Abstract Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been widely applied to solve multi-objective optimization problems. In contrast to great practical successes, their theoretical foundations are much less developed, even for the essential theoretical aspect, i.e., running time analysis. In this paper, we propose a general approach to estimating upper bounds on the expected running time of multi-objective EAs (MOEAs), and then apply it to diverse situations, including bi-objective and many-objective optimization as well as exact and approximate analysis. For some known asymptotic bounds, our analysis not only provides their leading constants, but also improves them asymptotically. Moreover, our results provide some theoretical justification for the good empirical performance of MOEAs in solving multi-objective combinatorial problems.