Who leases the top floors, and what they pay

TL;DR

• The City of London set a record top office rent of £160 per sq ft in Q1 2026, against an average Grade A rent of £80.43. The premium for height and prime specification is roughly 63%, and prime tower vacancy is 0.9%.
• Law firms and asset managers buy the top consistently: Skadden on floors 38 to 40 of 22 Bishopsgate, Lazard on the 47th floor of FOUR Frankfurt, CMS on floors 39 to 43 of Varso Tower, Baker McKenzie on the top eight floors of a Frankfurt tower and floors 35 to 37 in Warsaw.
• In the tallest buildings in London and Warsaw, no office sits at the top at all. The Shard lets offices only to floor 26. Varso Tower's highest office is floor 43. Above that: restaurants, a hotel and observation decks.

The most valuable floor in a European tower is often the one that generates no office rent. That is the finding buried under two years of record leasing, and it reframes the question. Before asking what the top floor costs, establish whether it is for sale at all.

In the tallest towers, nobody leases the top

The Shard reaches 306 metres to architectural top in the CVU register, 309.6 metres in the developer figure, with 72 habitable floors. Its offices stop at floor 26. Floors 31 to 33 are restaurants, Aqua Shard, Oblix and Hutong in ascending order. Floors 34 to 52 are the Shangri-La hotel. The viewing gallery occupies floors 68 to 72, with The View from The Shard at 244 metres. Flex operator Fora holds Levels 24 and 25, which the Flexible Space Association describes as the highest of all the office floors in the building. Nothing above the twenty-sixth storey of the United Kingdom's tallest building is let as an office.

Warsaw repeats the pattern almost exactly. Varso Tower rises 310 metres to the spire tip and 230 metres to the roof across 53 floors. Its Skytop Restaurant & Bar sits on floors 46 and 49. The observation terrace, which HB Reavis calls the highest in Poland, opened on 9 September 2025 at 230 metres. The highest office in the building is CMS on floor 43.

Then there is the third model, which is neither rent nor ticket. Horizon 22 occupies Level 58 of 22 Bishopsgate, reached in 41 seconds by lifts running at up to eight metres per second, and admission is free. The top of the City's tallest office tower is given away, four floors above space that let for £122.50 per sq ft.

• Offices, where the tower is an office building throughout: 22 Bishopsgate, 8 Bishopsgate, One Leadenhall.
• Restaurants and hotels, where hospitality outbids office at the summit: The Shard floors 31 to 52, Varso floors 46 and 49, Duck & Waffle on the 40th floor of 110 Bishopsgate, open 24 hours.
• Observation decks, paid or free: The View from The Shard at floor 72, Varso's terrace at 230 metres, Horizon 22 at Level 58 for nothing at all.

Where offices do take the top, lawyers get there first

The occupier mix at the top of a European tower is narrower than the marketing suggests. It is law firms, then asset managers and insurers, then one flex operator.

At 22 Bishopsgate, AXA IM Alts let floors 38 to 40 to Skadden on a 15 year lease covering 65,000 sq ft, with Fidelis taking about 25,000 sq ft on the 42nd floor. At 8 Bishopsgate, Proskauer Rose expanded onto the 46th floor. At One Leadenhall, Brookfield let 90,000 sq ft to Ripple Labs in January 2026, completing the building fully let.

Frankfurt tells the same story in euros. Lazard signed a 10 year lease for about 1,470 sq m on the 47th floor of FOUR Tower T1 to house its German headquarters. In the same complex, Baker McKenzie became the first anchor tenant by taking, in the developer's own words, "the top eight floors of the smaller office tower", around 8,000 sq m in total.

Warsaw's towers are leased by the same names. CMS took floors 39 to 43 of Varso Tower, 7,000 sq m with a terrace of more than 450 sq m at 177 metres, which the firm describes as the highest located office in Poland. Baker McKenzie followed onto floors 35 to 37. Warsaw UNIT, Ghelamco's 202 metre tower, is fully let to more than 20 occupiers including the headquarters of insurer Warta.

