Deck height is the only number that matters on this list: how far the road or railway surface sits above whatever lies beneath it, whether that is a river, a gorge floor or a valley of terraced fields. It is not structural height, which measures the towers — France's Millau Viaduct rises 343 m to its tallest mast, yet its roadway averages only 270 m above the Tarn valley, nowhere near this list. Every bridge below clears at least 340 m of open air and is open to traffic today carrying people, which rules out spans still under construction, pipeline crossings such as Sichuan's 410 m Wujiao bridge, and Papua New Guinea's Hegigio Gorge Pipeline Bridge, dismantled in 2023. Ties go to the earlier opening date. Rank honestly and eighteen of the twenty are Chinese, most in Guizhou, a limestone plateau cut by gorges so deep that building its expressways meant building the highest bridges ever made.
20 Highest Bridges in the World (2026)
The record The highest bridge in the world is the Huajiang Canyon Bridge, in China — 625 m (2,051 ft), deck height. Source: Wikipedia List of highest bridges + Guinness World Records. Verified .
Highest Bridges in the World The Ranking at a Glance
Fun Facts About the World's Highest Bridges
- The highest bridge on Earth clears 625 m of open air. Huajiang Canyon Bridge carries its deck nearly twice the height of the Eiffel Tower above the Beipan River, and Guinness World Records certified the figure at 626.01 m in April 2026.
- One river is spanned by three of the twenty. The Beipan, in Guizhou, carries Huajiang Canyon Bridge at 625 m, Zangkejiang Bridge at 410 m and Beipan River Guanxing Highway Bridge at 366 m — the most bridged extreme gorge on the planet.
- One bridge's first cables were delivered by rocket. The gorge at Sidu River Bridge was too deep for boats or helicopters, so engineers fired Nylon 66 pilot lines across it with a military rocket on 6 October 2006.
- The point of building this high is time. Baling River Bridge cut a one-hour valley crossing to four minutes, and Huajiang Canyon Bridge reduced an hour of switchbacks to roughly two.
- Only one of the twenty carries trains. Chenab Rail Bridge in Jammu and Kashmir is the world's highest railway bridge, standing about 35 m taller than the Eiffel Tower. Every other entry carries road traffic.
- The tallest bridge in the world is nowhere near this list. France's Millau Viaduct reaches 343 m to the tip of its mast, but its deck averages just 270 m above the valley — well short of the 340 m needed to make the top twenty.
1. Huajiang Canyon Bridge
At 625 m 2,051 ft above the Beipan River, the Huajiang Canyon Bridge is the highest bridge ever built, and it took the record by a margin that is hard to overstate — it clears the canyon floor by a full 60 m more than the bridge that held the title for the previous nine years. It opened to traffic on 28 September 2025, linking Guanling and Zhenfeng counties in Guizhou across a gash in the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau that had always been the obstacle in this part of the province. Guinness World Records certified the deck at 626.01 m in April 2026.
The structure runs 2,890 m end to end with a main span of 1,420 m, and work began in 2022. What it replaced was not a lesser bridge but an absence: getting across the Huajiang gorge used to mean a long descent on switchbacks, a river crossing and a climb back out the far side. The drive now takes roughly two minutes. That compression of hours into minutes is the whole argument for building at this height, and it is why this one province has produced more record-breaking bridges than any country on Earth.
2. Duge Bridge
At 565 m 1,854 ft, the Duge Bridge held the title of world's highest for almost nine years, from its opening on 29 December 2016 until Huajiang overtook it in 2025. It carries the G56 Hangzhou–Ruili Expressway across the Nizhu River, a tributary of the Beipan, on the provincial boundary where Shuicheng in Guizhou meets Xuanwei in Yunnan.
The main span measures 720 m, and the deck sits high enough that cloud can settle in the gorge beneath it, leaving the roadway running above an unbroken white floor. For most of a decade this was the bridge that appeared whenever anyone illustrated the phrase 'world's highest', and losing the record has not made the crossing any less startling — the drop below the guardrail is still greater than that of every other bridge on Earth bar one.
