A glass floor is the cheapest trick in tall-building architecture and the most effective. Take the structure already holding you up hundreds of metres in the air, remove the one surface you were not thinking about, and replace it with something you can see through. The result is a very specific kind of vertigo — not fear of the edge, but the collapse of the floor itself. This countdown ranks the twelve highest by a single measurement: how far the glass floor sits above the ground at the base of its structure, in a building or tower you can buy a ticket for and walk onto today. That rules out some famous names — including a couple whose celebrated glass floors turn out not to be glass at all — and cliff-edge and canyon walkways, measured against a valley floor rather than a street. Every figure below was checked against an operator, an encyclopedia or a record book in August 2026.
12 Highest Glass Floors in the World (2026)
The record The highest glass floor in the world is the Free Sky, Ping An Finance Centre, in China — 1,796 ft (547.6 m), glass-floor height above ground. Source: Guinness World Records. Verified .
Highest Glass Floors in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Highest Glass Floors
- Two of the most famous "glass floors" in the world are not glass. The floor on Level 125 of the Burj Khalifa that appears to shatter underfoot is a bank of OLED screens beneath a toughened surface, triggered by motion sensors. The Shanghai Tower's Sky Walk is a video floor too. Neither qualifies for this list.
- Guinness World Records holds two titles here, and they disagree. "Highest glass-floor observation deck" belongs to Seoul's Sky Deck at 478 m, verified in January 2017. "Highest glass floor cantilevered observation deck" belongs to Shenzhen's Free Sky at 547.6 m, achieved in October 2019 — nearly 70 m higher.
- The world's tallest building does not appear on this list. The Burj Khalifa's highest observation deck sits at 555 m, above every entry below, but it has no glass floor at all.
- The drop from first to twelfth is 861 ft — the gap between Shenzhen's record cantilever and Melbourne's sliding cube is itself taller than all but a handful of buildings on earth.
- Six of the twelve are in East and Southeast Asia, three of them in China alone. The full list spans eight countries and four continents, and Melbourne's Edge is the only entry anywhere south of the equator.
- Toronto's is the veteran, open since 1994 — older than most of the buildings the other eleven are installed in.
1. Free Sky, Ping An Finance Centre
At 1,796 ft 547.6 m above the pavement, the glass floor at Free Sky is the highest in the world that anyone can walk out onto. It sits on the 116th floor of the Ping An Finance Centre in Shenzhen, where a section of the deck pushes out past the building line and leaves nothing but laminated glass between your shoes and the Futian district below. Guinness World Records certified it in October 2019 as the highest glass floor cantilevered observation deck.
The cantilever is what makes it so unnerving. On most towers the transparent panel is set into a floor that is otherwise solid, so you can circle it and choose your moment; here the glass hangs beyond the facade, and the wall of the building falls away beneath you in one uninterrupted line. Shenzhen spreads out flat in every direction, which strips away the usual visual anchors — no hills, no neighbouring supertall close enough to measure the drop against — and makes the ground look considerably further off than the number suggests.
2. Sky Deck, Lotte World Tower
The Sky Deck lays a sheet of glass 1,568 ft 478 m over the Songpa district of Seoul, and for years it was the outright record holder: Guinness World Records verified it in January 2017 as the highest glass-floor observation deck in the world. It occupies one level of the seven-storey observatory near the top of the Lotte World Tower, South Korea's tallest building.
The engineering is deliberately overbuilt. The floor is 45 mm of laminated glass rated to carry more than 500 kg per square metre, and three of the surrounding walls are glass as well, so the space reads as a transparent box rather than a window cut into a floor. The view down is unusually legible for this height, because the ground around the tower is dense and low: you can pick out individual rooftops, the bridges over the Han River and the traffic threading between them, rather than the anonymous grey mat that most decks above 400 m look onto.
3. Sky Walk 100, Shanghai World Financial Center
Sky Walk 100 is a 55 m corridor suspended 1,555 ft 474 m up inside the Shanghai World Financial Center, with three transparent sections set into its floor. It runs across the trapezoid opening at the top of the tower — the aperture that earned the building its bottle-opener nickname — so visitors are crossing a void inside a void, with the structure framing the drop on every side.
