The estimation of mean life reliability of highway pavement plays a central role in road maintenance and pavement management. In this paper, a methodology to estimate the mean life and failure probability in consideration of road functional characteristics based on parametric and non-parametric estimation models are presented. Based on the three types of functionally classified roads: urban, rural and recreation roads, five different lifetime distributions were tested: Normal, lognormal, exponential, Weibull, and loglogistic to select the appropriate probability distribution and to estimate mean life and failure rates. For functional classification of roads, the permanent traffic counters located along the national highway in 2007 are used. Furthermore, national highway pavement databases from 1999 to 2008 are also used for selection of optimal probability distribution and estimation of mean life for pavement. The goodness-of-fit test, such as the Anderson-Darling test, was performed to select optimal probability distribution. As a result, an appropriate distribution of each case was selected: lognormal distribution for rural roads and Weibull distribution for recreation roads. The non-parametric estimation method for rural roads was applied because there is no appropriate probability distribution for rural roads. Furthermore, in order to verify the validity of the proposed parametric and non-parametric estimation models, the applicability of the estimation methodology presented in this paper is investigated by using the empirical lifetime data of the national highway in Korea.