Intensive anthropogenic activities, land reclamation, a cross-bay bridge construction, and the correction of Red Island have significantly changed the topography of Jiaozhou Bay (JZB) in northern China over the last decades. To quantify the effects of these modifications on the water-exchange capacity of the bay, the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model was used to calculate basin, regional and local residence time (RT) in the years 1935, 1966, 1986, 2000, 2008, and 2013, covering the periods of significant land reclamation. The bridge construction and a government plan to restore Red Island were also included in additional modelling scenarios. The regional RT increased significantly between 1935 and 1986, by 77% in the northeast, 40% in the west and 56% in the north-bridge regions, concurrent with the largest land reclamation. The regional RT continued to increase from 1986 to 2000 in the northeast and north-bridge regions but decreased slightly from 2000. These patterns can be explained by the general decreasing trend of the tidal prism from 1935 to 2000, up to 66% in the northeast region. A significant decrease in residual currents from 1935 to 1966 probably also contributed to explain this trend. The bridge construction had only a limited effect on regional RT. The restoration of Red Island would have reduced the regional RT in the northeast region from 83 to 60 days. The simulation of tracer transport, and therefore calculation of local RT, was found to be sensitive to the scheme used to formulate the horizontal diffusion coefficient, which should be taking into account when comparing results from different model configurations.