The tallest building in Sydney is Crown Sydney at Barangaroo, 271.3 metres with 75 floors, completed in 2020. Sydney Tower is taller at 309 metres, but it is an observation and telecommunications tower rather than a habitable building and does not appear in building rankings. Crown Sydney is also only the fourth tallest building in Australia — Melbourne and the Gold Coast all have taller ones — which is unusual for the country's largest city and is a direct result of flight paths.
The Airport Sets the Ceiling
Sydney Airport sits eight kilometres south of the central business district, closer to the city centre than the airport of almost any comparable metropolis. Its approach and departure paths run directly over the built-up area, and the Obstacle Limitation Surface — the invisible sloping plane that protects aircraft operations — caps building heights across the whole of central Sydney.
The practical limit in the CBD has long been around 235 metres above ground, and every proposal above it requires a specific determination from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority. Crown Sydney was permitted to exceed it because Barangaroo sits slightly further from the flight path.
This is the single most important fact about the Sydney skyline. The city has the money, the demand and the land to build considerably taller, and it does not because of where the airport is.
Crown Sydney
Crown Sydney is a hotel and residential tower on the Barangaroo headland, designed by Wilkinson Eyre with a twisting form of three petal-shaped elements that rotate as they rise. It holds a six-star hotel, apartments, restaurants and a casino.
Its approval was contentious. Crown Resorts was granted a restricted gaming licence in 2014 without a competitive tender, on the basis that the casino would serve international VIP players only, and the process was criticised in the New South Wales parliament.
The building was finished in December 2020 and opened without its casino, which was blocked after the Bergin Inquiry found Crown unsuitable to hold the licence. It was permitted to open the gaming floor in 2022 under strict conditions after a remediation programme, by which time the tower had been operating as a hotel for over a year.
Sydney Tower Is Not a Building
Sydney Tower, also called Centrepoint Tower and Sydney Tower Eye, opened in 1981 at 309 metres. Its turret sits at around 250 metres and contains observation decks, restaurants and a Skywalk platform, and the shaft below is a hollow structural cylinder.
Because usable floor space occupies well under half its height, it is classified as a tower rather than a building, the same distinction that keeps the CN Tower out of Toronto's rankings and the Eiffel Tower out of Paris's.
It is the second tallest observation tower in the southern hemisphere after the Sky Tower in Auckland, which reaches 328 metres. It is held down by 56 cables which, if laid end to end, would run about 7 kilometres, and it is designed to sway up to 1.5 metres in extreme wind.
Australia's Taller Buildings Are Elsewhere
Q1 on the Gold Coast, completed in 2005 at 322.5 metres, was Australia's tallest building for eighteen years. Australia 108 in Melbourne reached 316.7 metres in 2020, and Melbourne's Eureka Tower is 297.3 metres.
The current national record holder is Queen's Wharf Brisbane's Star Tower or the Gold Coast's Ocean pipeline depending on the measure used, and Melbourne holds the largest cluster of towers above 250 metres. Sydney's tallest sits fourth or fifth on the national list.
Melbourne's advantage is straightforward: Melbourne Airport is 23 kilometres from the city centre and its flight paths do not cross the CBD. The Gold Coast has no significant constraint at all.
Barangaroo
Barangaroo occupies 22 hectares of former container terminal on the western edge of the city centre, redeveloped from 2009. It is one of the largest urban renewal projects in Australia and has been argued about at every stage.
The southern section holds three commercial towers by Rogers Stirk Harbour, International Towers Sydney, of 168 to 217 metres, along with Crown. The northern headland was reshaped into a naturalistic park, Barangaroo Reserve, using around 10,000 sandstone blocks quarried on site.
The site is named after Barangaroo, a Cammeraygal woman of the Eora nation and the wife of Bennelong, who was a significant figure in the early contact period around 1790. The naming was proposed by community consultation and adopted in 2006.
