Height is easy to measure and hard to argue with, which is why every tall building wants a deck at the top of it. This countdown ranks the 20 highest observation decks in the world by one number only: how far the highest publicly accessible viewing floor sits above the ground — not the building's height, not the roof, but how high you can actually stand. Every deck here is open to visitors today, which rules out Kuala Lumpur's Merdeka 118, whose 500 m View at 118 has not opened yet, and Hong Kong's Sky100, closed for renovation with no reopening date announced. It also settles what the marketing blurs: a ticketed bar or a rooftop tour is not an observation deck, so the Burj Khalifa is ranked on At the Top SKY rather than the lounge two floors above it — and the world's highest deck turns out not to be in the world's tallest building at all. Heights verified August 2026.
20 Highest Observation Decks in the World (2026)
The record The highest observation deck in the world is Shanghai Tower, in China — 562 m (1,844 ft), observation deck height above ground. Source: Wikipedia (per CTBUH observation-deck study) + Guinness World Records + Los Angeles Times. Verified .
Highest Observation Decks in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Highest Observation Decks
- Only three observation decks on Earth stand above 500 m — Shanghai Tower, Shenzhen's Ping An Finance Centre and the Burj Khalifa. The top two are a dead heat, both quoted at 562 m, and Seoul Sky misses the 500 m mark by a single metre.
- The world's highest deck is not in the world's tallest building. The Burj Khalifa's deck sits roughly two-thirds of the way up its 828 m frame, while Shanghai Tower puts its highest deck nearly nine-tenths of the way up a 632 m tower.
- Four of the twenty highest decks stand in a single Shanghai neighbourhood. Lujiazui, on the Pudong side of the Huangpu, holds Shanghai Tower, the Shanghai World Financial Center, the Oriental Pearl Tower and Jin Mao Tower within a few hundred metres of each other.
- The Empire State Building's 102nd-floor observatory is the only deck in the top twenty that predates the Second World War. It opened in 1931 and, at 369 m, still ranks fifteenth in the world.
- The oldest deck in the top ten opened in 1976 — the CN Tower's SkyPod, nearly fifty years older than the newest entry on this list, the deck at Ciel Dubai Marina, which opened in November 2025.
1. Shanghai Tower
At 562 m 1,844 ft, the Top of Shanghai deck on the 121st floor of Shanghai Tower is the highest observation deck on Earth, and Guinness World Records recognises it as such. It shares the figure with Shenzhen's Ping An Finance Centre to within the margin of measurement, but the Guinness citation and the deck's position — nearly nine-tenths of the way up a 632 m tower — settle the order here. Two lower decks, on the 118th and 119th floors, sit at 546 m and 552 m and are usually where the standard ticket takes you.
The tower itself is the third-tallest building in the world, a 128-storey twist of glass wrapped in a second transparent skin that spirals as it rises. The gap between the two facades forms a stack of sky gardens, and the lifts that climb it are among the fastest ever built. Come on a clear day: at this height Shanghai's weather does most of the deciding, and low cloud over Pudong turns the view into a wall of white.
2. Ping An Finance Centre
At 562 m 1,844 ft, the Free Sky deck near the top of the Ping An Finance Centre is level with Shanghai Tower's and comfortably clear of everything else. It opened in February 2018 on the 116th floor of a 599 m Shenzhen tower and gives a full 360-degree sweep over the Pearl River Delta, with an interactive exhibition area folded into the viewing floor. Published figures for the deck vary — some sources measure the same floor at 541 m — so treat the top two placings as a dead heat rather than a settled order.
What makes the view unusual is what is under it. Shenzhen was a set of fishing villages within living memory and is now a city of many millions, so the skyline you are looking down on is almost entirely younger than the visitors looking at it. Free Sky faces the Futian district and, on a clear morning, the hills of Hong Kong's New Territories beyond.
3. Burj Khalifa
At 555.7 m 1,823 ft, the At the Top SKY deck on Level 148 of the Burj Khalifa is the third-highest observation deck in the world and the highest outdoor one anywhere. It opened in October 2014 and took that outdoor title from Guangzhou's Canton Tower. A larger, cheaper deck sits lower down on floors 124 and 125 at 452 m, which is the one most visitors mean when they say they have been up the Burj Khalifa.
There is viewing space higher still — a lounge on floors 152 to 154 at around 585 m — but it is sold as a bar with a minimum spend rather than an observatory, which is why this countdown ranks the tower on its deck instead. Either way the building remains the tallest in the world at 828 m, and the drop from Level 148 down to the fountains is the single most vertiginous thing on this list.
