For the maintenance of weathering steel structure facilities, it is necessary to evaluate the corrosion grade of the rust layer on the surface regularly. At present, the corrosion grade classification of weathering steel is mainly based on the human-eye inspection. In this paper, a deep learning method using a convolutional neural network for evaluating the corrosion grade of weathering steel is proposed to save time and manpower. Firstly, the image dataset of the corrosion steel plate was established using salt spray tests. Then, a CNN architecture named VGG-Corrosion was designed to evaluate the corrosion grade of the corroded steel plate. The effect of the learning rate, transfer learning, and batch size was also investigated to clarify the best hyperparameter configurations to train a powerful corrosion grade classification model. Under the best combination of considered hyperparameters, the mean average accuracy for the corrosion grade evaluation of the test results is 90.96%. The testing results indicated that the CNN based corrosion grade recognition for weath-ering steel plate is prospective, which would be helpful for safety evaluation of steel structures.