Announcing the Inaugural Honest Horizon Awards and the First Padded Pinnacle

The Tallest Buildings Council is pleased to announce the first annual Honest Horizon Awards, recognising buildings where the gap between architectural top and highest occupied floor falls below 5%. These are buildings where the marketed height is essentially the real height. They are rare.

Six buildings qualify for the 2026 inaugural class: CITIC Tower (China Zun) in Beijing (1.1% Vanity Ratio), International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong (1.7%), Empire State Building in New York City (2.1%), KK100 in Shenzhen (3.4%), Shanghai World Financial Center in Shanghai (3.7%), and Changsha IFS Tower T1 in Changsha (4.7%).

All six have Vanity Ratios below 5%. All six are in the Honest 100. None of them are the tallest building in the world. The world's tallest building has a 29.3% Vanity Ratio.

The inaugural Padded Pinnacle - the annual recognition for the highest confirmed Vanity Ratio in the top 100 by architectural height - goes to Bank of America Tower in New York City.

Bank of America Tower: 365.8m architectural top, 234m highest occupied floor, 36.0% Vanity Ratio. 131.8m of non-occupiable structure above the highest office floor.

This is the highest confirmed Vanity Ratio in our database. It is also, notably, one of the LEED Platinum-certified office buildings in Manhattan - a building with strong environmental credentials and the most extreme verified height inflation in the confirmed Honest 100. These facts are not contradictory. They are just both true.

Four buildings approach the Honest Horizon threshold but fall above 5%: Guangzhou International Finance Centre (5.4%), International Finance Centre 2 in Hong Kong (5.9%), Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre (6.4%), and Willis Tower in Chicago (6.7%).

Willis Tower's position in this list deserves note. A 1973-built American steel-frame tower, with broadcast antennas added in 1982, nearly meets the 2026 Honest Horizon threshold. Many buildings completed in the last 20 years do not come close.

Six of the ten Honest Horizon Award recipients or near-misses are in China. This reflects the broader pattern in the Honest 100: Chinese supertalls tend toward lower Vanity Ratios than their international peers.

The Padded Pinnacle winner is in New York City. New York City also contains the second-worst Vanity Ratio in the database (Emirates Office Tower is in Dubai; One Vanderbilt is next in New York at 27.2%). The city that contains the world's most honest historic supertall (Empire State Building at 2.1%) also contains the most dishonest modern supertall (Bank of America Tower at 36%). New York contains multitudes.

This is what the Honest Horizon Awards are for: naming the pattern, not the people.