4. Lotte World Tower
At 499 m 1,637 ft, the top floor of Seoul Sky in the Lotte World Tower is the highest observation deck outside China and the Gulf. The observatory occupies the tower's top seven levels, floors 117 to 123, and works as a vertical circuit rather than a single room: an entrance and viewing floor, a sky terrace, cafes, and a lounge on the 123rd floor at the very top.
The signature stop is lower down. The Sky Deck on the 118th floor, at 478 m, holds the Guinness record for the highest glass-floored observatory in the world, and looking straight down through it at the Jamsil district is the reason most people buy the ticket. Above the observatory, a separate rooftop Sky Bridge Tour walks visitors across the crown at 541 m — higher than any deck on this list, but a guided roof experience rather than an observation floor.
5. Canton Tower
At 488 m 1,601 ft, the open-air platform at the top of the Canton Tower held the title of the world's highest outdoor observation deck from December 2011 until the Burj Khalifa opened At the Top SKY in October 2014. Known as Cloud Top 488, it is a terraced square above the tower's top ring, reached by a final flight of stairs from the observation levels below — genuinely outdoors, with Guangzhou laid out on every side.
The indoor observatory sits at 449 m and is roughly half the size of a football pitch. Lower again, an open-air skywalk runs around the tower's narrow waist at 180 m for anyone who would rather climb than ride. The whole 600 m structure tapers to a hyperboloid twist that locals long ago nicknamed the Slim Waist, and it is at its best after dark, when the exterior lighting turns the lattice into a colour wash.
6. Makkah Royal Clock Tower
At 484.4 m 1,589 ft, the viewing level in the spire of the Makkah Royal Clock Tower is the highest observation deck in Saudi Arabia and the only one on this list overlooking a pilgrimage site. The tower anchors the Abraj Al Bait complex directly beside the Masjid al-Haram, and the top four floors of the clock tower house the Clock Tower Museum, opened to visitors in 2019. The observation level sits within The Jewel, the glass-clad base of the spire above the clock faces.
Those clock faces are the largest in the world, and Guinness World Records lists this as the world's tallest clock tower. One important caveat before you plan anything: Mecca is closed to non-Muslims, so unlike every other entry here, access depends on who you are rather than what you pay. For pilgrims, the view straight down onto the Kaaba is unmatched anywhere in the world.
7. Shanghai World Financial Center
At 474 m 1,555 ft, the Sky Walk 100 deck on the hundredth floor of the Shanghai World Financial Center is a corridor rather than a room — a long enclosed bridge running through the rectangular opening that gives the building its nickname, the bottle opener. Sections of the floor are glass, so you cross the void looking down through it, with Shanghai Tower rising directly alongside.
Two further decks sit lower in the building, on the 94th and 97th floors, and the 97th is partly open to the air within the aperture itself. The tower tops out at 492 m and was the tallest building in mainland China when it completed in 2008, before its two Lujiazui neighbours overtook it. Between them, the three towers plus the Oriental Pearl give this one riverside district four of the twenty highest decks in the world.
8. Tokyo Skytree
At 451.2 m 1,481 ft, the Tembo Galleria is the highest observation deck in Japan. It is not a conventional floor but a sloping glass tube that spirals gently upward around the shaft of the Tokyo Skytree, so you walk the view rather than stand at it, finishing at the highest point visitors can reach.
The main Tembo Deck sits far lower, spread over three levels at 340 m, 345 m and 350 m, and includes a glass floor panel looking straight down the tower's legs. At 634 m the Skytree is the tallest tower in the world, and its height was chosen to sound out as musashi in Japanese — the old name for the region Tokyo sits in. On a clear winter morning, Mount Fuji appears on the southwestern horizon.
9. Taipei 101
At 449.2 m 1,474 ft, the rooftop deck on the 101st floor of Taipei 101 opened to the public in June 2019, adding an open-air level above what had been an indoor-only observatory. It is a small platform by the standards of this list, and it puts you above the point where the building's stacked, tapering sections finish and the spire begins.
Most visitors stop lower down, at the indoor observatory on the 89th floor at 383.2 m and the outdoor deck on the 91st. Between them hangs the tower's most photographed feature: a vast golden steel sphere suspended as a tuned mass damper, swinging against the typhoons and earthquakes that come with sitting on the Pacific Ring of Fire. It is one of the very few structural dampers anywhere turned into a tourist attraction in its own right, complete with cartoon mascots.
