Buildings over 200 ft, by US metro area

#30DayMapChallenge Day 4: Clusters

How many buildings 200 feet or taller are in each US metro area? Each circle is one Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Its number is the count of buildings 200 ft or taller, and its area grows with the count.

6,485 buildings fall in 229 of 393 metro areas. New York leads with 1,047, followed by Miami (509), Dallas (332), Chicago (276), Los Angeles (234). 164 metro areas have none (gray dots), and 121 buildings stand outside any metro area (orange dots).

Find your metro. Hover over a circle for its metro area, click it for the tallest building, or search for a metro by name. How does your city stack up? Share it with #30DayMapChallenge.

How it was made

• Buildings: the FAA Digital Obstacle File, dated November 2, 2026. Anything over 200 ft generally has to be reported to the FAA, so the file is close to complete at this height. Only buildings count, including buildings topped with a tower, not freestanding towers, stacks or wind turbines. Some records stand for several buildings, and those are all counted. Unverified records are included.
• Height: above ground, to the very top, including spires and antennas. So it won't match skyscraper rankings, which use architectural height.
• Metro areas: 2023 Metropolitan Statistical Areas from the US Census Bureau's cartographic boundary files. Each building is assigned to the MSA it falls in, using detailed boundaries, and buildings within 2 km of an MSA's edge (piers, landfill) are counted in it. The outlines here are simplified.
• Circle position: the middle of each metro's tall buildings, which usually lands downtown.
• Tallest buildings: the FAA file has no names, so 106 of 229 are named from Wikidata: an item at that spot with a matching height, or else the nearest building within 90 m. A few names may be wrong.

Building names from Wikidata (CC0).