TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 474: Service Life of Culverts explores the time during which a culvert is expected to provide a desired function with a specified level of maintenance established at the design or retrofit stage.

This study is an update of NCHRP Synthesis 254: Service Life of Drainage Pipe (1998), which itself was an update of NCHRP Synthesis 50: Durability of Drainage Pipe (1978). Developments in plastic pipe, fiber-reinforced concrete pipe, polymeric-coated metal pipe, recycled materials, larger and more diverse structures, and sophisticated analytical soil-structure interaction modeling within the past 15 years led to the development of this report.