Predicting the punching shear strength (PSS) of fiber-reinforced polymer reinforced concrete (FRP-RC) beams is a critical task in the design and assessment of reinforced concrete structures. This study utilized three meta-heuristic optimization algorithms, namely ant lion optimizer (ALO), moth flame optimizer (MFO), and salp swarm algorithm (SSA), to select the optimal hyperparameters of the random forest (RF) model for predicting the punching shear strength (PSS) of FRP-RC beams. Seven features of FRP-RC beams were considered as inputs parameters, including types of column section (TCS), cross-sectional area of the column (CAC), slab’s effective depth (SED), span–depth ratio (SDR), compressive strength of concrete (CSC), yield strength of reinforcement (YSR), and reinforcement ratio (RR). The results indicate that the ALO-RF model with a population size of 100 has the best prediction performance among all models, with MAE of 25.0525, MAPE of 6.5696, R2of 0.9820, and RMSE of 59.9677 in the training phase, and MAE of 52.5601, MAPE of 15.5083, R2of 0.941, and RMSE of 101.6494 in the testing phase. The slab’s effective depth (SED) has the largest contribution to predicting thePSS, which means that adjustingSEDcan effectively control the PSS. Furthermore, the hybrid machine learning model optimized by metaheuristic algorithms outperforms traditional models in terms of prediction accuracy and error control.