Pavement design requires the specification of design criteria, the generation of feasible alternatives, the consideration of trade-offs, and the selection of the best overall choice. Pavement design alternatives typically present the engineer with unavoidable trade-offs between initial cost, maintenance cost, and design life. These trade-off decisions entail a great deal of complexity and controversy, making it difficult to select the alternative that might be the best. A rigorous decision-analytic method that can be used to compare alternatives, multiattribute utility analysis (MAUA), is described, and its advantages over two traditional approaches, life-cycle costing and weighting methods, are described. An example that illustrates a pavement design selection problem in which alternatives present the designer with trade-offs between initial cost, maintenance cost, construction flexibility, and pavement life is presented, thus demonstrating the applicability of the MAUA approach.