jump, which comes to about 546lbs of force. That does NOT mean I can leg press that weight. I'd be lucky to press a third of that. If spider-mans maximum leg press is 20,000lbs, the maximum Gs/force he could output should be several times higher. The average leg press is around twice your body weight. 2Gs. As you recall it takes 4 Gs for anyone to leap 24 inches but that doesn't mean everyone who can leap 24 inches can also leg press 4 times their weight. Since Peter Parker weighs 167 lbs, if he was normal his leg press should be about 334 lbs. If his leg press is actually 20,000lbs, his maximum jumping output should be at least double that leg press, enabling him to leap with 40,000lbs of force, or a massive 239.5 Gs (almost 240 times his body weight) Now if you know the math, about every 0.175 Gs gets you an inch off the ground. 239.5 Gs, no matter your weight, will launch you 114 feet in the air before you loose velocity and fall back down. So, not skyscraper leaping, but more than triple what Marvel estimates. The other thing to consider is that some record-holding conditioned athletes, rather than your average Joe who can only put 4Gs into a leap, put in more than 6. (The current vertical leap record is 46 inches and would require around 8Gs) So when I estimated the difference between Parker's weight and leg press I was not factoring the whole athletic conditioning thing.
BUT, If you wanted to just forget the entire "maximum leap force is much greater than maximum leg press force" thing...if you wanted to say "look dude, he can leap with 10 tons/20,000 lbs of force, period" then you still end up with higher numbers than marvel's official "3 stories." 20,000 lbs for Peter is just under 120 Gs. That would get him 57 feet high. So...there you go.
Want some fun math, calculate the height he could DROP from, and land on his feet without it being too much for his legs to handle.
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