3. Sidu River Bridge
At 496 m 1,627 ft above the gorge bottom, the Sidu River Bridge was the first structure anywhere to carry a road more than 400 m above the ground, and it held the world record from its opening on 15 November 2009 until Duge surpassed it in 2016. It carries the G50 Shanghai–Chongqing Expressway across the Sidu River gorge in Badong County, Hubei, on a suspension span of 900 m.
Its most quoted detail belongs to the construction rather than the finished bridge. The gorge was too deep and too rugged for boats or helicopters to string the first pilot line across, so the engineers developed a method using a military rocket, firing Nylon 66 pilot cables over the canyon on 6 October 2006. Everything else followed from those threads: each main cable was eventually built up from 127 strands of 127 wires apiece, 16,129 wires in total, and the deck was assembled from 71 sections of Warren steel truss, the heaviest weighing more than 91 tonnes.
4. Puli Bridge
At 485 m 1,591 ft above the valley floor, the Puli Bridge is the fourth highest crossing in the world and one of several record-class structures on the G56 Hangzhou–Ruili Expressway, the route that has driven a modern highway through some of the most broken terrain in southwest China. It opened on 25 August 2015 and spans 628 m between its towers.
The bridge sits in Xuanwei, in the northeast corner of Yunnan, where the plateau is cut by the Gexiang River gorge; the deck actually passes over a small side stream rather than the main river, which is a reminder that the height here comes from the depth of the landscape rather than the width of any watercourse. It is the terrain that is extreme, not the crossing — the gap is modest by the standards of this list, but the ground simply falls away beneath it.
5. Jin'an Bridge
At 461 m 1,512 ft above the Jinsha River, the Jin'an Bridge is the fifth highest in the world and one of the longest suspension spans in the ranking, with 1,386 m between its towers. It carries the G4216 Chengdu–Lijiang Expressway near Lijiang in northwest Yunnan and opened on 31 December 2020 after four years of construction.
There is a wrinkle to its height worth knowing. The bridge crosses the Jinsha 1.4 km upstream of the Jin'anqiao Dam, and the reservoir behind that dam has raised the water level considerably, so the full 461 m clearance to the original riverbed is not what you see looking over the edge today. The figure is measured to the valley floor as it was, which is the convention this ranking follows throughout. The Jinsha, for its part, is the upper Yangtze — this is the river that eventually becomes the largest in Asia.
6. Yachi River Bridge
At 434 m 1,424 ft, the Yachi River Bridge is the sixth highest crossing in the world and among the highest cable-stayed bridges ever built, with a main span of 800 m and a western tower rising 258.2 m. It opened on 16 July 2016 on the expressway connecting Qianxi County in Bijie with Qingzhen, on the approach to Guiyang. Published figures for this one vary: 440 m is the official height, 434 m the deck clearance above the valley floor, and because the bridge crosses the reservoir of the Dongfeng Dam the drop to the water you actually see is nearer 306 m.
The Yachi is a tributary of the Wu River, and the canyon it has cut is typical of central Guizhou: near-vertical limestone walls, dense vegetation clinging to the ledges, and a river reduced to a green thread at the bottom. Before the expressway arrived, the two sides of this valley were a substantial detour apart despite being visible from one another. The bridge is one of a chain of high crossings that made the Bijie–Guiyang corridor a straightforward drive rather than a day's undertaking.
7. Zangkejiang Bridge
At 410 m 1,350 ft above the Beipan River, the Zangkejiang Bridge is one of the newest entries on this list, opening to traffic on 14 February 2025. It carries the G7612 Nayong–Xingyi Expressway between Shuicheng and Pu'an County in northwestern Guizhou, and it is a genuinely large structure by any measure: 1,849 m long with a main span of 1,080 m, hung from towers of 248.1 m and 174.1 m.
It is described locally as the first wholly Guizhou-built suspension bridge, designed and constructed by the province's own engineering industry rather than brought in from outside — a marker of how completely bridge-building has become a regional speciality. The Beipan River appears three times in this ranking, at 625 m, 410 m and 366 m, which says as much about the depth of that single gorge system as it does about any of the individual bridges spanning it.
8. Qingshui River Bridge
At 406 m 1,332 ft, the Qingshui River Bridge carries the Guiweng Expressway between Kaiyang and Weng'an counties in central Guizhou on a suspension span of 1,130 m — one of the longest main spans of any bridge in this top twenty. It opened on 31 December 2015.
