Background <p>We aimed to investigate the association between dietary carotenoids and acute respiratory infection (ARI) in the general US population.</p> Methods <p>We analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2003 − 2018 and 64,560 participants with complete records of dietary intake and ARI definition. Five major dietary carotenoids were evaluated: α-carotene, β-carotene, lycopene, β-cryptoxanthin, and lutein plus zeaxanthin. Survey-weight logistic regression and restricted cubic spline were applied.</p> Results <p>The relationship between dietary carotenoids and ARI risk followed a linear trend. Participants in the highest quartile of dietary carotenoid intake exhibited a 15% lower risk of ARI than those in the lowest quartile (multi-adjusted odds ratio [OR]: 0.85, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.72 − 0.99). Individually, the association with ARI was consistently significant for β-carotene (multi-adjusted OR, 95% CI: 0.82, 0.69 − 0.98), β-cryptoxanthin (0.77, 0.66 − 0.91), lycopene (0.86, 0.75 − 0.99), and lutein plus zeaxanthin (0.84, 0.71 − 0.99). There was a significant inverse relationship between total carotenoid intake and ARI among children aged 1 − 18 years​(multi-adjusted OR, 95% CI: 0.74, 0.57 − 0.97 for the highest quartile, and 0.78, 0.63 − 0.96 for the third quartile compared with lowest quartile).</p> Conclusions <p>In this US national general population, our findings indicated that higher dietary carotenoid intake was inversely associated with ARI risk.</p>