High-rise reinforced concrete buildings are in great demand in developing countries with rapid urbanization.Construction engineers are facing more and more safety control challenges.One major issue is the understanding of the load distributions,especially the maximum slab load,of structures under construction,which is time dependent.Previous methods were mainly targeted to specific examples,providing specific solutions without addressing the fundamental issues of finding general solutions for load distributions in reinforced concrete buildings with different geometrical and material characteristics during construction.The concept of a structural characteristic parameter is used here to parameterize the main geometrical and material characteristics of concrete structures for generalized assessments of load distributions during construction.The maximum slab load for 20 different construction shoring/reshoring schemes is presented.The results indicate that the traditional simplified method may underestimate or overestimate the maximum slab load,depending mainly on the shoring/reshoring schemes.The structural characteristic parameter approach was specifically developed to assist construction engineers to estimate load distributions to assure safe construction procedures.