The Twist Is Structural
Crown Sydney's three curving petals rotate roughly 30 degrees over the height of the tower, and the geometry is not only decorative. Rotating the plan disrupts the regular vortex shedding that makes a constant-section tower oscillate in wind, which is the same principle used at Shanghai Tower and Cayan Tower in Dubai.
The consequence is that no two floors are identical. Every floor plate is a slightly different shape, which raises the cost of the structure, the facade and the fit-out considerably, and it is why twisting towers remain rare.
The building sits on a mat foundation cut into Hawkesbury sandstone, the rock that underlies most of central Sydney and is strong enough to carry very heavy loads at shallow depth. Sydney's geology is unusually generous to tall buildings, which makes the aviation constraint the more frustrating of the two limits.
Opal Tower and What Followed
Sydney's most consequential recent building story was not about height. On Christmas Eve 2018, residents of Opal Tower at Sydney Olympic Park, a 36-storey residential building completed months earlier, were evacuated after cracking was found in precast concrete panels.
An independent investigation found design and construction defects rather than a single catastrophic fault, and repairs took over a year. Mascot Towers followed in 2019 with a separate cracking problem, and the two cases together triggered a collapse in confidence in newly built apartments across New South Wales.
The state responded with the Residential Apartment Buildings Act of 2020, the appointment of a Building Commissioner with powers to block occupation certificates, and a mandatory design and building practitioner registration scheme. Every tall residential building approved in Sydney since has been built under that regime.
Sydney's Older Towers
Salesforce Tower at Circular Quay, completed in 2022 at 263 metres, is the second tallest building in the city and the tallest office building. One Sydney Harbour Tower 1 at Barangaroo reached 247 metres in 2024.
Chifley Tower, finished in 1992 at 244 metres, held the record for a long period and is still one of the most distinctive buildings in the CBD. Governor Phillip Tower, MLC Centre and Citigroup Centre all sit in the 220 to 245 metre band.
The 25-metre height limit that governed Sydney from 1912 was lifted in 1957, and the AMP Building at Circular Quay, completed in 1962 at 117 metres, was the first building to exceed it. Everything tall in Sydney dates from after that decision.
Sirius, the Opera House and Height Politics
Sydney's arguments about buildings are rarely about height alone. The Sydney Opera House, completed in 1973 at 65 metres, dominates the harbour by position rather than by scale, and protecting views to and from it constrains development around Circular Quay.
The most contested recent case was Sirius, a brutalist public housing block at The Rocks completed in 1980. The state government sold it in 2019 despite a heritage listing recommendation, and the campaign to save it ran for years. It has been converted to private apartments.
The city's tall building policy has generally traded height for public benefit — the design excellence competitions required for major sites, and the requirement to provide public space at ground level. Barangaroo's approvals were amended several times in exactly this way.
What Is Coming
Several Sydney projects are approved above 250 metres. The Central Barangaroo and Blackwattle Bay plans include substantial towers, and Parramatta — 24 kilometres west, and outside the airport constraint — is now building higher than the Sydney CBD.
Parramatta's tallest approved buildings exceed 270 metres, and the city has designated it as Sydney's second central business district. The Powerhouse Parramatta and the Sydney Metro West line are the anchoring investments.
The proposed Western Sydney Airport at Badgerys Creek, which opened in 2026, changes the constraint map again, imposing new limits on the western suburbs while doing nothing to relax the ones over the harbour.
Views
Sydney Tower Eye's observation deck at 250 metres is the highest public viewpoint, and the Skywalk takes visitors onto an outdoor glass-floored platform above it. The Pylon Lookout on the Harbour Bridge, at 87 metres, is far cheaper and gives the better photograph of the Opera House.
The BridgeClimb takes groups over the arch to 134 metres. Crown Sydney's A'Mare and Oncore restaurants occupy the upper floors of the tower itself.
For the skyline rather than the view from it, the ferry to Manly passes the whole harbour frontage, and Mrs Macquarie's Chair gives the standard postcard composition with the Opera House and Bridge together. For comparison, see the count of countries in Oceania and the tallest building in Toronto, the other city whose tallest structure is not a building.