The variable-length address is one of the important research content in the field of future network. Aiming at the low efficiency of traditional routing lookup algorithms for variable-length address， an efficient routing lookup algorithm suitable for variable-length addresses based on balanced binary tree — AVL （Adelson-Velskii and Landis） tree and Bloom filter， namely AVL-Bloom algorithm， was proposed. Firstly， multiple off-chip hash tables were used to separately store route entries with the same number of prefix bits and their next-hop information in view of the flexible and unbounded characteristics of the variable-length address. Meanwhile， the on-chip Bloom filter was utilized for speeding up the search for route prefixes that were likely to match. Secondly， in order to solve the problem that the routing lookup algorithms based on hash technology need multiple hash comparisons when searching for the route with the longest prefix， the AVL tree technology was introduced， that was， the Bloom filter and hash table of each group of route prefix set were organized through AVL tree， so as to optimize the query order of route prefix length and reduce the number of hash calculations and then decrease the search time. Finally， comparative experiments of the proposed algorithm with the traditional routing lookup algorithms such as METrie （Multi-Entrance-Trie） and COBF （Controlled prefix and One-hashing Bloom Filter） were conducted on three different variable-length address datasets. Experimental results show that the search speed of AVL-Bloom algorithm is significantly faster than those of METrie and COBF algorithms， and the query time is reduced by nearly 83% and 64% respectively. At the same time， AVL-Bloom algorithm can maintain stable search performance under the condition of large change in routing table entries， and is suitable for routing lookup and forwarding with variable-length addresses.