AbstractThe performance study of high‐rise towers has been attracting attention recently. Powerful analysis methods are used to assess local and global behaviour of tall structures. Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) is one the most powerful methods for accurate estimation of seismic performance of structures.In this paper, IDA is applied on high‐rise towers, specifically Tehran telecommunication tower. Three different finite element models have been developed. The first model is a two‐dimensional fibre beam element model on which IDA is applied. The other two models are finely meshed three‐dimensional elastic and inelastic multi‐axial‐element‐based models, which are used to investigate the validity of the two‐dimensional model. Furthermore, the efficiency of different Intensity Measures and Engineering Demand Parameters is investigated. The results show that there is a good agreement between the results of two‐dimensional and three‐dimensional models in linear and nonlinear domains. It is also observed that Sa(T1) is more efficient than peak ground acceleration (PGA) as spectral acceleration is a structural specific intensity measure in comparison with, which is site‐specific. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.