Abstract: Railing system as the important accessory of buildings and bridges is very important for ensuring the safety of lives and properties of the public user though it may not influence the performance of main structure.The existing research on the structural performance of railing systems and the safety design of railing systems is lacked, and the design criteria and the design loads in various codes in the world are different.In Chinese codes, the bearing capacity of railing under uniform load is evaluated but there is no rule on concentrated load and deformation limit.In this paper, the load requirements for railing structure in foreign and domestic codes were compared and investigated firstly.Based on the theoretical analysis and the practical requirements, a deformation limit of 1/100 height for railing systems was proposed.Then, a number of railing structures with the various design parameters were analyzed with finite element method, their deformation and safety were investigated under the concentrated load and uniform load separately.Based on the above, a complete design approach for the railing structure, in which the strength and the deformation under the various load patterns were considered, was also proposed.