The Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) has recorded bridge element damages in a database for all the bridges it manages since the 1990s. This paper presents a comparison of three methods to establish element condition based on damage records. The methods consist in a non-parametric procedure based on the worst damage registered in the element, linear regression considering also bridge and road characteristics data and classification through an artificial neural network. The methods are assessed using a set of 159 bridges inspected in 2016.