Abstract Tree planting is the most widely used technique for tropical forest restoration because it accelerates the recovery of forest structure and ecosystem functioning. Despite the importance of tree size distribution to the ecological function and habitat quality of restored forests, it has received little attention. Here we ask if the structure of reference forests has been recovered by planting tree seedlings and discuss the implications of skewed tree-size distributions for sustainability of restored forests. We sampled 11 tropical forest sites that had undergone restoration for between 16 and 53 years after planting tree seedlings and nine reference ecosystems (old-growth, secondary and degraded forests) in Brazilian Atlantic forest, and compared them by the abundance of individuals in five diameter classes. Restored forests presented 83% greater abundance of large trees (>20 cm DBH), 41% lower abundance of saplings (1 ≤ DBH