•Formulations of a high-order numerical manifold method (HONMM) for crack problems are presented.•The derivatives of HONMM shape function are continuous among internal element edges and nodes.•The proposed HONMM is very suitable for solving crack propagation problems.•High accuracy for crack analysis can be obtained from the HONMM. Recent attempts to solve solid mechanical problems using the numerical manifold method (NMM) are very fruitful. In the present work, a high-order numerical manifold method (HONMM) which is able to obtain continuous stress/strain field is proposed. By employing the same discretized model as the traditional NMM (TNMM), the proposed HONMM can yield much better accuracy without increasing the number of degrees of freedom (DOFs), and obtain continuous stress/strain field without recourse any stress smoothing operation in the post-processing stage. In addition, the “linear dependence” (LD) issue does not exist in the HONMM, and traditional equation solvers can be employed to solve the simultaneous algebraic equations. A number of numerical examples including four linear elastic continuous problems and five cracked problems are solved with the proposed method. The results show that the proposed HONMM performs much better than the TNMM.