The record table, as of 2026, with the span measured between supports of the main span. The Rankings page keeps the full list, including bridges under construction.

suspension

1915 Çanakkale Bridge, Turkey, 2,023 m (2022); Akashi Kaikyō, Japan, 1,991 m (1998); Nanjing Xianxin, China, 1,760 m (2025). Under construction: Zhangjinggao 2,300 m, Shiziyang 2,180 m; planned: Messina 3,300 m.

cable-stayed

Changtai Yangtze River Bridge, China, 1,208 m (2025); Russky Bridge, Russia, 1,104 m (2012); Husutong rail–road bridge, China, 1,092 m (2020); Sutong, 1,088 m (2008). Under construction: Guanyinsi, 1,160 m.

arch

Tian'e Longtan Bridge, China, 600 m (2024); Pingnan Third Bridge, 575 m concrete-filled steel tube (2020); Chaotianmen, 552 m (2009); Lupu, 550 m (2003).

girder / box

Shibanpo Bridge, Chongqing, 330 m (2006), with a steel box in the mid-span of a concrete box; Stolma Bridge, Norway, 301 m (1998), lightweight concrete.

truss

Quebec Bridge, Canada, 549 m cantilever (1917), a record unbroken for over a century.

extradosed

Chinese and Korean spans in the 250–300 m range; the form is limited by its own logic rather than by a record.

Three conventions sit behind every number in this table. A main span is measured between the centre lines of its two supporting towers or piers, not as the clear water between their faces. A bridge counts from the day it opens to traffic, not from the day its deck is closed. And a record is a record of span, not of length or height, which are separate lists (sections 11.6 and 11.7). The record holders also change faster than many readers expect: three of the entries above, Changtai, Nanjing Xianxin and Tian'e Longtan, opened in 2024 or 2025.

• Tay Bridge, 1879, wind became a design load.
• Quebec Bridge, 1907, compression buckling of built-up members, and professional responsibility for construction-stage checks.
• Tacoma Narrows, 1940, aerodynamic stability of long spans; every suspension deck since has been wind-tunnel tested.
• Kings Bridge, Melbourne, 1962 and the box-girder collapses of 1970 (Milford Haven, West Gate), brittle fracture of high-strength steel; plate buckling of thin steel boxes; the Merrison rules.
• Silver Bridge, 1967, fracture-critical members; the NBIS.
• Ynys-y-Gwas, 1985, corrosion of ungrouted tendons; a moratorium on internally grouted segmental construction in the UK.
• Kobe, 1995, modern seismic design of substructures; Japan's Level 2 ground motion.
• I-35W, 2007, gusset plates as rated members; loads during repair works.
• Morandi, 2018, inspectability of encased stays; the Italian and European inspection reforms.
• Key Bridge, 2024, vessel size versus pier protection on the world's ports.

Korea built its long-span skyline in one generation. The Seohae Grand Bridge (2000, 470 m cable-stayed) was the first modern long span; the Gwangan Bridge in Busan (2003, 500 m suspension) made the form a city symbol; the Incheon Bridge (2009, 800 m cable-stayed, the longest in Korea) connected the airport; the Busan–Geoje Fixed Link (2010) combined cable-stayed spans and an immersed tunnel; the Yi Sun-sin Bridge (2012) hung 1,545 m between towers at the height of the admiral's birth year; and the Ulsan Grand Bridge (2015, 1,150 m) was the first single-span suspension bridge in the country.

The author's own projects sit in that list: the Busan Harbor Bridge (북항대교, 2014, 540 m cable-stayed) with its cable plan documentation, and the Gunjang (Dongbaek) bridge. Korean practice combines AASHTO-derived codes (KDS 24) with a strong domestic cable and fabrication industry, and the country now exports cable-stayed and suspension design to the Gulf, Southeast Asia and beyond.

The Gulf's bridges are an engineering response to heat, salt and speed. The King Fahd Causeway (1986) connected Saudi Arabia and Bahrain with 25 km of precast concrete over shallow sea, and set the durability template: low-permeability concrete, high cover, and cathodic protection from the start. Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Zayed Bridge (2010, Zaha Hadid with Hyder) is a sequence of sinuous steel arches with a main arch of about 140 m; Dubai's Business Bay Crossing (2007) and the Infinity Bridge (2022, a 295 m steel arch over the Creek) carry twelve and more lanes; Kuwait's Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Causeway (2019) runs 36 km across the bay with a cable-stayed navigation span. Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are building the next set.

