Pitting corrosion is a local and severe form of corrosion, resulting in degradation of the mechanical properties for structural members and security risks for the whole structures caused by sudden accident. A simplified analytical method for the quantitative evaluation of the mechanical properties of steel members with pitting corrosion resistance was proposed by equivalent elastic modulus. Based on experimental data, an analytical method was proposed to calculate the mechanical properties of members with pitting corrosion. In this method, some assumptions about the pitting depth, diameter and distribution were put forward. Considering the influence of the coating life, the relationship of corrosion status between in laboratory and in ocean atmosphere was established according to the same corrosion rate. Based on axial compression FEM model, the equivalent elastic modulus of structural members with pitting corrosion was obtained. Through curve fitting, practical method was proposed to obtain the mechanical properties of members in ocean atmosphere. A numerical example demonstrated the validity of the proposed method using equivalent elastic modulus to analyze the mechanical properties of pitting corrosion members. The calculated results indicate that, with the same corrosion rate, the equivalent elastic modulus of pitting corrosion members is lower than that of uniform corrosion members.