Abstract The pendulum pounding tuned mass damper (PPTMD) is an effective passive control device for structures under harmonic excitations. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of PPTMD for vibration control of SDOF and MDOF structures subjected to ground motions. The dynamic equations of motion for a primary structure controlled by a PPTMD are formulated and the parameter of the PPTMD was obtained through minimizing the root mean square (RMS) of the free vibration response of the controlled structure. The control performance of PPTMD with the optimized parameters was verified by shake table tests of a SDOF structure under three different earthquakes. The effect of the mass ratio and frequency detuning of the PPTMD on its control performance under 17 different earthquake records with different frequency components was further investigated, and the comparison with the classic tuned mass damper (TMD) was also conducted. Additionally, the influence of the inherent damping ratio of primary structure and earthquake intensity to the control performance was discussed. It is shown that the proposed optimum parametric formulas can be used for the optimal PPTMD design, and both numerical and experimental results demonstrated that the PPTMD effectively suppressed the structural responses, even under detuning situations. The inherent damping of primary structure decreases the control efficiency of PPTMD. Moreover, the control performance of the PPTMD on 10-storey shear structure was studied. As a single-mode controller, the PPTMD is more effective when the structural vibration of target mode is mainly excited under seismic excitations.