Design here follows AASHTO with the Gulf's modifications, Abu Dhabi's TR-516 and TR-511, Dubai's own standards, and the lessons of Chapter 5: chloride, temperature ranges over 50 °C, and the difficulty of inspecting anything in summer. The elevated roads of Dubai and Doha are among the largest precast segmental programmes ever built.

Span records do not rise smoothly. They creep up a few per cent at a time while a form is refined, then jump when a new material, a new theory or a new construction method arrives. Three histories show the pattern.

Suspension. Telford's Menai Bridge (1826) spanned 176 m on wrought-iron chains. Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge (1883, 486 m) was the first to hang from steel wire cables spun in place, with diagonal stays added for stiffness. In 1931 the George Washington Bridge (1,067 m) nearly doubled the record at a stroke: deflection theory had shown that a long, heavy deck hung from heavy cables needs little stiffening of its own, and Othmar Ammann built it without a stiffening truss. The Golden Gate (1937, 1,280 m) and the Verrazzano-Narrows (1964, 1,298 m) followed, then the Humber (1981, 1,410 m) on a slender steel box. The Akashi Kaikyō Bridge (1998, 1,991 m) jumped 41 per cent on the strength of a new 1,800 MPa wire and full-bridge wind-tunnel testing. The 1915 Çanakkale Bridge (2022) took the record by 32 m: its 2,023 m span marks the centenary of the Turkish Republic in 2023, and its 318 m towers the date of the naval victory at the Dardanelles, 18 March 1915.

Cable-stayed. The modern form began at Strömsund in Sweden (1956, 183 m). Saint-Nazaire in France (1975, 404 m) and Barrios de Luna in Spain (1983, 440 m, in concrete) took it past 400 m; Skarnsundet in Norway (1991, 530 m) and Yangpu in Shanghai (1993, 602 m) past 500 and 600. The Pont de Normandie (1995) then leapt to 856 m, 42 per cent at once, with a steel box only 3 m deep in the central 624 m and prestressed concrete for the rest. Tatara (1999, 890 m) edged past it; Sutong (2008, 1,088 m) was the first beyond a kilometre; Russky (2012, 1,104 m) followed; and in 2025 the Changtai Yangtze River Bridge reached 1,208 m, carrying road and railway on a steel truss deck.

Arch. Eiffel's wrought-iron Garabit Viaduct (1884, 165 m) and the steel Hell Gate Bridge in New York (1916, 298 m) were the milestones before the race of 1931–1932, in which the Bayonne Bridge in New Jersey beat the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the record by well under a metre. New River Gorge (1977, 518 m) then held the title for 26 years. China took it with steel at Lupu (a box rib, 2003, 550 m) and Chaotianmen (a truss, 2009, 552 m), with concrete-filled steel tube at Pingnan Third (2020, 575 m), and with a concrete arch on a steel-tube skeleton at Tian'e Longtan (2024, 600 m). The concrete arch has its own line: the Krk Bridge (1980, 390 m) held it until the Wanxian Yangtze River Bridge (1997, 420 m), the first of the large skeleton-built concrete arches.

Two lessons sit in these lists. The big jumps come from method, not ambition: spun steel wire, deflection theory, the aerodynamic box deck, the cable-stayed deck that builds itself from its own stays, the tubular arch rib lifted by cable crane. And a record is a statement about one span, not about a bridge: many of the most influential bridges, Salginatobel, Severn and Ganter among them, never held a record at all.

Height has two meanings, and the record tables keep them apart. The height of a bridge is the distance from the deck down to the lowest point beneath it, water or valley floor. The structural height is the height of its tallest pier or tower. A viaduct over a broad valley can be tall without being especially high; a suspension bridge across a deep gorge can be the highest in the world on towers of ordinary size, because the ground falls away beneath it.

Highest decks. The Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado (1929), 291 m above the Arkansas River, was the highest bridge in the world for about seventy years, until China's mountain expressways overtook it in the early 2000s. The Sidu River Bridge in Hubei (2009) carried a 900 m suspension span about 496 m above its valley; its pilot rope was carried across the gorge by rocket. The Beipanjiang Bridge at Duge (2016), a 720 m cable-stayed span, raised the record to 565 m, and the Huajiang Canyon Bridge in Guizhou, a 1,420 m suspension span opened in September 2025, to 625 m. Mexico's Baluarte Bridge (2012), a 520 m cable-stayed span about 400 m above its gorge, was for some years the highest cable-stayed bridge. On railways, the Chenab Bridge in Jammu and Kashmir (2025), a 467 m steel arch, carries the line 359 m above the river, higher than any other railway bridge.

