Huntington Beach Pier Cam, Orange County, CaliforniaBeach Pier

On July 18, 1992, more than 500,000 people turned out to see the Huntington Beach Pier open again, four years after Pacific storms had left it too unsafe to walk on. The Huntington Beach Pier cam looks at that same pier today, streaming live from Huntington Beach, in Orange County, California, with the surf breaking on both sides of the pilings and the sand stretching away toward Pacific Coast Highway. It is one of the California webcams on the site, and the City of Huntington Beach runs the stream.

A pier rebuilt four times

The first wooden pier went up around 1901 as part of the new town of Pacific City and reached 1,000 feet in 1904. A violent storm dropped a large section into the ocean in 1910, and in 1914 the town finished a 1,350-foot concrete pier, described at the time as the longest and highest concrete pleasure pier in the United States.

A 500-foot extension followed in the early 1930s, along with the Sunshine Cafe at the end, and the 1933 Long Beach earthquake split the addition from the original deck. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. Navy set up a submarine lookout post on the pier.

Storms in 1983 and again on January 7, 1988, wrecked the structure, and the city closed it to the public. A local group called P.I.E.R., short for Persons Interested in Expediting Reconstruction, raised money for a new pier, construction began in October 1990, and the 1,856-foot replacement, built in reinforced concrete to stand up to waves and earthquakes, is the one on the Huntington Beach live cam today.

What the Huntington Beach live cam shows

The camera watches the pier and the lineups on either side of it, which is why searches for a Huntington Beach surf cam end up here so often. Surfers read the sets breaking along the pilings, swimmers check the size of the shore break, and anyone planning a walk out to the end can see how windy it is before leaving home.

The pier itself is busy from early morning. Sport fishermen work the rails, and at the far end the old diner space has changed hands several times: Ruby’s Diner, which opened there in 1996, closed in February 2021, and Broad Street Oyster Company took over in August 2023.

Across Pacific Coast Highway, where the pier meets Main Street, the Surfers’ Hall of Fame and the Surfing Walk of Fame honor the names that built the town’s surf culture. Like the other free live webcams on the site, this pier cam is free to open with no sign-up.

Why Huntington Beach is called Surf City

Huntington Beach goes by the nickname Surf City USA, and the pier sits at the center of it. Surfing here goes back to the early concrete pier: the Hawaiian-Irish surfer George Freeth rode waves beside it to mark its dedication, and the beach has hosted organized surf contests every year since 1959.

The pier also hosts marathons, other sporting events and July Fourth fireworks, and it has turned up in TV shows from 90210 to The Real Housewives of Orange County. The pier stands at the foot of Main Street, where the town’s first pier was built in 1904, so the Huntington Beach live stream is also a view of the center of town.

Farther up the coast, the Santa Monica live cam follows another of Southern California’s long piers, with its Ferris wheel and carousel, about an hour’s drive north.

Inland, the Disneyland live cam is closer still, about half an hour away in Anaheim, and makes a good second feed for the evenings when the beach goes dark.

The US Open of Surfing at the pier

Every summer the south side of the pier turns into a stadium for the US Open of Surfing, held in Huntington Beach every year since 1959 under several names: the United States Surfing Championships in 1964, the OP Pro from 1982 and the US Open of Surfing since 1994. The 2026 edition ran from July 25 to August 2, with a stop of the WSL Longboard Tour and the WSL Challenger Series, free admission and live music on the sand.

Those nine days are when the Huntington Beach Pier cam gets its biggest audience, with heats running right beside the pilings. Anyone heading down in person should plan for little shade on the sand, although beach umbrellas are allowed, and leave dogs, cigarettes and drones at home, since all three are banned at the event. A free bike valet on 5th Street runs on both weekends, which beats hunting for parking on Pacific Coast Highway.

Mark late July on the calendar: the next edition will bring the contest, and the crowds, back to the south side of the pier.