The World's Highest Tunnels — 11 Recorded Entries

• 8entries listed
• 5 kmlongest bore
• 1935–2006openings span
• 16.36 kmtotal length

The record table

Figures on this page were last checked against operator and administration sources on 2 September 2026.

How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering

How this table is compiled

The median entry measures 1.55 km, so half the table sits below that and half above, which is a better guide to the typical structure here than the headline figure. 4 entries sit above the median and 4 at or below it, so the table is evenly weighted and not clustered at one end.

This page records the road tunnels catalogued for the world in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 16.36 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Dated entries run from 1935 to 2006, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 3 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 6 rows and records Country, Tunnel name, Length, Height and Date of opening for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

The three longest entries alone account for 10.43 km of the 16.36 km on this page, which is 64 per cent of the total from 3 of 8 rows. After the 2000s the next busiest decade here is the 1930s with 1 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

Roughly 3 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 19 distinct places and structures — Tibet, Railway and Line among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

Reading the figures

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 4.69 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. A new scheme in the world would have to beat 5 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens.

The dated entries carry 6 distinct opening years across 71 years, and the median opening year is 1982. Read down the length column, the 5 values run from 311 m to 5 000 m with a midpoint at 1 729 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

6 of the 6 rows carry an entry in the notes column — 100 per cent of the table — and that column is where the qualifications live: tube counts, closures, boundaries and the reason a figure reads the way it does. Corrections have historically arrived by letter from engineers and administrations in more than twenty countries.

The next two longest are Eisenhower Memorial at 2.73 km and Salang at 2.7 km. The material on this page is held in 11 captions rather than in running text, 168 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

The earliest dated entry is Hoctor, opened in 1935, and the most recent is Anzob in 2006. They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 70 words and the briefest to 6, and on a page of this kind the long ones are where the explanation lives — the caption carries what the picture cannot.