Tallest structures. The Millau Viaduct (2004) set the modern benchmark: its tallest pier is 245 m, and the mast above it reaches 343 m from the ground. The largest cable-supported spans have now passed it. The towers of the Changtai Yangtze River Bridge (2025) are about 352 m tall, and those under construction for the Zhangjinggao south span (about 350 m) and the Shiziyang Bridge (342 m) are of the same order; the 1915 Çanakkale towers reach 318 m and Russky's 321 m. Tower height follows span: a suspension tower stands roughly a tenth of the span above the deck and a cable-stayed tower a fifth to a quarter (sections 3.5 and 3.6), so every new span record brings a tower record with it.

Why height is hard. A tall pier is a slender column in the wind. Second-order (P-Δ) moments, the thermal bow when the sun heats one face, and vortex shedding while the pier stands free before the deck braces it often govern its design. Piers over 100 m are usually hollow and tapered, built in climbing-formwork lifts of 4–6 m or by continuous slipforming, with survey corrections at every lift. Deep gorges add the problems of access (cableways, temporary roads cut into cliffs, materials lifted hundreds of metres) and of wind that accelerates and turns through the valley in ways a code written for open country does not describe. The largest gorge bridges are therefore designed with site wind measurements, topographic models and sectional model tests, not code values alone.

Headlines about the world's longest bridge usually mean total length, which is a different record with different engineering. A long span is one structure pushed to its limit; a long bridge is the same moderate span repeated thousands of times with consistent quality. The two lists hardly overlap.

Two definitions keep such a list honest. First, length is measured along the continuous bridge structure between its abutments; embankments, approaches at grade and tunnels do not count. Second, a crossing made of bridges, tunnels and artificial islands is a fixed link, not a bridge. The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau crossing (2018) is 55 km in all, but its main link is 22.9 km of bridge and a 6.7 km immersed tunnel joined by two artificial islands. The Øresund link (2000) and the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link (2024) follow the same bridge, island and tunnel pattern, which is chosen wherever a shipping lane or an airport's flight path rules out tall towers. Recent sea bridges include the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (Atal Setu, 2024), 21.8 km, India's longest sea bridge.

Why build 165 km of viaduct instead of an embankment? On the soft alluvial plains of eastern China and western Taiwan an embankment would settle for decades, while a high-speed track tolerates only millimetres of settlement after it is laid. A viaduct on piles also takes less land and leaves roads, canals and floodwater free to pass beneath. The Chinese high-speed network is built mostly of a standard 32 m simply supported box girder of about 900 t, cast in temporary factories along the line, carried over the finished deck on a girder transporter and placed by a bridge-erecting machine, often at one or two spans per machine per day. At that span length the Danyang-Kunshan bridge is of the order of 5,000 spans: the engineering lies in the logistics, the precision of the bearings and the control of long-term creep camber, not in any single span.

Long sea crossings add durability at scale: thousands of piers in the splash zone, for a design life that owners now set at 100 years (Hangzhou Bay) or 120 years (Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau). The tools are those of Chapter 5 applied industrially: high-performance concrete with large cover, corrosion-resistant reinforcement where exposure is worst, precast elements made under factory control, and monitoring from the first day, the template the King Fahd Causeway set in the Gulf in the 1980s (section 11.4).

Record lists date quickly, and bridges under construction are a moving target: dates slip, spans change in detailed design, and projects are cancelled. The rule in this book is that a record counts only when the bridge is open to traffic; the Rankings page marks bridges under construction as such. Recent openings show how fast the tables move: in 2025 the Changtai cable-stayed record (1,208 m), the Nanjing Xianxin suspension span (1,760 m), the Huajiang Canyon height record and the Chenab railway arch; in July 2026 the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, whose 853 m span is the longest cable-stayed span in North America. With that caveat, these are the projects under way in 2026 that will reshape the tables before the end of the decade.