10. CN Tower
At 446.7 m 1,465 ft, the SkyPod is the highest observation deck in the Americas and, at nearly fifty years old, by far the oldest deck in the top ten. It requires a separate ticket from the main CN Tower admission and a second lift ride above the principal observation levels, which is why plenty of visitors never see it. On a clear day the view reaches across Lake Ontario to the spray of Niagara Falls.
The better-known levels sit lower: an outdoor terrace at 342 m with the famous glass floor, and the indoor LookOut at 346 m. Outside that same level, EdgeWalk sends harnessed visitors around the exterior ledge with nothing between them and Toronto. Completed in 1976, the tower stood as the tallest freestanding structure on Earth for more than three decades before Asia and the Gulf began building past it.
11. Willis Tower
At 412.7 m 1,354 ft, the Skydeck on the 103rd floor of the Willis Tower is the highest observation deck in the United States, a title it has held since 1974 and shows no sign of losing. On a clear day the view is said to reach four states across the flat Midwest, which is the sort of claim only a building on a plain this featureless can make.
The reason to queue is The Ledge: a set of glass balconies added in 2009 that cantilever straight out from the facade, so you step off the building's edge into a transparent box with 412 m of nothing beneath your shoes. The tower was the tallest building in the world for almost 25 years as the Sears Tower, and Chicagoans have never entirely accepted the name change.
12. One World Trade Center
At 386.6 m 1,268 ft, One World Observatory occupies floors 100 to 102 of One World Trade Center and is the highest observation deck in New York City. The approach is part of the attraction: the lifts screen a time-lapse of Manhattan's skyline growing from farmland to the present day in the under a minute it takes to reach the top, and the reveal at the end is a curtain lifting on the real thing.
The building rises to 541.3 m — 1,776 feet, a deliberate reference to the year of American independence — which makes it the tallest in the Western Hemisphere. From the deck the whole harbour opens up: the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island to the southwest, Brooklyn and the East River bridges opposite, and the memorial pools directly below, marking the footprints of the towers that stood here before.
13. Landmark 81
At 382 m 1,253 ft, the observation levels on floors 79 to 81 of Landmark 81 are the highest in Vietnam. The tower rises 461 m over the Vinhomes Central Park development on a bend of the Saigon River, and the decks look back across the whole sprawl of Ho Chi Minh City — a skyline that barely existed a generation ago and now runs to the horizon.
The design is meant to read as a bundle of bamboo stalks of uneven height, tied together and tapering as they rise, which is more convincing from a distance than from underneath. Sunset is the slot worth booking: the light comes in low across the delta, and the city switches on beneath you while the river holds the last of it.
14. Petronas Twin Towers
At 370 m 1,214 ft, the observation deck on the 86th floor of Tower 2 is the highest point visitors reach in the Petronas Twin Towers, and the highest deck in Malaysia until Merdeka 118's observatory opens. It is a compact indoor floor near the top of the tower's tapering upper section, looking out over Kuala Lumpur City Centre and across at its identical twin.
The more famous stop comes first. The double-decker Skybridge links the two towers on the 41st and 42nd floors at 170 m, and the standard ticket takes you across it before the lift up to 86. At 451.9 m these remain the tallest twin towers ever built, and they were the tallest buildings in the world outright from 1998 until Taipei 101 passed them in 2004.
15. Empire State Building
At 369 m 1,211 ft, the 102nd-floor observatory of the Empire State Building is the highest deck of any pre-war building in the world, and the only entry on this list that predates the Second World War. It is a small enclosed room with floor-to-ceiling glass on all sides, and it sits directly beneath the mooring mast originally built in the optimistic belief that airships would dock there.
The 86th-floor deck at 320 m is the one everybody pictures: open-air, art deco railings, and the setting for more film scenes than any other building on Earth. Completed in 1931 during the depths of the Depression, the tower rose in barely over a year and stayed the tallest building in the world for nearly four decades — a record no skyscraper has come close to matching since.
16. Lakhta Center
At 365 m 1,198 ft, the observation deck spread across floors 83 to 86 of the Lakhta Center is the highest in Europe. A shuttle lift climbs to it in a little over a minute, opening into a multi-storey atrium with panoramic lifts running between the viewing levels. Access is by guided tour with tickets bought in advance rather than by turning up, so it needs planning in a way most decks on this list do not.
The twisting glass spire rises 462 m on the Gulf of Finland shoreline several kilometres northwest of central Saint Petersburg, deliberately kept clear of the low historic skyline around the Neva. That distance is what makes the view work: from up here the entire baroque centre, the islands and the Gulf read as one flat map, with the sea stretching away to the west.
