The stay forces in service of the cable-stayed bridges are usually defined in early stages of design, when the construction process has not even been conceived in detail yet. For this reason, the effects of the evolutionary erection of the superstructure are rarely included into the definition of these forces. Nevertheless, these effects might play an important role in the structural behavior both during construction and in service. To fill this gap, this paper studies the effects of the evolutionary erection of the superstructure into thestructural behavior of cable-stayed bridges. To this aim, a new method to include these effects into the definition of the OSS is proposed. This method is based on the minimization of the bending energy of the structure. Furthermore, to illustrate the effects of the evolutionary erection of the superstructure, this method is applied in steel cable-stayed bridges of growing complexity erected on temporary supports.