When asked what the kanji with the most strokes was I originally thought that the upper limit was around 30. I had a look on the net and in fact it goes way higher than that although it is debatable into which is officially recognized as a kanji. More about that later. Here are some examples of kanji comprised of 30 strokes ( randomly taken from jisho.org)

（らん）Ran – A mythical bird

（ライ、り、レイ）Ri – A Chinese oriole ( a kind of bird )

Some kanji characters are formed by repeating the basic radical character two, three or even four times such as 林 or hayashi or 晶. My personal favorite is 姦 “kashimashii” which is made up from the basic radical for woman written three times. It means “noisy”. Here are a few more examples of kanji with repeated radicals.

（ショウ）Shou – Many horses – 30 strokes

（ セン ）fresh – 30 strokes

large group of horses traveling in a line – 34 strokes

In the following kanji, the basic radicals have been repeated four times to produce 64 strokes.

(てつ）Many, numerous (words)

The big hitters in the kanji stroke department are the following. This kanji (おういちざ) – has an incredible 79 strokes.

But the winner here weighing in at an incredible 84 strokes is “Daito”:

According to this site, the last two kanji (ouichiza and daito) were invented by a playwright for a play during the Edo period. However this fact hasn’t been substantiated so it is doubtful as to whether this could be recognized as an official kanji. It doesn’t appear in any of the dictionaries I have checked and is not in popular use or even known about by most Japanese people.
According to jisho.org 䯂 is the kanji with the highest number of strokes at 34. However for a kanji with a high stroke order which is in common use,　鬱（うつ） at 32 strokes is a safe bet.

All of this information is not a definitive guide and is posted to inspire anyone who has the time and resources to look into this further. I also wrote this for fun and because I hadn’t found any articles about this in English.

My main sources were:

jisho.org

http://nackham.exblog.jp/d2005-11-14

http://www.akatsukinishisu.net/kanji/mottomo.html