The Qingshui cuts a steep, narrow trench through the karst here, the kind of formation that makes overland travel in this province so laborious and bridge-building so necessary. The combination on show — a very long span carried at a very great height — is the signature of the modern Guizhou expressway crossing, and it is a comparatively recent capability. A bridge of these dimensions would have been close to unbuildable a generation earlier.
9. Baluarte Bridge
At 390 m 1,280 ft, the Baluarte Bridge is the highest bridge in the Americas and the only entry on this list outside Asia. It carries Mexican Federal Highway 40 across a gorge of the Baluarte River in the Sierra Madre Occidental, in Pueblo Nuevo, Durango, and was certified by Guinness World Records as the world's highest cable-stayed bridge when it was inaugurated by President Felipe Calderón on 5 January 2012. It opened fully to traffic in late 2013.
Its main span of 520 m is the longest cable-stayed span in North America. The bridge is the centrepiece of the Durango–Mazatlán highway, a route that crosses the Sierra Madre between the high desert and the Pacific coast and which, before it was built, was a notoriously slow and switchbacked mountain road known as the Espinazo del Diablo — the Devil's Backbone. The new highway cut the crossing of the Sierra Madre dramatically.
10. Liuguanghe Xiqian Expressway Bridge
At 375 m 1,230 ft, the Liuguanghe Xiqian Expressway Bridge is a cable-stayed crossing with a 580 m main span, carrying the S30 Xifeng–Qianxi Expressway over the Wu River system in central Guizhou. It opened in 2017.
As with Jin'an further west, the water beneath it is no longer where it was: the reservoir behind the Wujiangdu Dam has raised the river so that the effective drop from the deck is closer to 300 m today, while the 375 m official figure is measured to the original valley floor. It is a recurring feature of Chinese high bridges — the same dam-building programme that transformed these rivers also runs alongside the expressway programme that spans them, and the two projects frequently meet in the same gorge.
11. Baling River Bridge
At 370 m 1,210 ft of clearance above its valley, the Baling River Bridge carries the G60 Shanghai–Kunming Expressway between Guiyang and Kunming, and it opened on 23 December 2009 with a main span of 1,088 m and a deck 24.5 m wide. Its two towers are deliberately unequal — 204.5 m on the west side, 189 m on the east — because the valley walls they stand on are at different elevations.
The practical effect of the bridge is the clearest statement of why any of these structures exist: crossing this valley took about an hour before it was built, and takes four minutes now. It stands in Guanling County, the same county as the Huajiang Canyon Bridge at the top of this list, which gives some sense of the concentration of extreme terrain in this one corner of Guizhou.
12. Beipan River Guanxing Highway Bridge
At 366 m 1,201 ft above the river it spans, the Beipan River Guanxing Highway Bridge is the oldest entry on the list and the one with the strongest claim to having started the sequence. When it opened in 2003 on the Guanxing Highway between Xingyi and Guiyang, it was the highest bridge in the world, and the beginning of a run of Chinese record-holders that has not really stopped since.
It is a modest bridge by current standards, with a main span of just 388 m, and it lost the world record within two years to the Hegigio Gorge pipeline crossing in Papua New Guinea. But the Beipan gorge it spans has since become the most bridged extreme landscape on the planet, and the two structures now above it in this ranking both cross the same river. Twenty years on, a bridge that was once the highest on the planet sits twelfth on this list, and everything above it has been built since.
13. Tongzihe Bridge Jinrentong
At 365 m 1,198 ft above the Tongzi River, the Tongzihe Bridge Jinrentong opened to traffic on 13 September 2024 in Renhuai, in northern Guizhou. It measures 1,422 m in length with a main span of 965 m, carried on towers of 208 m and 140 m.
It is the principal crossing on the Jinrentong Expressway, the route linking Jinsha, Renhuai and Tongzi through the hill country north of Guiyang. Renhuai sits in the valley of the Chishui River system and is the centre of China's baijiu distilling industry, so this is a bridge built as much for freight and commerce as for scenery — a reminder that the world's highest crossings are, almost without exception, ordinary working infrastructure that happens to be extraordinary.
