With the development of highly swift urban transportation systems, the underground tunnel of suburban railway often needs to pass beneath the basements of large scale residential developments. The large-diameter tunnel (approx. 14 m span) of the 160 km/hr limit high speed suburban railway is required to be more than 8 m far away vertically beneath the basement raft, and the horizontal distance between the tunnel and the adjacent basement side wall has to be more than 10 m to avoid mutual disturbance. The above distance requirements result in large-span basement rafts above the railway tunnel (approx. 36 m span). In this paper, life cycle multi-state analysis and design studies are carried out considering the various internal force states, such as pressure bearing and anti-floating, that may occur in the construction and service stage of the large-span basement rafts above the underground line of to-be-constructed high speed railways. Taking a large residential community above the underground tunnel of suburban high speed railway in Shanghai city as an example, the load cases, soil and water conditions corresponding to various states were formulated, and the multi-performance design criteria corresponding to each short-term and long-term state were enacted. The controlling design states and corresponding controlling constraints of the raft schemes with different thicknesses are analyzed, and the redundancy data of the design indicators of the raft with different thickness are compared. Finally, the optimal design scheme of the long-span raft for the study case is given by comprehensively considering costs, practicability and construction convenience, which provides an beneficial example for efficient and reasonable life cycle multi-state analysis and design of similar projects.