• Zhangjinggao Yangtze River Bridge, Jiangsu: a south channel suspension span of 2,300 m, about 14 per cent beyond the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge, with a south tower about 350 m tall. Foundation work began in 2022.
• Shiziyang Bridge, Guangdong: a 2,180 m suspension span carrying sixteen lanes on two decks, the longest double-deck span yet attempted. Its 342 m towers were topped out in March 2026, and completion is expected around 2029.
• Yanji Yangtze River Bridge, Hubei: a 1,860 m suspension span hung from four main cables instead of the usual two, due to open in 2026.
• Chacao Bridge, Chile: a 2.75 km suspension bridge with two main spans of 1,155 m and 1,055 m on three towers, linking Chiloé Island to the mainland. Expected in 2028, it will be the longest suspension bridge in South America.

The Strait of Messina Bridge is the outlier. Its design, a single 3,300 m suspension span carrying a motorway and a double-track railway between Calabria and Sicily, has been studied since an international competition in the 1960s, and has been approved, cancelled and revived several times. The Italian government approved the final design in 2025, but the approval process was reopened after review by the Court of Auditors; in September 2026 the main works had not begun, and the programme pointed to opening around 2034. This book therefore treats it as planned, not under construction. If it is built, it will be 63 per cent longer than today's record, a jump of the Akashi kind that depends on a new idea: a deck of three separate streamlined boxes, two for the road and one for the railway, with open gratings between them so that wind passes through.

Two cautions for anyone quoting these numbers. A span quoted before completion is a design value and may change by a few metres. And a hybrid, such as a cable-stayed bridge with a suspended centre, is ranked by the system that carries most of the main span; different lists decide this differently, which explains many disagreements between published tables.

Europe holds few span records today, but much of modern bridge engineering was invented there, and its bridges show the ideas most clearly.

• Forth Bridge, Scotland (1890): the steel cantilever at full scale (section 3.11), designed after the Tay disaster with wind as an explicit load, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2015.
• Salginatobel, Switzerland (1930): Robert Maillart's 90 m three-hinged hollow-box concrete arch, the bridge most often cited as structural art.
• Severn Bridge, England-Wales (1966): a 988 m span and the first suspension bridge with an aerofoil steel box deck, lighter than a truss and stable in wind; the model for the Bosphorus, Humber and Great Belt bridges.
• Ganter Bridge, Switzerland (1980): Christian Menn's 174 m span with its stays encased in concrete walls, an ancestor of the extradosed bridge.
• Krk Bridge, Croatia (1980): two concrete arches, the larger 390 m, the concrete arch record for seventeen years.
• Great Belt East Bridge, Denmark (1998): 1,624 m on concrete towers 254 m tall, with a streamlined steel box deck in the line of the Severn.
• Øresund Bridge, Denmark-Sweden (2000): a 490 m cable-stayed span carrying a railway below the motorway in a steel truss, joined to an immersed tunnel by an artificial island so that the approach to Copenhagen airport stays clear.
• Millau Viaduct, France (2004): 2,460 m in eight spans, six of them 342 m, on seven cable-stayed pylons; the steel deck was launched from both ends over temporary towers.
• Rion-Antirion, Greece (2004): three 560 m cable-stayed spans on foundations resting on reinforced seabed in up to 65 m of water, in one of Europe's most active seismic zones; the deck is continuous and suspended, restrained sideways by fuses and dampers.
• Hardanger Bridge, Norway (2013): 1,310 m with a deck about 18 m wide, a span-to-width ratio above 70, close to the limit of what wind stability allows.
• Queensferry Crossing, Scotland (2017): two 650 m spans on three towers, with the stays from adjacent towers crossing at mid-span so that the central tower is steadied by its neighbours; the longest three-tower cable-stayed bridge.

European practice in the 2020s is dominated less by new records than by renewal. Much of the motorway stock of 1960–1980 is reaching the end of its life. Italy reformed its inspection regime after the Morandi collapse of 2018. Germany is replacing motorway bridges at an accelerated rate since the Rahmede Viaduct on the A45 had to be closed in 2021 and demolished in 2023, and in September 2024 part of the Carola Bridge in Dresden collapsed, a failure traced to stress corrosion cracking of its prestressing steel. The lesson for the rest of the world is in Chapter 10: the bridges of an industrial boom all age at once.

The Americas wrote the first chapters of the long-span story, and the United States built one of the largest highway bridge stocks in the world: its National Bridge Inventory lists more than 600,000 bridges. The bridges below are the ones engineers study.