14. Maling River Bridge Fenglin
At 361 m 1,184 ft, the Maling River Bridge Fenglin opened on 1 March 2021, carrying the S65 Expressway across the Maling River Canyon near Xingyi in southwestern Guizhou on a suspension span of 550 m.
The Maling River Canyon is one of the few places on this list that is a destination in its own right rather than simply an obstacle. It is a narrow, deeply incised gorge lined with waterfalls that fall directly down the rock walls from the plateau above, and it is a well-established scenic area. This is also the second bridge to be built across it at height — the canyon is spanned elsewhere by an older and lower crossing — which makes this one of the few gorges in the world carrying two major high-level crossings.
15. Dimuhe River Bridge
At 360 m 1,180 ft, the Dimuhe River Bridge carries the G56 Hangzhou–Ruili Expressway across the Sancha River near Liupanshui in western Guizhou. It opened on 26 December 2015 with a suspension span of 538 m. It ranks above the Yangbaoshan Bridge despite an identical published height because it opened seven years earlier, which is how ties are broken on this list.
The Sancha is one of the headwaters of the Wu River, the largest river system in Guizhou and the one responsible for a striking number of the gorges in this ranking. Liupanshui itself sits at altitude and is known within China for its cool summers, an unusual thing in a country at this latitude, and the expressway the bridge carries is the same G56 that also crosses the Puli gorge 125 m higher up the list.
16. Yangbaoshan Bridge
At 360 m 1,180 ft above the Dushui River, the Yangbaoshan Bridge opened on 31 May 2022 with a main span of 650 m, carrying the S36 Guiyang–Huangping Expressway through Guiding County in central Guizhou.
It shares its exact published height with the Dimuhe River Bridge above it, and the two are separated in this ranking only by the tiebreaker of opening date. That two entirely separate bridges, built seven years apart in different corners of the same province, should land on precisely the same figure is a coincidence — but a telling one, because it reflects how consistently deep the river gorges of the Guizhou plateau are. The expressway it carries runs east from the provincial capital towards the terraced country around Huangping.
17. Chenab Rail Bridge
At 359 m 1,178 ft above the river it is named for, the Chenab Rail Bridge is the highest railway bridge in the world and the only rail crossing in this ranking — every other entry carries a road. It is a single steel arch spanning the Chenab gorge in Reasi district, Jammu and Kashmir, and it opened for rail traffic on 6 June 2025 as the central structure of the Udhampur–Srinagar–Baramulla Rail Link.
It stands roughly 35 m taller than the Eiffel Tower, was built at a cost of around ₹1,486 crore, and is designed for a service life of 120 years. Its significance is not really the record: the USBRL project connected the Kashmir Valley to the Indian rail network for the first time, through terrain that had defeated every previous attempt, and this gorge was the hardest single obstacle on the route. Trains now run between Katra and Srinagar across it.
18. Yongren Bridge
At 352 m 1,155 ft above the Jiangdi River, the Yongren Bridge became operational on 9 June 2023, carrying the S45 Yongren–Jinshui Expressway in Yongren County, in the far north of Yunnan near the Sichuan border. It is a suspension bridge with concrete towers and a steel box girder deck, and its main span measures 920 m.
This is dry, hot, deeply eroded country — the Jinsha River basin here is one of the more arid parts of Yunnan, with bare red slopes rather than the green karst of Guizhou, and the valleys are cut correspondingly sharp. The expressway is part of the network knitting northern Yunnan to Sichuan, a region where the road distance between two points has historically borne almost no relation to the distance across the map.
19. Liuchong River Bridge
At 340 m 1,120 ft, the Liuchong River Bridge is a cable-stayed crossing near Zhijin in western Guizhou, opened in 2013. It runs 1,508 m in total with a main span of 438 m, and it ranks among the highest cable-stayed spans anywhere.
The Liuchong is another tributary of the Wu River, and the bridge is part of the expressway network linking Zhijin and Qianxi — the same corridor as the Yachi River Bridge higher up this list. Zhijin is best known for the Zhijin Cave, one of the largest and most elaborately formed limestone cave systems in China, which is a useful clue to the geology: the same soluble rock that produces caverns on that scale also produces the sheer-sided gorges that make bridges like this one necessary.
