Copenhagen has a height problem, and it is the single most important thing to understand before you spend 120 kroner on a drink for the view. This is a deliberately low city: the historic centre is five and six storeys, the skyline is spires rather than towers, and a bar on the sixth floor is genuinely near the top of it. The best Copenhagen rooftop bars are lovely, social and worth an evening. They are not Manhattan, and any guide implying otherwise has not stood on one.
Below are the ones that actually exist and are open to the public, what each is good for, which are overpriced, and the free viewpoints that beat most of them outright. Prices and hours were checked in September 2026 — rooftop bars change their seasons and their menus more often than almost any other kind of venue, so confirm before you build an evening around one.
The Short Version
| Bar | Where | Season | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Level Six | Frederiksborggade 18, above Nørreport | Year-round | The reliable one, open from noon |
| ILLUM Rooftop | ILLUM department store, Amagertorv | Year-round, indoor and out | Strøget views and a fallback in bad weather |
| ROOF Bar & Lounge | NH Collection Copenhagen | April to October | Summer evenings, hotel-bar polish |
| Nimb Roof | Nimb Hotel, inside Tivoli | Warm months, restricted access | The best view, if you can get on it |
| Christiansborg Tårnet | Christiansborg Palace | Year-round, not a bar | The tallest view in the city, free |
Level Six: The One That Actually Works
Level Six sits at Frederiksborggade 18, directly above Nørreport, which is the busiest station in Denmark and about as central as it is possible to be. It opens at noon every day and runs to 23:30 Monday to Thursday, 01:00 on Friday and Saturday and 23:00 on Sunday, with the kitchen doing 12:00 to 16:00 and 17:00 to 22:00.
The noon opening is what makes it useful. Almost nothing else in Copenhagen’s drinking scene opens before four in the afternoon, so on a bright day Level Six is one of the few places you can have a drink outdoors and above street level at two o’clock. The view is over rooftops towards the lakes and the spires rather than a skyline, and it is better than the venue’s own photographs suggest because it is close enough to street level to feel connected to the city rather than detached from it.
It is also, being above a station on a busy junction, not a quiet place. Come for the light and the drink; do not come expecting a serene evening. Prices are not published in advance, but the whole city runs on the same arithmetic — expect rooftop rather than bodega money, which our beer price guide puts in context.
ILLUM Rooftop: The Bad-Weather Answer
On top of the ILLUM department store on Amagertorv, in the middle of Strøget, ILLUM Rooftop is not one bar but a small floor of them — several restaurants, cafes and bars sharing a terrace, open all year with indoor space as well as outdoor. That last detail is why it belongs on this list at all.
Copenhagen’s rooftop season is genuinely short. A terrace-only bar is useless from November to March and marginal in April. ILLUM is the one that works in a Danish October, because you can be inside with a view through glass when the horizontal drizzle arrives, which it will. The trade-off is atmosphere: this is a department store food floor with a terrace attached, and it feels like one. It is busy, bright and functional rather than romantic.
It is also right on top of the shopping street, so it fits neatly into a day rather than requiring an evening of its own. See our ILLUM guide for the rest of the building, and the shopping guide for what surrounds it.
ROOF Bar & Lounge: Strictly Seasonal
On top of the NH Collection Copenhagen, ROOF runs April to October and is open to non-guests as well as people staying in the hotel. It is the most conventionally attractive of the group: a proper hotel rooftop with a designed terrace, competent cocktails and a view across the harbour side of the city.
The seasonality is not a technicality. Turning up in March to find a closed roof is the most common rooftop disappointment in this city, and it happens to people who read a list written in July. If you are here between November and March, ROOF is simply not available to you and neither are most of its competitors.
Nimb Roof: The Best View You Probably Cannot Have
Nimb Roof, on top of the Moorish-looking Nimb Hotel inside Tivoli, has the view. Panoramic, over the gardens and out across the city, from the one building in central Copenhagen that is both high enough and beautifully placed. It is genuinely the best rooftop in the city.
It is also, for most of the time, restricted to hotel guests and Nimb Club members. During the warmer months there are evenings and events when it opens to the public, and those are worth watching for, but turning up at the Tivoli entrance on the assumption you can go up is how people waste an evening. Check nimb.dk before you plan around it, and note that you will need a Tivoli ticket to be in the gardens at all — see our Tivoli guide for how that works.
This is the honest position that most rooftop lists dodge: the best one is largely closed to you. Everything else is a compromise between access, season and view.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Copenhagen Rooftops
Copenhagen has spent centuries keeping its buildings low. The result is a city where the tallest thing in the historic core is a church spire and where “rooftop” means five or six floors up. You are not going to look down on the city. You are going to look across it, at roof tiles, copper spires and the harbour, which is a genuinely handsome thing to look at and is not what the phrase promises.
This matters for value. In a high-rise city the height is the product and the price reflects it. Here you are paying a premium of roughly 20 to 30 kroner a drink over a good ground-floor bar for a view that a free tower does better. The rooftop is worth it for the outdoor light, the space and the social feeling of being above the street on one of the forty evenings a year when Copenhagen is warm. It is not worth it as a viewing platform.
Which brings us to the thing no rooftop guide will tell you: the best view in central Copenhagen is free and it is not a bar. The tower at Christiansborg Palace — Tårnet — is the tallest accessible viewpoint in the city, it costs nothing to go up, and there is a restaurant at the top if you want one. It is closed on Mondays and queues at peak times, so check the current hours, but a fifteen-minute climb up that tower gives you more of Copenhagen than any bar in this article. Do that first, then go and have your drink somewhere with a heater. Full details on Christiansborg.