17. Ciel Dubai Marina
At 355 m 1,165 ft, the glass observation deck near the top of Ciel Dubai Marina is the newest entry on this list and the second in the city, opening with the hotel in November 2025. The 360-degree platform looks over Dubai Marina, out across Palm Jumeirah and the Arabian Gulf, and back inland toward the cluster of towers around the Burj Khalifa.
The building was certified by Guinness World Records in December 2025 as the world's tallest hotel, at 377 m — a title Dubai has been trading with itself for years. Alongside the deck the tower carries one of the highest infinity pools anywhere, and the marina below is one of the densest concentrations of tall residential buildings anywhere, which makes the downward view unusually strange: towers all the way down, and almost no ground visible at all.
18. Oriental Pearl Tower
At 351 m 1,152 ft, the highest of the Oriental Pearl Tower's fifteen observation levels is an outdoor platform with a panoramic glass floor, and it remains one of the most enjoyable decks in Shanghai despite being comfortably outclassed on height by its neighbours. Several of the lower levels have glass floors too, and the walk out onto them is the tower's signature move.
Built between 1991 and 1994, the tower was the tallest structure in China until the Shanghai World Financial Center overtook it in 2007, and it did more than any building to establish Pudong's skyline as an image of modern China. Its eleven linked spheres were designed to evoke pearls falling onto a jade plate, and a small hotel occupies the space between the two largest of them.
19. The Strat
At 350 m 1,149 ft, the observation levels at the top of The Strat sit on the tallest observation tower in the United States and the second-tallest in the Western Hemisphere, behind only the CN Tower. The 1,149-foot concrete tower stands just north of the Las Vegas Strip, and the indoor and outdoor decks look straight down the length of it — the single best overview of the Strip anywhere in the city.
The tower is better known for what it lets you do at that height than for the view. Thrill rides run off the top deck, including a controlled descent down the outside of the tower, and a revolving restaurant turns slowly a few floors below. Opened in 1996, it was conceived as a landmark sign that grew out of all proportion, which is a very Las Vegas way for a building to happen.
20. Jin Mao Tower
At 340.1 m 1,116 ft, the 88th-floor observation deck of the Jin Mao Tower closes out the top twenty and completes Lujiazui's set — four of the world's twenty highest decks within a few hundred metres of each other. The deck is a single 1,520 sq m room, and its best view is not outward but down, through the hollow atrium of the hotel that occupies the tower's upper third, spiralling thirty floors down to the hotel lobby.
Outside it, the Jin Mao Skywalk runs 60 m around the building's edge at 340.6 m: a ledge just over a metre wide with no guardrail, walked in a harness. The 420.5 m tower opened in 1998 and is the most deliberately Chinese of Shanghai's supertalls, its stepped setbacks scaled in a repeating pattern drawn from traditional pagoda proportions.
FAQ: The World's Highest Observation Decks
What is the highest observation deck in the world?
The Top of Shanghai deck on the 121st floor of Shanghai Tower, at 562 m 1,844 ft above the ground. Guinness World Records recognises it as the world's highest observation deck. Shenzhen's Ping An Finance Centre measures level with it to within the margin of error, so the two are best treated as a dead heat at the top.
Is the Burj Khalifa's observation deck the highest in the world?
No. At the Top SKY on Level 148 reaches 555.7 m, which places the Burj Khalifa third, behind two Chinese towers that are shorter buildings but put their decks closer to the roof. It does hold a real record, though: it is the highest outdoor observation deck anywhere, a title it took from Guangzhou's Canton Tower in October 2014.
How is observation deck height measured?
By how far the highest publicly accessible viewing floor sits above ground level — not by the height of the building. That distinction matters, because a deck can sit anywhere from two-thirds to nine-tenths of the way up a tower. This ranking also excludes rooftop tours and ticketed sky bars sold separately from the observatory, which is why the Burj Khalifa's 585 m lounge does not count.
Why aren't Merdeka 118 and Sky100 Hong Kong on this list?
Because neither is open. Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur is the world's second-tallest building and its View at 118 observatory would rank fourth here at 500 m, but it has not opened to visitors yet. Sky100, on the 100th floor of Hong Kong's International Commerce Centre at 393 m, closed in 2025 for a major renovation and has announced no reopening date.
Which country has the most of the world's highest observation decks?
China, with six of the top twenty — and four of those six stand in a single Shanghai neighbourhood, Lujiazui, within a few hundred metres of each other. The United States is next with four, in Chicago, New York and Las Vegas. Eleven countries appear in total, spread across Asia, the Gulf, Europe and North America.
Planning more of your trip? Keep exploring more world record-breakers.