Abstract: The city-scale nonlinear time-history analysis is widely used in the field of seismic analysis. Strong ground motion records are input into the building models of a target region for nonlinear time-history analyses to obtain damage of the buildings. However, different earthquakes have different target regions, which makes it difficult to compare the destructive capacities of different earthquakes. In this work, the damage state ratios of buildings in the campus of Tsinghua University under different earthquakes are compared using several strong ground motion records in recent years and two artificial ground motions. The results indicate that the spectral characteristics of ground motions have a great influence on the damage states of buildings in the target region. The economic loss under the earthquakes are also evaluated using the method based on FEMA P-58 and the method based on the Chinese code, respectively. The results show that the two methods have different results due to their different computing theories. Peak ground accelerations (PGAs) have some effects on the results of economic loss evaluation. The analysis results can provide a reference for the comparison of the destructive capacity of different earthquakes.