The CTBUH brackets
Tall
150-300m
Defined as the upper bracket of conventional high-rise. Buildings of urban significance but below the supertall threshold.
Supertall
300m+
300 metres or taller. As of 2026, fewer than 250 supertall buildings exist globally. The category is widely used in rankings and tourism marketing.
Megatall
600m+
600 metres or taller. Only seven megatall buildings exist as of 2026: Burj Khalifa, Merdeka 118, Shanghai Tower, Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower, Ping An Finance Centre, Lotte World Tower, and One World Trade Center.
Note: One World Trade Center reaches the 600-metre threshold only because of its 124-metre antenna spire above 386 metres of office floors. The architectural top is 541 metres - just shy of megatall - until the spire is included. This is precisely the kind of measurement that the Vanity Ratio exists to make visible.
Why these thresholds, and why they are arbitrary
The CTBUH set the supertall threshold at 300 metres in the 1990s and added megatall at 600 metres around 2010, partly in response to the Burj Khalifa pushing supertall heights into a category of their own. Both numbers are round-figure thresholds rather than engineering boundaries: there is no specific structural or material change that distinguishes a 299-metre building from a 301-metre one.
The thresholds are useful for rankings and language - having a one-word descriptor for "over 300 metres" is helpful in casual writing. They are less useful for engineering, environmental, or urban-planning analysis, all of which are governed by site-specific constraints rather than height brackets.
The thresholds also matter for branding: a developer can market a 301-metre building as "supertall" in a way that materially affects pricing and prestige. This creates incentive to design to the threshold - sometimes by extending spires past it. The relationship between thresholds and architectural top is not coincidental.
Honest height view of these categories
By honest height, the megatall category becomes considerably smaller. Of the seven megatall buildings on the architectural-top measurement, only the following have honest heights above 600 metres: none. Zero buildings on Earth have an occupied floor above 600 metres as of 2026.
The buildings that come closest are the Burj Khalifa (highest occupied floor at 585 metres), Shanghai Tower (583.5 metres), and Ping An Finance Centre (555.1 metres). All three have architectural tops well above 600 metres - but none reach 600 metres in occupied use.
The supertall threshold (300 metres) holds up better under honest height. Most buildings classified as supertall have occupied floors above 300 metres, even after subtracting their spires. The Bank of America Tower in New York is the notable exception: its highest occupied floor is at 234 metres, despite an architectural top of 365.8 metres - it is a supertall in name only.