The component and system reliability based design of bridge abutments under earthquake loading is presented in the paper. Planar failure surface has been used in conjunction with pseudo-dynamic approach to compute seismic active earth pressures on an abutment. The pseudo-dynamic method, considers the effect of phase difference in shear waves, soil amplification along with the horizontal seismic accelerations, strain localization in backfill soil and associated post-peak reduction in the shear resistance from peak to residual values along a previously formed failure plane. Four modes of stability viz. sliding, overturning, eccentricity and bearing capacity of the foundation soil are considered in the analysis. The series system reliability is computed with an assumption of independent failure modes. The lower and upper bounds of system reliability are also computed by taking into account the correlations between four failure modes, which is evaluated using the direction cosines of the tangent planes at the most probable points of failure.