Residual stresses in hot-rolled wide flange steel cross sections may lead to premature yielding, accelerated corrosion and brittle fracture of steel members. The above phenomena lead to a loss of a steel member's stiffness and resistance under mechanical loading. Available residual stress models are mostly based on residual stress measurements that date back to 1950s. Some of the drawbacks of these models relate to the lack of consistency in the considered parameters that affect the residual stress development within a steel cross section. Motivated by this, this paper proposes a new residual stress model for hot-rolled wide flange steel cross sections. The proposed residual stress model relies on a dataset of 80 experiments that are complemented by additional measurements done as part of the present study. A parabolic residual stress distribution, which is deduced from a constraint optimization problem, is fitted to the assembled data. The proposed residual stress distributions are generalized with the aid of rigorous statistical analyses. The results suggest that the residual stress model is highly dependent on the cross-sectional area and the depth-to-width ratio of a hot-rolled wide flange steel cross section. The proposed residual stress model reduces the error, on average, by 60-70% compared to available residual stress models (e.g., European Convention for Constructional Steelwork model), regardless of the cross-sectional geometry of the hot-rolled cross section.