Tallest Buildings in the World

How this list ranks the world's tallest buildings

This list includes 19 skyscrapers, ordered by height to architectural top. That is the measure the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) uses for its official "World's Tallest Buildings" ranking. Recent pages on the council's Skyscraper Center database use a new name, the Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU), but the criteria haven't changed. Heights are given in meters first, because that is the unit the council publishes, with feet alongside.

The first eleven entries match the top of the global ranking exactly, from the Burj Khalifa down to Taipei 101. After that the list stops following the ranking and picks out famous towers: past record holders such as the Willis Tower and the Empire State Building, and icons such as the Burj Al Arab and the Chrysler Building. A list of only the next few hundred meters of Chinese and Gulf towers would teach far less about how skyscraper height came to be measured.

Floor counts and completion years come from Wikipedia's list of tallest buildings, which cites a Skyscraper Center page for each tower. The two CTF towers tie at 530 m. The Tianjin tower reaches that height with fewer than 100 floors, the tallest building in the world to do so.

The three heights the CTBUH recognizes

Every CTBUH measurement starts from the same base: the floor level at the lowest significant, open-air, pedestrian entrance. Each word in that phrase rules something out. A sunken plaza or a car-park door doesn't count. Neither does a service entrance, or a shop door that only opens onto the street rather than giving access to the tower's lifts. From that base, the council records three heights:

1. Architectural top. This includes spires but leaves out antennas, signage, flagpoles and other "functional-technical equipment". It is the figure used for the official ranking and for this list.
2. Highest occupied floor. This is the finished floor level of the top floor designed for people to use regularly. Mechanical levels that only see occasional maintenance visits don't count.
3. Tip. This is the highest point of the structure, whatever the top element is made of or used for.

The Burj Khalifa shows how far apart the three can be. The Skyscraper Center lists it at 828 m to its architectural top, 829.8 m to its tip and 584.5 m to its highest occupied floor. That means about 244 m of the tower rises above its last usable floor.

The reason for the antenna rule is practical. The criteria explain that antennas, signs and wind turbines tend to be added, lengthened, shortened or removed as technology changes. A spire is a fixed part of the architecture, and taking it away would change the building's design.

What counts as a building, and what counts as finished

Two more rules decide which towers can appear on the list. First, at least 50% of a structure's height has to be occupiable floor space. Below that, it is classed as a telecommunications or observation tower and can't enter the building rankings. Second, only completed buildings are ranked. That means topped out structurally and architecturally, fully clad, and open for business or at least partly occupiable. A tower that has reached full height but is still waiting for its cladding stays off the list.

The council also defines the size categories that appear across this site. Its criteria page suggests that 14 stories or about 50 m is a rough threshold for a "tall building", although it also says tallness is relative to context and proportion. A supertall is 300 m (984 ft) or more. A megatall is 600 m (1,968 ft) or more. Every entry here is a supertall, and the top four (the Burj Khalifa, Merdeka 118, the Shanghai Tower and the 601 m Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower) clear the megatall line.

A short history of measuring "tallest"

The rules above are fairly recent. According to Wikipedia's account, before 1996 the tallest building was simply the one with the highest architectural element, spires included and antennas excluded. That gap in the rules had already caused a famous fight in Manhattan.

In 1930 the Bank of Manhattan Building at 40 Wall Street, 282.5 m tall, was racing the Chrysler Building. The Chrysler team had a 38 m spire assembled secretly inside the building and then raised it into place, taking the title at 319 m. The rival architects objected that their building had the highest usable floor, and that Chrysler's spire was purely ornamental. Wikipedia describes the Chrysler Building as the world's first supertall and notes that it held the world record for just 11 months. Our page on the Chrysler Building covers that story in more detail.

The modern system came out of another dispute. In 1996 the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur passed the Sears Tower in Chicago, now the Willis Tower, even though the Sears Tower had the higher roof and the higher top point. The Petronas spires counted as architecture, while the Sears antennas didn't. The council answered by ranking buildings in four categories: architectural top, highest occupied floor, top of roof and tip. The roof category was dropped in November 2009. The case is still the textbook example of why the antenna rule exists, which is why the Petronas Towers at 451.9 m sit above the Willis Tower on this list.