When it opened in 2008 this was the highest observation deck in the world, a title it held until 2011. The tower keeps two lower decks as well, on the 94th and 97th floors, but the 100th is the one worth the ticket. The glass panels look straight down the building's own flank onto Lujiazui, with the Oriental Pearl Tower sitting well below eye level and the Huangpu River curling round behind it toward the Bund.
4. Starry Sky Observation Hall, Canton Tower
At 1,421 ft 433 m, the Starry Sky Observation Hall is the highest enclosed level inside the Canton Tower, and its transparent tempered-glass walkways are the reason to keep going up rather than stop at the deck below. Because the hall is glazed and climate-controlled, it is also one of the few places on this list where standing on glass in high summer is a comfortable proposition.
The tower's hourglass profile does something no rectangular skyscraper can. The structure pinches in at the waist and then flares again, so the walkway looks out past a lattice of steel that twists as it falls rather than down a flat wall. A second glass-floored hall sits a few metres lower, and higher still is an open-air deck at 488 m — though that upper level is a bare platform, not a transparent one, which is why the Starry Sky hall takes the ranking.
5. The Ledge, Skydeck Chicago
The Ledge pushes a row of glass boxes out from the 103rd floor of the Willis Tower, leaving visitors standing on inch-and-a-half glass 1,353 ft 412 m above Wacker Drive. Each box extends about four feet past the facade, which is far enough that looking between your feet takes in the tower's black flank, the Chicago River and the street all at once, with nothing in the frame to interrupt the fall.
Skydeck Chicago opened The Ledge in 2009 and it remains the American benchmark for this kind of thing. The city helps: the tower stands at the edge of the Loop's tightest cluster of high-rises while the lakefront lies barely a mile east, so the view has a dense vertical foreground and a completely flat horizon behind it. The Skydeck's long-standing claim is that on a clear day the sightlines reach across Lake Michigan into three neighbouring states.
6. Glass Floor, CN Tower
Toronto's glass floor sits 1,122 ft 342 m up the CN Tower, and at more than thirty years old it is comfortably the veteran of this list — it opened in 1994, long before glass boxes and cantilevers became a standard feature of tall buildings. The panel is set flat into the main observation level, so you cross ordinary carpet and then simply run out of floor.
That plainness is the point. There is no theatrical reveal and no harness, just a square of glass with the tower's concrete shaft dropping away beneath it toward the Rogers Centre and the rail corridor into Union Station. The CN Tower has since added an outdoor terrace on the same level and a hands-free ledge walk higher up the pod, but the glass floor is still the part visitors describe afterwards.
7. Tembo Deck Glass Floor, Tokyo Skytree
The glass floor on the Tembo Deck sits 1,115 ft 340 m above Sumida, on the lowest of the three levels that make up the Tokyo Skytree's main observatory. The deck wraps the tower in a continuous ring across 340, 345 and 350 m, and the transparent panels are cut into the bottom level, so the view runs straight down the shaft to the plaza at its base.
What you see through it is unusual for a glass floor. This is not a business district but a dense low-rise city — the Sumida River, the old Asakusa quarter and a grid of narrow streets laid out like a map. The Skytree runs a second observatory higher up, the Tembo Galleria at 450 m, but that upper level is a sloping glass-walled ramp rather than a glass floor, which leaves the 340 m panels as the place to look down from.
8. Glass Floor, Ostankino Tower
The enclosed observation deck of the Ostankino Tower stands 1,105 ft 337 m over northern Moscow, and sections of its floor are glass — walking onto one and looking between your feet is the first thing most visitors do on arriving. The tower is a slender concrete needle with nothing tall anywhere near it, so the drop is entirely unobstructed from the moment the floor disappears.
Ostankino was for a time the tallest free-standing structure on earth, and it still dominates its quarter of the city in a way few towers manage. An open-air deck sits a little higher at 340 m, but it depends on the weather and stays shut for much of the year; the glazed level with the glass floor is the one that operates year-round, which is what puts it on this list.
9. Edge at Hudson Yards
Edge at Hudson Yards cantilevers roughly 80 feet out from the 100th floor of 30 Hudson Yards, and its glass floor panel sits 1,100 ft 335 m above Manhattan's West Side. The deck is triangular and open to the sky, which changes the experience entirely: wind, weather and street noise all reach you, and the transparent section is set near the point of the triangle, where there is least structure left around you.