20. Aizhai Bridge
At 336 m 1,102 ft above the floor of the Dehang Grand Canyon, the Aizhai Bridge closes out the top twenty, and it is probably the most visited bridge on the entire list. It carries four lanes of the G65 Baotou–Maoming Expressway across the canyon near Jishou in western Hunan, on a suspension span of 1,176 m, and it opened on 31 March 2012.
Unlike most entries here it sits in an established tourist landscape rather than a working freight corridor: the Dehang canyon is a scenic area in the Xiangxi region, and the bridge has been treated as an attraction in its own right since it was finished — it was opened temporarily to pedestrians during the 2012 Spring Festival, and hosted an international BASE jumping event that September. The canyon walls are close enough together and steep enough that the bridge reads as a single clean line across the gap, which is why it turns up in photographs far more often than bridges twice its height.
Higher Bridges Still to Come
This ranking counts only bridges you can cross today, and that line matters more here than on almost any other record list, because the next generation is already standing in the gorges of western Guizhou waiting to be finished. The Tianmen Bridge, a single-span steel truss suspension crossing of the Beipan River near Shuicheng, will carry its deck 560 m above the water — enough to enter this list at number two, ahead of everything except Huajiang. It is 1,553 m long with a main span of 820 m, and as of August 2026 it had not opened to traffic.
Two more are close behind it on the same road. The Guniuhe Bridge, whose arch was closed on 5 January 2026, will stand 405 m above its canyon and become the highest arch bridge ever built; the Liuchehe Bridge, a double-span arch nearby, will reach 400 m. All three belong to the Anshun–Panzhou Expressway, usually shortened to the Anpan, which when complete will be the only expressway anywhere with five separate bridges more than 300 m high. Further out, and further from certainty, sit a cluster of Chinese crossings planned for the late 2020s that would rewrite the top ten again — among them a bridge over the Lancang River designed to clear 610 m.
None of these are included above, and none should be. A bridge under construction has no deck height in any meaningful sense until it carries something across, and record lists that quietly mix the built with the promised are the reason so many published rankings of the world's highest bridges disagree with one another.
FAQ: The World's Highest Bridges
What is the highest bridge in the world?
The Huajiang Canyon Bridge in Guizhou, China, which carries its deck 625 m 2,051 ft above the Beipan River. It opened on 28 September 2025 and was certified by Guinness World Records at 626.01 m in April 2026. It replaced the Duge Bridge, which had held the record since 2016, by a margin of 60 m.
What is the difference between the highest bridge and the tallest bridge?
Height measures the deck — how far the road or railway sits above the ground below. Tallest measures the structure, usually the top of the highest tower. They produce completely different lists. The Millau Viaduct in France is the tallest bridge in the world at 343 m to its mast tip, but its deck averages only 270 m above the valley.
Why are so many of the world's highest bridges in China?
Eighteen of the top twenty are Chinese, and most are in one province. Guizhou sits on a limestone plateau incised by exceptionally deep, narrow river gorges, and China has spent two decades driving an expressway network across it. Spanning that terrain at speed means building at extreme height, so the record list and the road-building programme are effectively the same story.
Why do sources give different heights for the same bridge?
Two reasons. Some bridges are measured to the original valley floor while a dam has since raised the water beneath them — the Jin'an, Liuguanghe and Yachi crossings all clear far less open air today than their official figures suggest. Others are simply surveyed differently, to the riverbed or the deepest point, which shifts a figure by several metres.
What is the highest bridge outside China?
The Baluarte Bridge in Durango, Mexico, at 390 m 1,280 ft above the Baluarte River, which is also the highest bridge in the Americas. The highest outside China and Mexico is India's Chenab Rail Bridge at 359 m. Papua New Guinea once held a place on this list, but that bridge was dismantled in 2023.
What is the highest railway bridge in the world?
The Chenab Rail Bridge in Reasi district, Jammu and Kashmir, which carries track 359 m 1,178 ft above the Chenab River — roughly 35 m higher than the Eiffel Tower. It opened on 6 June 2025 and connected the Kashmir Valley to India's rail network for the first time. Every other bridge in this ranking carries road traffic.
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