The record holders on the list

Five buildings on the list have been the world's tallest at some point:

• Chrysler Building (319 m). It held the record for 11 months in 1930–31, until the Empire State Building opened.
• Empire State Building (381 m). Wikipedia gives a roof height of 1,250 ft (380 m) and a total of 1,454 ft (443.2 m) including the antenna. It stayed the tallest building in the world until the World Trade Center's North Tower topped out in 1970. Its architectural figure is the one that counts here. See the Empire State Building page for its observation decks.
• Willis Tower (442.1 m). It opened in 1973 as the world's tallest building and kept the title for nearly 25 years. Wikipedia gives its height as 1,451 ft (442.3 m), a few tenths of a meter more than the figure used on this site, which comes from the building's Skyscraper Center entry. The tower is also a lesson in counting floors: it has 108 stories by standard methods, but the owners number the main roof as 109 and the mechanical penthouse roof as 110.
• Petronas Towers (451.9 m). They were the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004 and are still the tallest twin skyscrapers.
• Taipei 101 (508 m). It was officially the tallest from its opening on December 31, 2004, until the Burj Khalifa passed it in 2009.

The Burj Khalifa itself began construction in 2004 and opened in 2010. Its 828 m includes a 242.6 m spire. Wikipedia notes that much of this spire is widely regarded as vanity height, because very little of it is usable.

Spires, sails and arches: vanity height

The architectural-top rule rewards spires, and some towers make the most of that. "Vanity height" is the term for the part of a building above its highest occupiable floor. Three entries on this list show it clearly:

• Burj Al Arab (321 m). Wikipedia reports that 39% of the sail-shaped hotel's total height is non-occupiable space. It stands on an artificial island 280 m off Jumeirah Beach, and its helipad sits at 210 m.
• Kingdom Centre (302.3 m). The top third of this 99-story Riyadh tower is an inverted parabolic arch crossed by a 300-ton steel skybridge that visitors can walk through. The opening gives the tower its silhouette, and the arch and bridge make up much of the height that carries it just past the 300 m supertall mark.
• Merdeka 118 (678.9 m). Its spire was finished in December 2022. Wikipedia notes that the tower beats the Shanghai Tower to the tip because of that long spire, even though it has fewer floors and a lower highest occupied floor. Measured by occupied height, the Shanghai Tower is the world's second-tallest building.

None of this breaks the rules. It shows that each of the three heights answers a different question. Architectural height is about the built form. Occupied height is about how high people actually live and work. Tip height matters most to aviation authorities.

Floors are not a measure of height

The table above shows that floor counts and heights don't follow each other closely. The Tianjin CTF Finance Centre ties with the Guangzhou tower at 530 m with 97 floors against 111. The Lotte World Tower has 123 floors and is shorter than the 120-floor Abraj Al-Bait. Office, hotel and residential floors are built to different heights, and tall mechanical floors complicate the counts further.

Marketing makes it worse. The CTBUH criteria warn that some regions skip unlucky floor numbers, such as 4, 14 and 24 in Hong Kong, and that owners sometimes number floors to suit their own goals. Central Park Tower in Manhattan, at 472.4 m on this list, has 98 stories above ground, yet its top story is numbered 136. The council counts the physical floors and ranks by measured height.

What's coming next

The top of the table is not finished. The Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia is planned to be the first building over 1 km tall, at least 180 m taller than the Burj Khalifa. Wikipedia reports that work stopped in January 2018, resumed in January 2025, and that by October 9, 2026, construction had passed the 118th floor at more than 470 m. Under the completion rule it won't appear here until it is topped out, clad and partly occupied.

Even Merdeka 118 shows how loose the word "completed" can be in news coverage. Wikipedia reports that its structure was finished in November 2023 and that it held a grand opening in January 2024. A Park Hyatt hotel on levels 75 to 112 opened in August 2025, while much of the rest of the building was still closed. In July 2026 the tower was renamed Merdeka Maybank Tower after an anchor tenant. This site still lists it by its better-known name.

Comparing these buildings with people and landmarks

At these sizes, human scale is hard to picture, so comparisons help. An adult of 175 cm would need about 473 copies of themselves stacked head to toe to match the Burj Khalifa's 828 m. The gap between first and second place, about 149 m, is more than one and a half times the 85 m height of the Motherland Calls statue in Volgograd, measured from the base of its pedestal. Load any two towers into the 3D height comparison tool to see them side by side, or browse the landmarks hub to compare skyscrapers with statues, monuments and mountains. The One World Trade Center page covers the 541 m tower that Wikipedia describes as the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere and the tallest outside Asia.