It is the highest outdoor sky deck in the Western Hemisphere, and the siting is what makes it work. Because Hudson Yards sits west of Midtown's main cluster, the glass looks down onto the High Line, the rail yards and the Hudson River rather than onto the flanks of other towers — an unusually open foreground for a Manhattan viewpoint, and one that gives the drop somewhere to land.
10. Levitation, SUMMIT One Vanderbilt
Levitation hangs a pair of glass boxes off the side of One Vanderbilt with their floors 1,063 ft 324 m above East 42nd Street. You step out of the building altogether: the boxes protrude from the facade, so the glass underfoot is over open air and the avenue is directly, vertically beneath you rather than somewhere off to the side.
SUMMIT One Vanderbilt built its whole attraction around reflection and disorientation — mirrored rooms, mirrored ceilings, sightlines that fold back on themselves — and Levitation is the sharpest part of it, because this time the effect is not an illusion. The tower stands immediately beside Grand Central Terminal, so the drop takes in the station's roof and the crown of the Chrysler Building from a height that puts you well above both.
11. Sky Box, Menara Kuala Lumpur
The Sky Box juts out from the open-air Sky Deck of Menara Kuala Lumpur with its glass floor 984 ft 300 m over the city. It is a small transparent cube built from layers of tempered laminated glass, entered a few people at a time, and it clears the rim of the tower entirely, so what lies beneath the glass is not deck or structure but open air.
The setting is what separates it from the skyscraper decks elsewhere on this list. Menara Kuala Lumpur stands on a forested hill inside the Bukit Nanas reserve, so the immediate view down is old-growth rainforest canopy rather than pavement, with the Petronas Twin Towers and the rest of the skyline rising behind it. Few glass floors anywhere put jungle directly under your feet and a supertall city on the horizon at the same time.
12. The Edge, Melbourne Skydeck
The Edge is a glass cube that slides bodily out of the side of the Eureka Tower, carrying its occupants 935 ft 285 m above Southbank with the Yarra River beneath them. You board it while the glass is still opaque; once the cube has travelled clear of the building, the glass turns transparent all at once — floor, walls and ceiling together.
Melbourne Skydeck occupies level 88 and is the highest public observation deck in the Southern Hemisphere, which makes The Edge the only entry on this list from below the equator. The reveal is theatrical by design and it works precisely because there is no gradual approach: one moment you are standing in a lit white box, the next the floor has gone and the river, the bridges and the Flinders Street rooftops are directly underneath.
FAQ: The World's Highest Glass Floors
What is the highest glass floor in the world?
Free Sky, on the 116th floor of the Ping An Finance Centre in Shenzhen, China, at 1,796 ft 547.6 m above ground. Guinness World Records certified it in October 2019 as the highest glass floor cantilevered observation deck. Second place, the Sky Deck at Seoul's Lotte World Tower, sits 228 ft lower.
Is the Burj Khalifa's glass floor real?
No. The floor on Level 125 that seems to crack as you walk across it is a video effect — a bank of screens under a toughened surface, driven by motion sensors. It is convincing enough to frighten people, but there is no transparent panel and nothing beneath it. The tower's highest deck has no glass floor either.
What is the highest glass floor in the United States?
The Ledge at Skydeck Chicago, 1,353 ft 412 m up the Willis Tower, where four glass boxes push out about four feet past the facade. New York holds the next two: Edge at Hudson Yards at 1,100 ft and Levitation at SUMMIT One Vanderbilt at 1,063 ft. Three of the world's twelve highest are American.
How thick is the glass on these observation decks?
Thicker than it needs to be, and always laminated rather than a single sheet. Seoul's Sky Deck uses 45 mm glass rated to carry more than 500 kg per square metre. Chicago's Ledge uses panels about an inch and a half thick. Melbourne's Edge cube is built from 45 mm glass on every face.
Can you visit all twelve?
Yes — that is the rule for inclusion here. Every glass floor on this list is open to the public, so you buy a ticket and walk onto it. That deliberately excludes real glass floors in towers whose observation decks have not yet opened, along with the video floors that only look the part.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.