Coal-based 3D hierarchical porous carbon aerogels (3D HPCAs) has been successfully fabricated from a freeze-drying method and with subsequent of calcination process, using coal oxide as carbon precursors, and PVA as both cross-linking agent and sacrifice template. The 3D HPCAs, using as electrode materials for supercapacitors, display outstanding electrochemical performance. The optimal sample (HPCAs-0.4-800) presents a high specific capacitance of 260 F g −1 at 1 A g −1 , and exhibits considerable rate capability with the retention of 81% at 10 A g −1. Notably, HPCAs-0.4-800 shows an excellent cycling stability with 105% of the capacitance retention after 50000 cycles at 10 A g −1 , attributing to its unique hierarchical porosity, high surface area up to 1303 m 2 g −1 , and improved conductivity. This work offers a promising route to synthesize coal-based porous carbon aerogels electrode materials for supercapacitors. Supercapacitors (SCs), also called ultracapacitors or electrochemical capacitors, have caused a large amount of interest owing to excellent electrochemical stability, fast charge/discharge, high power density and environmental friendly 1-5. Supercapacitors store electrical charge on high-surface-area conductive materials, so its performance mainly relies on the electrode materials. Outstanding electrode materials should possess ion approachable high surface areas for high specific capacitance and fasted electron transfer for excellent rate capacity 6,7. So it is very crucial for supercapacitors with high performance to prepare electrode materials with proper architecture structure, suitable pore size distribution and high specific surface area (SSA) 8. Among the numerous electrode materials of supercapacitors, carbon materials have attracted more attention because of their unique physical and chemical properties 9,10. Carbon aerogels (CAs), as one of carbon materials, show outstanding characteristics, such as low density, developed porosity, and multi-branched network structure 11-13. These structural features can afford the quick transfer channel for ion migration and more active sites, which can lead to the excellent electric double layer performance in supercapacitors. To improve the specific surface area and porosity, most of the CAs are prepared by using pore-forming agents, such as strong bases 14-16 , hard templates 17-19 , soluble salts 20,21 , soft templates and so on 22-24. Among of them, the soft templates can be directly decomposed during the carbonization process instead of etching procedure using harmful and toxic or corrosive chemicals. Therefore, it has been attracting extensive attention to prepare CAs using soft template for the application of supercapacitors. Currently, the researches of CAs are mainly focused on precursors, such as resorcinol-formaldehyde 25 , polymers 26 , nanotubes 27,28 , graphene 29,30 , and natural precursors such as cellulose and glucose 31,32. In our previous works, we have fabricated some functional materials on coal of traditional fossil, such as porous...