Objectives Individuals with obesity especially excessive visceral adiposity have high risk for incident hypertension. Recently, a new algorithm named relative fat mass (RFM) was introduced to define obesity. Our aim was to investigate whether it can predict hypertension in Chinese population and to compare its predictive power with traditional indices including body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC) and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR). Design A 6-year prospective study. Setting Nine provinces (Hei Long Jiang, Liao Ning, Jiang Su, Shan Dong, He Nan, Hu Bei, Hu Nan, Guang Xi and Gui Zhou) in China. Participants Those without hypertension in 2009 survey and respond in 2015 survey. Intervention Logistic regression were performed to investigate the association between RFM and incident hypertension. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was performed to compare the predictive ability of these indices and define their optimal cut-off values. Main outcome measures Incident hypertension in 2015. Results The prevalence of incident hypertension in 2015 based on RFM quartiles were 14.8%, 21.2%, 26.8% and 35.2%, respectively (p for trend <0.001). In overall population, the OR for the highest quartile compared with the lowest quartile for RFM was 2.032 (1.567-2.634) in the fully adjusted model. In ROC analysis, RFM and WHtR had the highest area under the curve (AUC) value in both sexes but did not show statistical significance when compared with AUC value of BMI and WC in men and AUC value of WC in women. The performance of the prediction model based on RFM was comparable to that of BMI, WC or WHtR. Conclusions RFM can be a powerful indictor for predicting incident hypertension in Chinese population, but it does not show superiority over BMI, WC and WHtR in predictive power.