The Rundetårn is the other one — a seventeenth-century spiral ramp with a viewing platform, cheap, central, and considerably more interesting as a building than any hotel roof.
What a Rooftop Evening Costs
| Drink | Typical rooftop price | Ground-floor equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Beer, 0.5L | 75–95 DKK | 50–75 DKK |
| Glass of wine | 90–130 DKK | 70–100 DKK |
| Cocktail | 130–160 DKK | 105–150 DKK |
| Bar snacks for two | 150–250 DKK | — |
Two people having two drinks each on a Copenhagen rooftop is comfortably 500 kroner. That is not outrageous for the setting, but it is a real number and it buys a substantially better evening in a proper cocktail bar where somebody is thinking hard about the drink rather than the terrace furniture. Our bar guide has the ground-floor alternatives by neighbourhood.
How to Actually Use a Copenhagen Rooftop
- Go early. Level Six opens at noon; most rooftops are at their best between four and seven when the light is low and the terrace is not yet full.
- Check the season before anything else. April to October is the honest window for terrace-only venues. ILLUM and Level Six are the year-round options.
- Dress for ten degrees colder than the forecast. Copenhagen sits on a flat coast with a westerly wind and there is nothing between you and it up there. The blankets bars hand out are not decorative.
- Do not plan a sunset in June. Midsummer sunset here is around 22:00, which is later than most people want to still be starting an evening. In August it is a far more civilised 20:30.
- Have one and move on. Rooftops are a first drink, not a whole night. The city’s good drinking is at ground level and it starts late — see Copenhagen after dark.
Where Locals Actually Drink Outdoors
Almost nowhere on a roof. The Copenhagen outdoor drinking tradition is at water level, not above it: the harbour steps at Islands Brygge, the quay at Ofelia Plads, the pontoons at Christianshavn, the containers at Refshaleøen. In summer the entire city sits on the edge of the water with supermarket beers, which is both free and considerably more Danish than a hotel terrace.
If you want the version of that with table service, Refshaleøen has the waterside bars and Christianshavn has the canal pontoons. Neither is a rooftop and both are better on a warm evening than most rooftops in this article.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best rooftop bar in Copenhagen?
Nimb Roof has the best view but is normally restricted to hotel guests and members. Of the ones anyone can walk into, Level Six above Nørreport is the most reliable — open year-round from noon, genuinely central, with a rooftop view across the spires.
Are Copenhagen rooftop bars open in winter?
Mostly not. Terrace-only venues such as ROOF run April to October. ILLUM Rooftop and Level Six work year-round, ILLUM because it has indoor space with a view.
How much is a drink on a Copenhagen rooftop?
Roughly 75 to 95 DKK for a half-litre of beer, 90 to 130 for a glass of wine and 130 to 160 for a cocktail — about 20 to 30 kroner a drink more than a good ground-floor bar.
Do you need to book a rooftop bar in Copenhagen?
For a table on a warm Friday or Saturday evening, yes, and for anything with a kitchen. On a weekday afternoon you can walk in. Nimb Roof is the exception: access is restricted rather than booked.
What is the tallest viewpoint in Copenhagen?
The tower at Christiansborg Palace, which is free to climb and closed on Mondays. It is higher than any rooftop bar in the city and costs nothing, which makes it the better choice if the view is what you actually want.
Is Level Six worth it?
Yes, with the caveat that you are paying for outdoor light rather than a skyline. It is central, opens at noon when nothing else does, and stays open year-round. For the view alone, climb Christiansborg’s tower instead and drink somewhere cheaper.
For the harbour view specifically, the paid option that beats every terrace here is the Church of Our Saviour in Christianshavn, where you climb to 86 metres on stairs wrapped around the outside of the spire. It costs 70 kroner, less than one rooftop cocktail — see our guide to climbing the Church of Our Saviour.
The terrace season, in other words, starts in April — and April here can mean frost in the first week and seventeen degrees in the last. Our guide to Copenhagen in April covers what else reopens that month and what the weather actually does.
One more viewpoint worth knowing about, if you are in Frederiksstaden at a weekend: the Marble Church dome, 50 kroner and the only view in the city that shows the eighteenth-century royal quarter laid out as it was drawn. There are thirty places a week — our guide to the Marble Church explains how to get one.
A few of these work better as a date than as a round of drinks. Our Copenhagen for couples guide pairs the better views with harbour sunsets and hotels worth lingering in.
Related Reading
- The best bars in Copenhagen the ground-floor drinking, sorted by neighbourhood.
- Copenhagen cocktail bars where the drink itself is the point.
- Copenhagen after dark how the night actually runs here, and why nothing opens early.
- Christiansborg Palace including the free tower that beats every rooftop on this page.
- Beer prices in Copenhagen what the rooftop premium looks like in kroner.
Final Thoughts
Rooftop bars are a genre invented for cities with skylines, and Copenhagen deliberately does not have one. What it has instead is six months of extraordinary evening light, a harbour everyone drinks beside, and a handful of terraces that are genuinely pleasant places to spend the first hour of a night out. Judge them on that and they hold up. Judge them on the view and they will disappoint you, because a free tower two hundred metres away does it better.
So: Level Six if you want the reliable one, ILLUM if it is raining, ROOF between April and October, and Nimb only if you have checked. Then go down to the water, where the city actually drinks.
