Structural health monitoring systems are often installed on bridges to provide assessments of the need for structural maintenance and repair. Damage or deterioration may be detected by observation of changes in bridge characteristics evaluated from measured structural responses. However, construction materials such as concrete and steel cables exhibit certain time-dependent behaviour, which also results in changes in structural characteristics. If these are not accounted for properly, false alarms may arise. This paper proposes a systematic and efficient method to study the time-dependent effects on the dynamic properties of cable-stayed bridges. After establishing the finite element model of a cable-stayed bridge taking into account geometric nonlinearities and time-dependent behaviour, long-term time-dependent analysis is carried out by time integration. Then the dynamic properties of the bridge after a certain period can be obtained. The effects of time-dependent behaviour of construction materials on the dynamic properties of typical cable-stayed bridges are investigated in detail.