Every Tall Building on Earth

What the colours mean

Each building is tinted by its floor count— the number of storeys it rises. The ramp runs from cool to hot as the towers climb: most are in the lower bands, and the map is built so the tall ones stand out — a cluster always takes the colour of its tallest building, so a lone supertall will set a whole city bloom glowing red.

How a building this tall actually stands up — why height is measured in floors and metres, what a core does, and why the supertall era only began recently — is worth a couple of minutes:

Tall buildings by country

Where the world built upward — led by the dense, vertical cities of North America, East Asia and the Gulf. Open a country for its mix of floor bands and its tallest towers.

About this data

Buildings, their locations and their floor counts come from Wikidata, the open, CC0 knowledge base. We map every habitable tall building — skyscrapers, office and residential towers, hotels and mixed-use blocks — that has real coordinates and rises at least forty floors, and colour it by storey count. We deliberately do notshow a height in metres: on Wikidata the recorded metre-heights for buildings are unreliable (feet entered as metres, antenna tips counted as roof, a real seventy-three-floor tower listed at over seven hundred metres), so we use the floor count instead, which the data records consistently. Completion years, where recorded, appear in each marker’s popup. A handful of buildings with no country recorded appear on the map but have no country page. This is a map of where humanity built tall, not a definitive height ranking. As community-maintained data it is broad but imperfect; we refresh the snapshot periodically rather than calling Wikidata on every visit.