Abstract: This article investigates and analyses the hysteretic characteristic of the prestressed concrete beams under different load histories. In the quasi-static test on prestressed concrete beams, four types of loading schemes were selected to simulate different earthquake actions. The influence of load histories on energy dissipation characteristic and failure feature of the members were acquired. The study indicated that the maximum displacement in the load histories is an important influence factor to energy dissipation characteristic of members. The sooner the maximum displacement experiences, the larger influence on the stiffness of member under the succeeding middling or small displacements, and the more loss to total energy dissipation capacity of the member.