Critical pitting temperature (CPT) of 316L stainless steel with different specimen areas in 3.5 wt% NaCl solution was investigated by the potentiostatic method. The results showed that the CPT exhibited a decreasing tendency with the increase in specimen areas, which was attributed to the higher probability for large-scale specimens to attain a large pit depth than small specimens. Therefore, stable pitting is easier to form, resulting in a lower CPT. Subsequently, a Gumbel extreme function was applied to establish a model correlating CPT with the specimen area. The CPT was linear with the double logarithm of the specimen area and could be accurately predicted for large-scale specimens. (c) The Author(s) 2018. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.