We want to invest in innovation and attract the best talent in the legal services market.

Andrzej Pośniak, Managing Partner, CMS Poland

Paris shows the structure without the disclosed rent. Tour First at La Défense, 231 metres over 52 floors, houses Ernst & Young, Euler Hermes across floors 32 to 45, and a coworking operator on two floors. Professional services, an insurer, and flex: the same three-part stack as London, Frankfurt and Warsaw.

The premium over the mid-tower is about 63%

Savills put the average prime City rent at £130.80 per sq ft in Q1 2026, a record, up 40% on Q1 2025 and 24% on the previous quarter's record of £105.26. The same report puts the City's average Grade A rent at £80.43. That gap is the real answer to what the top costs against the middle: about 63%.

Two further datapoints frame it. The Insurance & Financial Services sector achieved an average of £94.25 per sq ft in Q1, which Savills calls a 13% premium to the market average, so sector alone explains only a fraction of the spread. And Monex took part of the 12th floor at 40 Leadenhall at £130 per sq ft, a mid-tower floor priced near the prime average, which suggests the premium attaches to the building at least as much as to the altitude.

Warsaw's ladder is cheaper and steeper in percentage terms. AXI IMMO reports central rents of roughly EUR 19.00 to EUR 27.50 per sq m per month at the end of 2025, and states that "in selected prime locations and on top floors, rents exceed EUR 30.00 per sq m per month". Non-central Warsaw starts around EUR 10.00. Eastnine's disclosure on Warsaw UNIT gives a whole-building benchmark: EUR 18.0m of annual rent on 59,800 sq m of lettable area, which is about EUR 25 per sq m per month averaged across all 46 floors, on a weighted average unexpired lease term of 5.1 years.

Frankfurt sits between them. JLL recorded a prime rent of EUR 55.00 per sq m per month in Q2 2026, up from EUR 52.00 a quarter earlier, with vacancy at 11.1%. High vacancy and a rising prime rent in the same market is the clearest statement of the thesis: the money is chasing a small number of floors, not the stock.

Scarcity is doing the work. Savills counts City tower vacancy at 2.9%, falling to 2.2% once space under offer is treated as unavailable, and prime tower vacancy at just 0.9%, or 0.2% excluding under-offers. Which is why the next generation of London towers is contested before it leaves the ground.

Who gains, who pays

Gains:

• Landlords of completed prime towers, who hold scarce stock and, in Savills' words, pricing power firmly on their side.
• Law firms already in situ, several of which expanded within their existing buildings in Q1 2026 rather than re-tendering.
• Hospitality and visitor-attraction operators, who outbid office use for the summit and monetise it by the hour rather than the square foot.

Pays:

• Occupiers below 10,000 sq ft. Sub-10,000 sq ft City transactions fell 25% below the Q1 average, the lowest level since 2021.
• Anyone arriving late. Commitments were made an average of 2.87 years ahead of lease expiry in 2022, and 4.02 years ahead in 2025.
• Mid-tower and secondary stock, where the spread against prime has widened rather than closed, a problem examined in when a tower ages.

What to watch

The pre-let cycle is the number to track through 2027. Savills reports that 21% of central London refurbishments and developments over 150,000 sq ft scheduled for 2026 to 2029 are already pre-let, with a further 4% under offer. The named battlegrounds are Edge London Bridge, 2 Finsbury Avenue, 50 Fenchurch Street and the Broadgate Tower refurbishment. If those upper floors are committed before completion, the £160 record will not stand past 2027. If they are not, the current spread was a supply artefact rather than a durable premium for height.

Warsaw's test arrives on a different clock. With central vacancy tightening and the development pipeline thin, the question is whether the EUR 30 top-floor rents hold when new supply lands, a question that runs through how Warsaw built a skyline. The vertical premium itself, as the economics of height sets out, is mostly a statement about the firm rather than the view. The engineering that makes a 47th floor lettable in the first place is covered in engineering the supertall. More from the Skyscraper Day Dive.