Accurately resolving spatio-temporal variations in sea surface height across the polar oceans is key to improving our understanding of ocean circulation variability and change. Here, we examine the first two years (2018-2020) of Arctic Ocean sea surface height anomalies (SSHA) from the photon-counting laser altimeter onboard NASA’s ICE, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2). ICESat-2 SSHA estimates are compared to independent estimates from the CryoSat-2 mission, including available semi-synchronous along-track measurements from the recent CRYO2ICE orbit alignment campaign. There are documented residual centimeter-scale range biases between the ICESat-2 beams (in the current data release, r003) and we opted for a single-beam approach in our comparisons. We find good agreements in the along-track estimates (correlations > 0.8 and differences < 0.03 m) as well as in the gridded monthly SSHA estimates (correlation 0.76 and mean difference 0.01 m) from the two altimeters, suggesting ICESat-2 adds to the SSHA estimates from CryoSat-2.