Time delay inevitably exists in active control systems, and it may cause the degradation of control efficiency or instability of the systems. So time delay needs to be compensated in control design in order to eliminate its negative effect on control efficiency. Today time delay in linear systems has been more studied and some treating methods had been worked out. However, there are few treating methods for time delay in nonlinear systems. In this paper, an active controller for a nonlinear and hysteretic building structure with time delay is studied. The nonlinear and hysteretic behavior of the system is illustrated by the Bouc-Wen model. By specific transformation and augmentation of state parameters, the motion equation of the system with explicit time delay is transformed into the standard state space representation without any explicit time delay. Then the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method and instantaneous optimal control method are applied to the controller design with time delay. Finally, numerical simulations and comparisons of an eight-story building using the proposed time-delay controller are carried out. Simulation results indicate that the control performance will deteriorate if time delay is not taken into account in the control design. The simulations also prove the proposed time delay controller in this paper can not only effectively compensate time delay to get better control effectiveness, but also work well with both small and large time delay problems.