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A series of shake table tests were recently conducted on full-scale 10-story and 6-story mass timber buildings at the 6-DOF Large High-Performance Outdoor Shaking Table facility at the University of California San Diego. Stairs, providing the primary egress in and out of a building during and after an earthquake event, were incorporated in each of these building test programs. To ensure they support the immediate recovery of building function, a variety of drift-release details were incorporated. Previous earthquake events and experimental studies have shown that stairs are among the most drift-sensitive nonstructural systems and are prone to damage, therefore relieving interstory drifts is paramount to improving their performance. To this end, the designed drift-release connections within the stairs considered the test buildings response during earthquake motions scaled at various hazard levels with expected minor and repairable damage under large earthquake loading. This paper provides an overview of the shake table test programs from the perspective of the design and performance of resilient steel stairs.