Abstract. We introduce the rank-pairing heap, a heap (priority queue) implementation that combines the asymptotic efficiency of Fibonacci heaps with much of the simplicity of pairing heaps. Unlike all other heap implementations that match the bounds of Fibonacci heaps, our structure needs only one cut and no other structural changes per key decrease; the trees representing the heap can evolve to have arbitrary structure. Our initial experiments indicate that rankpairing heaps perform almost as well as pairing heaps on typical input sequences and better on worst-case sequences. 1