Top 10 Highest Building in the World: 2026 Ranking

This guide sets out the top 10 highest building in the world ranking as of late 2026, using the completed-building heights published by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), the body that adjudicates official building heights. It also explains how height is measured, and why the tower that will soon top the list is not on it yet.

Lists of tall buildings are easy to find. What they rarely explain is how these structures resist the wind, carry their own enormous weight and stay comfortable for occupants. This article reads each ranking with a structural engineer’s eye: the record is the headline, the structural system is the story.

How building height is measured

CTBUH recognises three measures:

Height to architectural top, including spires but excluding antennas, signage, flagpoles and other functional equipment. This is the measure used for official rankings.
Height to highest occupied floor.
Height to tip, including everything at the top.

Heights are measured from the level of the lowest significant open-air pedestrian entrance. A building is counted only once it is complete, which means topped out structurally and architecturally, clad, and at least partially open for occupation. A tower under construction, however tall it already is, does not enter the ranking.

The top 10 highest building in the world list for 2026

By height to architectural top, the ten tallest completed buildings are:

Burj Khalifa, Dubai, United Arab Emirates: 828 m, completed 2010.
Merdeka 118, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: 678.9 m, completed 2023.
Shanghai Tower, Shanghai, China: 632 m, completed 2015.
Makkah Royal Clock Tower, Mecca, Saudi Arabia: 601 m, completed 2012.
Ping An Finance Center, Shenzhen, China: 599.1 m, completed 2017.
Lotte World Tower, Seoul, South Korea: 554.5 m, completed 2017.
One World Trade Center, New York, United States: 541.3 m, completed 2014.
Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre, Guangzhou, China: 530 m, completed 2016.
Tianjin CTF Finance Centre, Tianjin, China: 530 m, completed 2019.
CITIC Tower, also known as China Zun, Beijing, China: 527.7 m, completed 2018.

Just outside the top ten is Taipei 101, which held the title of world’s tallest from 2004 until the Burj Khalifa opened. All ten were completed in 2010 or later, and five are in China, a reflection of the concentration of supertall construction in Asia and the Middle East over the past two decades.

Jeddah Tower: the next number one

The building expected to take first place is Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture to rise above 1,000 m. Construction started in the 2010s, stalled for several years, and resumed in 2025. As of early October 2026, its developer reported that the tower had passed its 116th floor, at roughly 466 m, with a little over 40 floors remaining and completion targeted for late 2028.

It is therefore not yet in any ranking of completed buildings, and will not be until it is finished. Other towers under construction that would enter the top ten, including Burj Azizi in Dubai, also remain years from completion. Rankings of this kind change slowly, but they do change, so any list should be read with its date.

How the tallest towers stand up

At these heights, wind, not gravity, governs the design. A supertall tower must be stiff enough that its sway is imperceptible to occupants, and shaped so that wind does not set it vibrating. The main strategies appear across the list:

Buttressed cores

The Burj Khalifa, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, uses a buttressed core: a hexagonal concrete core braced by three wings, each stiffening the others, in a Y-shaped plan. The wings set back in a spiral pattern as the tower rises, so the shape of the building changes with height and the wind cannot organise into regular vortices along it.

Core, mega-columns and outriggers

Many of the towers, including Shanghai Tower, Ping An Finance Center, Lotte World Tower and Merdeka 118, rely on a concrete core linked to perimeter mega-columns through storey-deep steel trusses called outriggers, with belt trusses tying the columns together. The outriggers make the whole width of the building work against overturning. Our guide to the outrigger system explains how they work.

Tubes and diagrids

Other towers use the perimeter itself as the structure: braced frames, mega-frames or diagrids around the outside, as in the braced composite mega-frame of the CITIC Tower and the sloping perimeter mega-frame of the Tianjin CTF Finance Centre. Our article on tall building structural systems covers frames, tubes and diagrids in more depth.

Shaping and damping

Shape matters as much as structure. Shanghai Tower’s twisting, tapering form was tested in wind tunnels and reduces wind loads significantly compared with a straight prism. Rounded corners, setbacks and openings near the top all help. Where extra control is needed, tuned mass dampers, large masses near the top that move out of phase with the building, absorb motion. Taipei 101’s exposed pendulum damper is the best known, and Shanghai Tower also uses one. See our article on the tuned mass damper.

Foundations, materials and construction

A supertall tower concentrates huge loads onto a small footprint. Most of the towers on the list stand on thick concrete raft foundations supported by deep bored piles, often extending tens of metres into the ground. The Burj Khalifa’s raft, for example, sits on large-diameter friction piles in weak sedimentary rock.

High-strength concrete, pumped to record heights, forms the cores and mega-columns, often in composite construction with embedded steel. Construction depends on self-climbing formwork for the core, high-capacity cranes and precise survey control so that a building hundreds of metres tall stays vertical, accounting for shortening of columns as load accumulates. Our article on wind load on buildings covers the forces that drive all of this.

What the ranking tells us

The top 10 highest building in the world ranking is partly a story of national and corporate ambition. But it is also a record of engineering progress. A century ago, the tallest building was the Chrysler Building in New York, at 319 m, a steel frame clad in brick. Today’s tallest is more than two and a half times that height, made possible by composite structures, wind engineering, high-strength materials and computational analysis.

Height alone is a poor measure of architectural quality, and many tall-building specialists now argue that the more interesting frontier is efficiency: towers that use less material and energy, and that work for the city at their base. Our list of famous buildings includes towers that matter for reasons other than height.

Frequently asked questions

What is the tallest building in the world in 2026?

The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 828 m, completed in 2010. It remains the tallest completed building. Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, under construction and designed to exceed 1,000 m, is expected to overtake it when completed, currently targeted for late 2028.

What is the second tallest building in the world?

Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at 678.9 m to its architectural top, completed in 2023. It overtook Shanghai Tower, which at 632 m is now third.

How is the height of a skyscraper measured?

Official rankings by CTBUH use height to architectural top, from the lowest significant open-air pedestrian entrance to the top of the building including spires, but excluding antennas, signage and flagpoles. Height to highest occupied floor and height to tip are also recorded.

Why is Jeddah Tower not on the list?

Because it is not finished. Rankings include only completed buildings. As of October 2026 it had reached about 116 floors and roughly 466 m, with completion targeted for late 2028.

Why are the tallest buildings mostly in Asia and the Middle East?

Rapid urban growth, high land values in dense city centres, and government and corporate ambition to create landmarks have concentrated supertall construction in China, the Gulf states and Southeast Asia since the 2000s.

Interested in the structural side of tall and complex buildings? Talk to our consultancy or get in touch.