• Brooklyn Bridge, New York (1883): 486 m, the first steel-wire suspension bridge, built by John, Washington and Emily Roebling; its compressed-air caissons taught the profession the dangers of decompression sickness.
• Quebec Bridge, Canada (1917): the 549 m cantilever record (section 3.11), whose two collapses became a lesson in professional responsibility and part of the inspiration for the Canadian engineer's iron ring.
• George Washington (1931) and Golden Gate (1937): the spans that took the suspension bridge past one kilometre; the Golden Gate's towers and colour made it the world's image of a suspension bridge.
• Tacoma Narrows (1940): an 853 m span whose collapse four months after opening made aerodynamics a design discipline (section 11.2).
• Mackinac (1957) and Verrazzano-Narrows (1964): the deep-truss answer to Tacoma; the Verrazzano held the span record until the Humber.
• Rio-Niterói Bridge, Brazil (1974): 13 km across Guanabara Bay with a 300 m steel box girder navigation span, still one of the longest girder spans in the world.
• New River Gorge, West Virginia (1977): a 518 m arch in weathering steel, 267 m above the river, the arch record for 26 years.
• Sunshine Skyway, Florida (1987): a concrete cable-stayed bridge with a single central plane of stays, built after a freighter struck a pier of the old bridge in 1980 and brought down part of its main span; its piers are ringed by protective islands and dolphins, a reference for vessel collision design.
• Confederation Bridge, Canada (1997): 12.9 km of 250 m precast spans designed for a 100-year life in a strait that freezes, with cone-shaped ice shields on the piers to break the pack ice.
• Hoover Dam Bypass, Arizona-Nevada (2010): the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, a 323 m concrete arch 270 m above the Colorado River, built out from both canyon walls on temporary stays; the longest concrete arch in the Western Hemisphere.
• Baluarte Bridge, Mexico (2012) and Atlantic Bridge, Panama (2019): 520 m and 530 m cable-stayed spans, Baluarte across a gorge on the Durango-Mazatlán highway and the Atlantic Bridge over the Atlantic entrance of the Panama Canal.
• Gordie Howe International Bridge, Canada-United States (2026): 853 m, the longest cable-stayed span in North America; by coincidence the same span as the Tacoma Narrows, a measure of how far the understanding of long decks in wind has come.

The North American contribution is also institutional: the National Bridge Inspection Standards that followed the Silver Bridge collapse, the load and resistance factor design of AASHTO, and the fracture-critical and vessel-collision rules that many other countries have adopted (Chapters 4 and 10).

Section 2.13 tells how East Asia came to build most of the world's long spans. The record tables hide what the two largest builders contributed technically, which is why their bridges are studied everywhere.

Japan designs for typhoons and great earthquakes at the same time, and its long-span bridges carry the results. The Akashi Kaikyō Bridge was tested as a complete aeroelastic model at 1:100 scale in a large boundary-layer wind tunnel; its main cables use 1,800 MPa wire, which allowed two cables instead of four, and it was the first suspension bridge built with a system that blows dry air through the main cables to stop corrosion, now standard on new long-span suspension bridges. The Tatara Bridge (1999) showed how to make an 890 m cable-stayed span on a steel box stable in typhoon winds. Japanese engineers built the first extradosed bridges (section 3.7), made tuned mass dampers in tall towers routine, and after Kobe wrote rules for ductile piers, unseating prevention and seismic isolation that have influenced codes across Asia. The country also keeps its heritage working: the Kintai Bridge at Iwakuni, five timber arches first built in 1673, was rebuilt in the same form after a typhoon flood destroyed it in 1950.

China contributed scale, and with scale came new methods. The concrete-filled steel tube arch, erected as hollow tubes by cable crane and then filled with concrete pumped up from the springings, made 400–500 m arches practical in the mountain provinces. Swivel construction, in which a span is built alongside a railway or road and then rotated into place on a large spherical bearing in an hour or two, lets bridges cross busy lines with almost no closures; rotations of tens of thousands of tonnes have been achieved. Caissons sunk through tens of metres of silt and sand made the Yangtze's kilometre spans possible. For wind, Chinese and Hong Kong engineers took the slotted twin-box deck, in which air passes through a gap between two streamlined boxes and the flutter speed rises, to spans of over a kilometre at Xihoumen and Stonecutters (both 2009); the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge uses the same idea. And the high-speed rail viaducts of section 11.7 turned bridge building into a factory process.

The other side of that pace is experience. China now has the world's largest body of evidence on the long-term problems of modern bridges: the excessive deflection of long concrete box girders (section 3.10), fatigue cracking in orthotropic steel decks, stay-cable vibration and the behaviour of very high piers. Its codes are changing in response, and engineers elsewhere, building the same forms at smaller scale, are learning from the same data.