Abstract: Two typical fire scenarios of shopping mall and residential building are selected to investigate the influences of fire combustion modes and of axial load ratios on the mechanical behavior of post-fire reinforced concrete (RC) columns in axial compression. Full-scale fire exposure tests and subsequent post-fire axial compression tests are performed on 14 RC stub columns. The effects of fire combustion modes and of axial load ratios on failure modes, on load-deformation curves, on the residual bearing capacity and, on the axial stiffness of specimens are systematically analyzed. The paper compares the practicality of two calculation methods for equivalent fire duration, i.e., equal-area method and equal-energy method. The current design codes are used to predict and to evaluate the residual bearing capacity of post-fire components. Test results indicate that failure mainly occurs at the mid-section region. For the adopted practical fire scenarios, specimens exposed to shopping mall fire suffer severer high-temperature damage than those exposed to residential fire. With identical axial load ratios, the degradations of residual bearing capacity and stiffness of specimens exposed to mall-fire are 20%–40% and 9%–13% higher than those of the counterparts. As axial load ratio increases, the residual bearing capacity rises first and then drops, while the residual axial stiffness increases continuously. The equal-energy method can be used to predict the test results with a good agreement and the relative errors of 1%–24% for residual bearing capacity and 2%–13% for axial stiffness. While the equal-area method produces the errors of 5%–40% and of 8%–20%, respectively. The comparisons between test data and code calculations show that the current codes give conservative evaluations of post-fire residual bearing capacity. It is suggested that the design codes should be revised in the future to consider the effects of fire combustion modes and axial load ratios, and should optimize the calculation formula based on equal-energy equivalent fire duration to improve the evaluation precision of mechanical properties of post-fire RC columns.