In the recent years, a rigid pavement composed of a flat concrete slab has ken constructed due to the desirable structural strength of concrete, durability and economy. However, despite of precise design and construction of concrete highway pavement, some sections of the 88 Olympic express highway, Jung-bu express highway, and Kyung-bu express highway, which have shown premature cracking, faulting, and pumping before the end of their intended service life, have already been viewed with great concerns by highway officials and engineers. Since environmental variations and traffic loads might be considered as major factors to cause pavement failure problems, the thermal load due to temperature variations between top and bottom surface of the concrete slab was highlighted to verify analytical behavior of concrete slab using the finite element method.