Abstract: Tuned liquid damper (TLD) is an effective passive control device to control structural vibration under wind and earthquake loads. To overcome the disadvantage of scaled model in traditional shaking table test, a real-time hybrid testing system is established in this study to evaluate the seismic performance at the linear response stage of low-rise, middle-rise and high-rise buildings and the nonlinear seismic response of high-rise buildings with TLD. The influence of TLD frequency ratio, mass ratio and excitation amplitude on seismic performance are discussed. The results showed that when the structure is at the linear stage, TLD is more suitable for controlling the acceleration response. TLD performed more effective in suppressing the structural response of high-rise structure than low-rise and middle-rise structure. Because of the randomness of earthquake, TLD may have adverse effects on the dynamic response of low-rise and middle-rise structure. When the high-rise structure is at the nonlinear stage, the damping performance of TLD on the structural response shows strong discreteness due to the narrow damping frequency band of TLD.