Steel bridge has outstanding advantages, such as high ratio of strength to weight, large span capacity, easy to factory manufacturing and assembly construction, where bridge engineering is going in the further. However, the engineering practice shows that fatigue and fracture are the decisive factors to reduce the service performance of steel structure and cause catastrophic accidents, which seriously restrict the development and application of steel bridges. The in-depth and systematic researches on this practical engineering problem from different perspectives have been have conducted at home and abroad. To clarify the urgent problems and determine the research focuses and development directions in the next stage, the latest research progress in fatigue of steel bridge are summarized, including fatigue failure mechanism and fatigue resistance assessment method, anti-fatigue design and construction technology, environmental factors and their effect mechanism to fatigue resistance, fatigue crack identification, monitoring and detection, fatigue crack treatments and fatigue performance enhancement. The results demonstrate that the fatigue issue is a hot topic to researchers and engineers. the researches on fatigue critical problems in steel bridge has made adequate progress. Based on the studies including anti-fatigue design method, structures with high fatigue resistance, fatigue resistance assessment method, construction technology, fatigue damage monitoring and fatigue micro-crack identification, remaining fatigue life prediction and fatigue performance enhancement, it is the research emphasis and future directions to establish the fatigue resistance technology of steel bridges in life cycle.